Michael B. Katz is a new discovery for me (h/t Roving Librarian). His scholarship on the history of public education in the U.S.is fascinating, troubling, and revelatory. I’m sure his conclusions are contested–whose aren’t?–but at times the clarity and forcefulness of his insights take my breath away.
“The Moral Crisis of the University,” reprinted in Katz’s last book, Reconstructing American Education (1987), is full of such insights. The essay doesn’t make for happy reading, but every time I read it I come away with a renewed understanding of what will be lost if higher education centered on the life of the mind and nurtured by a strong sense of civic obligation disappears. In many cases, this has already happened. The change Katz describes in 1987 has accelerated in ways that may go beyond his worst nightmare. Along with that acceleration, of course, is a great deal of business as usual, as there always is. We look here when the real erosion is happening there. It’s hard to know where to look, even when there are no distractions–and there are always distractions.
There’s an old joke about going broke, credited to Hemingway: Q: “How did you go bankrupt?” A: “Little by little, then all at once.” During the little by little stage, people who sound various alarms risk being called cranks, or worse. And it’s true: a premature or mischievous cultivation of outrage may damage or destroy what little semblance of community may be left.
And yet, the little by little becomes greater every year. Michael Katz gives me a way to see that. With that clarity also comes hope, the hope that recognizing problems really is the first step toward addressing them, managing them, perhaps even solving them.
Here, then, for Week 7 of Open Learning ’18, my last week as hub director, is some Michael Katz for us to consider together.
[W]hat is it exactly that makes a university distinct from other social institutions? [Robert Paul] Wolff offered a compelling definition based on a conception of the ideal university as a “community of learning.” The ideal university, he argued, should be “a community of persons united by collective understandings, by common and communal goals, by bonds of reciprocal obligation, and by a flow of sentiment which makes the preservation of the community an object of desire, not merely a matter of prudence or a command of duty.” Community implies a form of social obligation governed by principles different from those operative in the marketplace and state. Laws of of supply and demand lose priority; wage-labor is not the template for all human relations; the translation of individuals into commodities is resisted. The difficult task of defining common goals or acceptable activity is neither avoided nor deflected onto bureaucracy….
For all their problems, universities and their faculties remain immensely privileged. They retain a freedom of activity and expression not permitted in any other major social institution. There are two justifications for this privilege. One is that it is an essential condition of teaching and learning. The other is that universities have become the major source of moral and social criticism in modern life. They are the major site of whatever social conscience we have left…. If the legitimacy of universities rested only on their service to the marketplace and state, internal freedom would not be an issue. But their legitimacy rests, in fact, on something else: their integrity. Like all privileges, the freedom enjoyed by universities carries correlative responsibilities. In their case it is intellectual honesty and moral courage. Modern universities are the greatest centers of intellectual power in history. Without integrity, they can become little more than supermarkets with raw power for sale. This is the tendency in the modern history of the higher learning. It is what I call the moral crisis of the university.
I firmly believe that these large questions are essential foundations for any effective change or conservation in higher education. For always some new things must be invented, some things will benefit from change, and some things must be conserved. Some core principles must remain non-negotiable. I agree with Katz: tenured faculty in higher education are the last, best hope for addressing these large questions of common goals and acceptable activities.
L-R: me, Roy Flanagan, Wendy Furman-Adams, Diane McColley, and Rich DuRocher. Both Diane and Rich have left us for now. The photo is likely from 1999 or 2001, taken at the Conference on John Milton at Murfreesboro, Tennessee.
Dr. Diane Kelsey McColley, the scholar who saved my life, the colleague who encouraged my work, the friend whom I loved and will always love, has passed away.
Today Diane lives within a light I cannot imagine, but one I hope to see with her, side by side again, one bright morning.
Once more I share the words I wrote and spoke in Diane’s honor many years ago, when she became an Honored Scholar of the Milton Society of America. But how could I honor Diane, when the privilege of praising her at this extraordinary occasion was so overwhelming?
I will write about Milton today. As always, Diane’s prose will be my aspiration, as her poetic and musical soul will be my inspiration.
There is more to say, but for now this will have to do.
An Encomium for Diane McColley Honored Scholar of the Milton Society of America Delivered by Gardner Campbell to the Society at its Annual Meeting Chicago, Illinois, December 28, 1999
Loving in truth, and fain in this encomium my love to show, I asked the Muse for assistance. The first answer I received was the one I expected: “Fool, look in thy heart and write.” Alas! As do all of you in this room, I recognized the layers of irony within that statement and could not take it as a simple directive.
So I applied to the Muse for another answer. And this time I heard, “work out your encomium with fear and trembling.” This command was apt but not helpful. Fear and trembling I could manage on my own.
I decided on a sterner approach. I reminded the Muse that she was not talking to an utter yokel, and that I knew something of her history and the efforts of my fellow supplicants. I asked again for her help. This time she drew near, knowing full well what I lacked, took my hand, and said, “There is in McColley a sweetness ready penned. Copy out only that, and save expense.”
So I did sit and write.
In her life, Professor Diane Kelsey McColley has planted and tended many gardens: as wife, as mother of six children-four of whom are with us tonight-and now as a grandmother, as musician and poet, as friend and mentor, as teacher and colleague. Her service to her students, to Rutgers University, and to her profession has been generous and multiform, including the Presidency of this Society. But tonight we focus our particular attention and esteem on her career as a distinguished scholar, one whose work has, for nearly thirty years, sought to train our ears to hear the music of the spheres, and our minds to grasp the essential concinnity of the created universe.
She claims as our common human inheritance the power to return to a state of what she calls “Edenic imagination, consciousness, and conscience, a kind of thought and language that is not only linear, binary, dialectical, or vertical/horizontal, but also radiant, global, multispherical, synchronic….” Mark the characteristic note of inclusiveness in her words: instead of “not this, but that” she writes “not only, but also.” For Diane McColley participates with grace and élan in both discursive and intuitive intellection, and thus unites the excellences of both ratiocination and poetry.
Of her many published works on Milton, Herbert, Shakespeare, Donne, and in Renaissance studies generally, several of which are listed in your program, some flowerings must be singled out for special praise. Her first book, Milton’s Eve, immediately effected a fundamental shift in the critical conversation. As an art historian lovingly restores a Vermeer, McColley cleaned the misogynist grime and critical varnish from Milton’s image of Eve. She restored to us a speaking portrait of the woman for whose sake Adam argued with God and angels, the woman whose selfhood both Adam and Raphael experienced as sublime, the woman whom Milton believed the artful, faithful mother of us all. After Milton’s Eve, never again would Milton’s song sound the same-and to do that to us was why Diane McColley came.
Then in A Gust for Paradise: Milton’s Eden and the Visual Arts, which won the 1993 Hanford Award, Diane McColley revealed that, with no middle flight, she intended to map Edenic consciousness not only through poetry but also through the visual and musical arts. In his review of this book for Milton Quarterly, a deeply impressed William Kerrigan called the roll of “the critics who make a difference,” who “have taught us their minds … and taught us, as it were, to think in their minds.” At the end of a list including Saurat, Hanford, Tillyard, Le Comte, Barker, Lewalski, Fish, Tayler, Lieb, and Bloom, Kerrigan wrote-prophetically, given tonight’s occasion-that “to this list we can now add McColley, a distinct consciousness shaped by the poetic invitations of Paradise Lost.”
But half yet remained unsung, and in her next book, Poetry and Music in Seventeenth Century England, the arts of explication, prosodic analysis, scrupulous historical research, and musicology form a new song of pure concent, one in which the lightest touch on what C. S. Lewis called “the Paradisal Stop” in us might resonate long after it has sounded. Early in the book, for example, McColley observes of Renaissance music that “much word-painting crosses the line, if there is one, between mimetic and rhetorical metaphor.” Plunging immediately back into her musical exegesis, McColley leaves us to ponder that “if,” to wonder about the nature of language and its relationship to being-in short, to open our imaginations to the very connectedness that resounds throughout her book. And she achieves such effects here with the verbal equivalent of a grace note. Such is the copious matter of her song.
And that song continues. One critic has said that “in the strength with which she inhabits the imaginative position of Eve, McColley has no peer.” But we must also say, after McColley’s recent essay on “the individuality of creatures in Paradise Lost,” that she may be peerless in her angelic imagination too, so fully and perceptively does she inhabit the mind and paradisal experience of Raphael in that essay. Her current project, part of which she is carrying out now on a Mellon Postdoctoral fellowship at the Huntington Library, is a study of the language of nature in seventeenth-century poetry and technology, and she has at least five other works in progress, one of which will analyze language and nature in both early modern and twentieth century poetry and prose.
It is customary on these occasions to offer anecdotes about life in the honoree’s classroom. I have no such anecdotes, strictly speaking, for I have never formally enrolled in a class taught by Professor McColley. Yet she has been my teacher from the day I first read her work, over a decade ago. As I got ready, to get ready, to prepare to begin my dissertation, I was increasingly haunted by Wordsworth’s complaint that, when it comes to literary criticism, “we murder to dissect.” Then one evening I turned a page and began to read “Eve and the Arts of Eden.” By the time I finished it, I was both chastened and encouraged; I knew more and knew better. On fire with my discovery, I eagerly telephoned a former student at the University of Virginia. “You must read this essay by Diane McColley,” I said. There was a long silence on the line. Then my student replied, “What did you say her name was?” “Diane McColley,” I answered. My student laughed: “I’m rooming with one of her daughters!” And so several weeks later my wife Alice and I drove to Charlottesville to meet Diane McColley. I had just re-read Diane’s moving descriptions of prelapsarian Eden, and now talking to her I felt anew that some small corner of that Eden had been restored, a corner where one might indeed find, to quote Diane’s own words, “conversations of the most felicitous reciprocity, dense with poetic shoots.” That conversation helped keep me alive and growing during the labors that followed. I do not believe I would be in this room or this profession tonight if it were not for her.
Indeed, there is in McColley a sweetness ready penned, one to pierce the meeting soul, a sweetness whose origin may be found in this excerpt from the conclusion of Paul’s letter to the Philippians: “And now, my friends, all that is true, all that is noble, all that is just and pure, all that is lovable and of good repute, whatever is excellent and admirable-fill your thoughts with these things” (Phil. 4:8, NEB).
For all of her remarkable career, Diane Kelsey McColley has inspired us to do just that. Miraculously, her luminous prose, her abiding sense of what Hopkins called “the dearest freshness deep down things,” and her quick-eyed apprehension of the essential connectedness of those depths have in fact made those things present to us, their inscape intact and flourishing, their instress sublimely whole.
Please join me now in applauding the works and days of the newest Honored Scholar of the Milton Society of America, Diane Kelsey McColley.
By Sean O’Connor – http://www.flickr.com/photos/seanoconnor365/3351618688/in/set-72157615114247195/, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=9963566
One of the summer’s great discoveries for me was the work of Alasdair MacIntyre. It’s a late discovery, but in a strange way, also just in time. A moral philosopher, i.e. a philosopher of ethics, MacIntyre has had a long and distinguished career. He’s reached a wide audience as well, writing in such a way that one need not be a specialist to understand his arguments. His writing is helping me understand some longstanding difficulties I have experienced within academic culture(s). His work also helps me think more precisely, and at greater depth, about fundamental questions regarding the character of learning within higher education. I’ve been a professor long enough to have seen many complex and often very well-intentioned ideas about how to scale up higher education, make it more accessible, make it more effective, and so forth. Student-centered education, learner-centered education, learning-centered education, learning science, student success, personalized or adaptive learning, next-generation digital learning environments, workforce preparation, analytics, rubrics, Bloom, Barr & Tagg, the varieties of open, the list goes on. Yet many basic assumptions go unquestioned or even undetected. So I’m drawn to philosophy, a discipline that should help us keep our thinking rigorous and organized, to try to work through these assumptions and identify, at the very least, what I truly believe–and what I ought to be convinced of, too.
I used to think the bedrock layer was epistemology. How do we know what we know? I still think that’s an essential question, but I now think the even more urgent question is the one raised by moral philosophy: what then must we do? and on what evidence, for what reasons, do we decide the answers to that question? In the end, epistemology and moral philosophy are thickly mingled, but the latter carries with it the dilemmas and inquiries I feel most strongly.
To give you a taste of what I’m reading, I quote below from an interview with MacIntyre conducted by a philosopher of education named Joseph Dunne, and published in The Journal of the Philosophy of Education Vol. 26, No. 1, 2002. The entire “dialogue” is well worth reading, even though it’s ultimately a little disappointing that MacIntyre won’t quite grasp all the nettles Dunne offers him. That said, MacIntyre’s clarity in this lengthy excerpt puts the matter quite cogently, and with a strong sense of the dangers present in some of the rhetorics of educational “success” that are now pervading the discussion. One might even call these rhetorics the “prosperity gospel” version of higher education, and ask how such definitions of “success” will help when the storms come–as they do, especially when we dare to hope to try to build a better world, and especially when those efforts are thwarted.
Here’s MacIntyre:
During the period of fifty or so years in which I have been a teacher, almost, but not quite always in universities, the tasks of the teacher have become ever more difficult. When I spoke about those difficulties in 1985 in my Richard Peters lecture, what I had in mind was the tension between two different sets of tasks, one imposed by the social and educational system on the teacher, the other arising from the very nature of education. What the system requires of teachers is the production of the kind of compliant manpower that the current economy needs, with the different levels of skill and kinds of skill that are required in a hierarchically ordered economy. Some few children are to become corporate executives and stockbrokers, some others lawyers and physicians, very many more will occupy the lower ranks of the service, manufacturing and farming industries, and then there will be those destined by their inadequate education to provide an adequate supply of casual unskilled labour.
These unequal outcomes are required by our social and economic order. But what education has to aim at for each and every child, if it is not to be a mockery, is both the development of those powers that enable children to become reflective and independent members of their families and political communities and the inculcation of those virtues that are needed to direct us towards the achievement of our common and individual goods.
Yet, insofar as such education is successful, it will to a remarkable extent render those who profit from it unfit to participate compliantly and successfully in the social and economic order. For they will have learned how to ask questions about the activities presented by that order which it is important–from the standpoint of that order–not to ask. What questions are these? They will be of at least three kinds. A first concerns the goods served by each particular type of activity. A good education is one in which students learn not only how to play their intended part in different kinds of complex activity by developing their skills, but also how to recognise the goods served by those activities, goods which give point and purpose to what they do.
A second set of questions will be elicited by the answers to the first set. Insofar as the activities in which they engage turn out not to serve genuine goods, and more especially not to serve the common goods of the family and the local political community, what is to be done. This is partly a political question, but it is also a question for individuals about their own work. Where can I find work to do that is both for my good and for the common good? Here it matters that in the market society of advanced modernity being successful involves going where the money is and this with a single-mindedness and a tunnel vision that makes it less and less easy to enjoy the success for which one has learned to lust. The metaphor of the rat race becomes increasingly appropriate and in Ireland the true emblem of the past decade is not the Celtic tiger, but the Celtic rat.
Being unsuccessful involves being where the money is not and teachers, although much better off than either the working or the unemployed poor, are sill a paradigm case of lack of success. But teachers have one great advantage over many other members of the workforce. Not only do they serve the common good, but even when either the bureaucratic or the economic constraints on their teaching deform it, or when their own defects as teachers prevent them from achieving what they should and can achieve, they generally have colleagues with whom they can enquire together how to remedy matters.
Yet this is not so for almost everyone else. Most people, if and when they have asked a first set of questions about the goods at stake in their activities, and a second set of questions about what is to be done, will find themselves badly in need of discussion and enquiry with others, so that their initial answers to the first two sets of questions may be tested against the best objections that can be brought against those answers. But, when they ask a third set of questions about the possibilities for such discussion and enquiry, they will find that our contemporary social order offers almost no opportunity for them. Our conditions of work are such and our institutions are such that there is very rarely any milieu within which, in the company of others, we can step back from the established ongoing order of things and raise questions about it sub specie boni.
Why is this? It is in part because of the phenomenon of social compartmentalisation, of the increasing extent to which each particular area of life is delimited, with its own norms and prescribed roles, so that the self is in danger of being liquidated into those roles, presenting one persona in the home, another in the workplace, a third at parties or in a bar, yet without anywhere to recollect who she or he is as a human being and to reflect upon what the point and purpose of the whole may be, so that one can better understand the parts….
So contemporary teachers have the task of educating their students, so that those students will bring to the activities of their adult life questioning attitudes that will put them at odds with the moral temper of the age and with its dominant institutions. Many of these students will become frustrated, many will be defeated. But some will find their own way and become, by the standards of the age, unintelligibly happy failures….
On August 14, 2017 I was honored to be the keynote speaker at the Southwest Teaching and Learning Symposium, held at Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff, Arizona. My heartfelt thanks to Don Carter for the invitation, and to Don, John Doherty, and Alexandria Lewis for all they did to make my visit smooth and greatly enjoyable.
As you’ll hear from my talk, I spent some time on familiar ground, but this time newly contextualized in ways the very long title points toward. My idea, emerging from my experience as a faculty member for twenty-seven years and as an administrator for twelve of those years, is that amidst the urgent, necessary, and largely (but not entirely) beneficial emphasis on so-called “student-centered learning,” we have not considered the role of faculty as deeply or as wisely as we should.
There are many reasons for that lack. I consider some of them in my talk. At the same time, I return to what I take to be some necessary, if inconvenient truths regarding faculty, whom I consider as the heart, the sine qua non, of a university. My point is not to demean or diminish anyone at the university who is not faculty. The intelligence, hard work, and insight of a university’s staff, and their commitment to their work for the greater good, sometimes put faculty to shame. If anything, calling attention to faculty’s central role in a university may remind us of faculty’s responsibilities for being good stewards of what is best in higher education–and, sadly, also remind us of where that stewardship is overlooked, denied, ignored, or mired in endless petty disputes.
My talk at NAU starts with faculty, then, and moves to faculty roles in a university, and enlarges that focus to bring in one of the defining characteristics of contemporary life, ubiquitous personal networked computing. Like all communicative extensions (to use McLuhan’s word), ubiquitous personal networked computing empowers some insights and obscures others. I do not believe that our age guarantees any outcome–to that extent, I am neither a technological determinist nor a techno-utopian. But I do believe, very strongly, in the human potential for good, and in communicative extensions as primary and powerful agents with which to realize and propagate that potential.
So in this talk, I try to take a comprehensive view of a key aspect of contemporary higher education, one that I don’t hear about very often (and I recognize I may not know where to listen–so help me there). I think once again about points of leverage, and places to stand where that leverage might be exercised. For it is nothing less than a world we seek to move, and I continue to believe with all my heart that education is both ground and lever for that motion.
So here’s the talk.
If you’d like to follow the slides, I’ve embedded them in a pdf below:
Note that the black slide has several slides after it. I ran over time so I didn’t get to them, but they’re important and I wanted to include them here.
I overheard this remark by [REDACTED] and decided to remember it. I thought it might come in handy as the title for a blog post one day.
“You may kiss the bride”
That’s 38 years ago. July 14, 1979. The day Alice Woodworth and I were married. That’s her father, the Reverend Robert B. Woodworth, officiating at the ceremony.
It’s always interesting and spooky, too, to look at an old picture of oneself and ask, “what was I thinking in that moment?” I remember the moment vividly, and I remember that I was thinking about a lot of things, all swirling through my head and heart. I felt there was approximately zero distance between those thoughts and the moment I was experiencing. I was in the moment, one might say, though that seems a superficial way of describing it. Awesome, however, seems apt. It’s a word with great range. Awesome is exhilarating, awesome is humbling, awesome is uncanny, awesome is a little scary, awesome is that “oceanic feeling” of oneness.
This kiss was awesome in all those ways. The first kiss of our married life. Our first deed as a married couple, out there in public, a response to the minister’s pronouncement that we were married. (And yes, right there in front of my wife’s father.) How strange, in a way, that the traditional response to “I now pronounce you” is to kiss each other. A good tradition, in my view. Awesome.
Everyone knows that the pronouncing is sealed with a kiss. Here’s comes awesome! Wait for it! Another photographer documents the moment:
“You may kiss the bride” II. Attendants from L-R: Barrie Kirby, Ellen Woodworth (sister of the bride), Walter Campbell (father of the groom, and best man) and Fred Campbell (brother of the groom). Setting: the amphitheater behind Mary Washington College.
And now, what has changed? Oh, everything. One awesome kiss marks that change. We walk together from that moment on in a new way, one that co-exists, sometimes spectacularly, sometimes confusingly, with the old ways. Alice walks, Gardner walks. No problem. We’d done that together. But now, walking with Alice, walking with Gardner, is this third thing, Alice-and-Gardner, our marriage. The wedding has concluded, and the marriage has begun.
Our marriage walks with us, now, everywhere we go. Here’s a picture of that beginning.
Three walk together
The three of us–Alice, Gardner, and our marriage–are still walking together, 38 years later. It’s still awesome, in all the ways I could have imagined and in all the ways I could not possibly have imagined. Getting to know each other is a mighty work-in-progress. Getting to know that third thing, our marriage, is an equally mighty work-in-progress. The marriage becomes a person in its own right, a third being that can be distinguished, but not divided, from the two separate beings who have walked together for all this time. I hadn’t expected that, though I’m sure all the elders tried to tell me. Such lessons feel like riddles or news from another land until the years clarify and expand one’s own complex locations. But I’m glad to remember that they tried anyway. It’s an elder’s job.
So here we are, two young people in love, guarded and goaded and lifted beyond ourselves by the persons we have just invited into our lives: each other, and our marriage.
It happened just last Tuesday, and I’ve been reeling ever since.
I was talking with a student during an office visit. The topic of blogging came up. I’m not sure exactly how we got there, but I brought out one of my touchstones, the great “Dackolupatoni” experiment undertaken by a student at Virginia Tech just after a visit to the class by our Distinguished Innovator in Residence, Jon Udell. I could explain all that to you, but I’d really rather you just go read the student’s post (miraculously, several years later, it’s still there–thank you, VT). In a marvelously recursive description of her learning, the student blogged about, and thus enacted, her new understanding of the web’s peculiar, thrilling potential to be both noun and verb. The blog post was about the web, and because it was a blog post to the web, it also became webby itself. It webbed itself. “Dackolpatoni” thus became a small, potent, magically self-enacting instance of the very thing the student had just learned. It became, in Jon Udell’s wonderful metaphor, an “awakened grain of sand.”
The memory thrills me now now less than the experience did then. To have a student, all on her own, craft such an elegant proof of concept! There were several other electric moments in that class, but this one immediately defined a moment that continues to resonate, ever more plangently, throughout the sounding connections of this resonant web. The student’s post is as powerful a demonstration I can imagine of Jerome Bruner’s definition of understanding: “going beyond the information given.” And the going-beyond has now transcended its local context. It has gone beyond its own going beyond! The bright moment continues to expand its sphere of illumination. And the bright moment continues to light my path. So fragile and exquisite a moment, to have proven so remarkably enduring. But of course that was the reason for the student’s experiment to begin with. And the spark that became incandescent was the student’s realization that there were grounds for making that experiment. She became aware of a question to ask.
It was indeed a thrill for me, and remains so, to have been present in the moments leading up to, and away from, that particular moment. I wasn’t there for the moment of the writing, of course. I read that post after the class, after it had been written, after it had already begun to do its work. But reading it, afterwards, as it began to web, I saw something like the red shift that indicates the universe is expanding. I did not see the leap, but I saw the leaping. Spooky action at a distance. The web was the instrumentation that revealed that action, even as it inspired it and made it possible.
Thrilling as that “Dackolupatoni” experience was, it was not a new thrill for me. My experience with the Web has always been one of uncanny connections and near-mystical properties. I know they’re not really mystical properties, really I do, but I continue to marvel at, and seek to emulate and propagate, the conditions and protocols and dreams underlying the technical architecture that makes these properties possible. When I became an administrator at the University of Mary Washington, right about the time there was enormous energy around the idea of “Web 2.0,” I was fortunate to be able to gather a team that was ready and able to help faculty, staff, and students to find and make those uncanny, web-energized connections in their own work. Marvels tumbled out, and the sense of uncanny energies and possibilities seemed to increase with near-exponential intensity and frequency. Those webs kept growing, too–not that everyone understood or welcomed or even acknowledged these miracles in plain sight.
All of which brings me back to last Tuesday, and the student in my office. I had just told her the “Dackolupatoni” story as a way of describing the energy and linking I hoped students could discover (and craft, and experience) in the blogging we were doing for class. I told her about awakening grains of sand. She looked at me, paused, and thought. Then she said something like, “That’s a really interesting metaphor. I’d never thought about the Web that way. Posting something to the Web always seemed to me like sending a message into vast, dark, and empty interstellar space.” And all at once I could see, with newfound clarity, what I’ve been trying to share for years, even when I felt discouraged and baffled by aggressive and sometimes hostile resistance to the very idea of connected learning.
I see with renewed clarity that a core element of what I would call digital literacy, perhaps the core element, is understanding the possibilities the Web holds out to us for awakening grains of sand, of “Dackolupatoni” experiments that have the weird and transformative properties of demonstrating how giving airy nothings a local habitation and a name can make us more at home, and much less alone, within the apparent infinities of our own consciousness. How human agency can scale, not by dwarfing and even consuming those around us, but by equipping us to recognize, and on this platform to demonstrate, the possibility of becoming what Donne describes as “books lying open to each other,” in an environment in which it is possible, in Parker Palmer’s beautiful phrase, “to know as we are known.” Like language. Like love.
A story of two students, then, each of whom taught me crucial things. A story to help explain why “connected learning” is for me not only an aspiration, but pretty close to a redundancy. A story of how permissionless linking generates both spam and the music of the spheres. I hardly know what to say.
This week, Open Learning ’17 turns to Doug Engelbart’s “Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework”–but I want to write a few words about “As We May Think,” first.
One of the great things about a learning experience undertaken with others is the way familiar texts reveal new layers of meaning and implication. This time around with “As We May Think,” an essay I’ve read maybe twenty times or more, I was particularly struck the multiple meanings of Vannevar Bush’s idea of “associative trails.” Some of these trails we make deliberately, the way we construct an argument, but also the way we build a curriculum, organize a course of study, or even write a story. Bush envisions a time when such trails, with all the context (or “scaffolding”) that’s part of the story of the trail-blazing, will help good ideas come into being more frequently:
When the user is building a trail, he names it, inserts the name in his code book, and taps it out on his keyboard. Before him are the two items to be joined, projected onto adjacent viewing positions. At the bottom of each there are a number of blank code spaces, and a pointer is set to indicate one of these on each item. The user taps a single key, and the items are permanently joined. In each code space appears the code word. Out of view, but also in the code space, is inserted a set of dots for photocell viewing; and on each item these dots by their positions designate the index number of the other item.
Thereafter, at any time, when one of these items is in view, the other can be instantly recalled merely by tapping a button below the corresponding code space. Moreover, when numerous items have been thus joined together to form a trail, they can be reviewed in turn, rapidly or slowly, by deflecting a lever like that used for turning the pages of a book. It is exactly as though the physical items had been gathered together from widely separated sources and bound together to form a new book. It is more than this, for any item can be joined into numerous trails.
I think it’s fair to say that we believe expertise will result in more interesting and fruitful trails, some of them so interesting and fruitful that the trails themselves become objects of study. The Memex also gives us a better opportunity to study both results and process, and to study in particular those associative trail-makers who are particularly ingenious and conceptually powerful in their ability to build new ideas and implementations out of new combinations. This power of juxtaposition and connection drives the primary modes of discovery Steven Johnson analyzes in Where Good Ideas Come From, and it also underlies Jon Udell’s idea of “manufactured serendipity” that’s taken up as “designed serendipity” by Michael Nielsen in Reinventing Discovery: The New Era of Networked Science.
Of course, environments that increase the likelihood of interesting and revelatory juxtapositions only work if the learner in those environments has a combinatorial disposition, one that adds to innate curiosity the disciplined education that yields the conceptual frameworks one can build with and upon, the divergent-convergent meta-education that helps one recognize when to arrange the cards and when to shuffle them (and thus try to elude confirmation bias and path dependency), and the cognitive energy to present novelty to a blinking audience and share that novelty widely whether or not the occasion provides immediate affirmation–or any affirmation at all.
Bush writes:
There is a new profession of trail blazers, those who find delight in the task of establishing useful trails through the enormous mass of the common record. The inheritance from the master becomes, not only his additions to the world’s record, but for his disciples the entire scaffolding by which they were erected.
This new profession is in one respect an old one: that of the teacher. (A quick aside: I recognize and regret that Vannevar Bush is sexist throughout the essay, even allowing for the old and regrettable practice of using “he” and “him” as so-called “general pronouns.” At the same time, I want to be hospitable to his ideas, and humble about matters about which the future will likely judge us harshly because of our own blindnesses.) The talk of “master” and “disciple” may cause our Foucault to fall off the shelf, narrowly missing our heads, or not. For me, the language is deeply resonant and liberating, as the idea of mastery conveys what Bruner defines as “understanding,” that is, “going beyond the information given.” That power of going-beyond can, I believe, be taught, not so much through direct instruction but by the teacher’s energy and commitment in modeling that process. For me, that’s what it meant to be a disciple of Dr. Elizabeth Phillips, my beloved English professor. She found delight in her making, in her going-beyond, not as a means of humiliating her disciple Gardner, putting me in my place, but as a way of encouraging me, putting me in her place, if only by helping me to imagine her and her place more deeply.
In the poet Walt Whitman’s words:
Failing to fetch me at first keep encouraged,
Missing me one place search another,
I stop somewhere waiting for you. (Song of Myself, section 52, 14-16)
Though her death has put our lives so far apart we can no longer hear each other speak, I continue to find my beloved professor, indeed to find her by following her, emulating her as I practice my own mastery, such as it is. For among many other things, Elizabeth’s mastery revealed itself in her delighted sharing of the scaffolding of her additions to the world’s record. She instructed me, but she did so by inviting me into the workshop where she crafted those additions. That invitation is precious indeed, because the associative trails of master trail blazers can become mere “content” to be “delivered,” and thus lose what the poet Robert Frost calls the “most precious quality” of a poem, “its having run itself and carried away the poet with it … its sense of a meaning that once unfolded by surprise as it went.” My intellectual discipleship (a word related to discipline, as in the object of study we pursue and the focused energy of that pursuit) follows not only the trails she blazed, but the light of that blazing, the surprise and delight shared generously and openly by my beloved English professor, shared that I might follow.
That opening does not come within “the information given,” but in the masters’ willingness to share their experience of being carried away. The disciples learn they may be carried away too, not by the cult of personality (always a danger, to be sure) but by the energy of insight as experienced in the context of lived experience. Michael Nielsen describes something like this in Reinventing Discovery, when he recounts a transformative moment in his own learning, one that the Internet at its best can amplify and extend:
What’s important then is that blogs make it possible for anyone with an internet connection to get an informal, rapid-fire glimpse into the minds of many of the world’s scientists. You can go to the blog of Terence Tao and follow along as he struggles to extend our understanding of some of the deepest ideas of mathematics. It’s not just the scientific content that matters, it’s the culture that is revealed, a particular way of viewing the world. This view of the world can take many forms. On the blog of experimental physicist Chad Orzel you can read his whimsical explanations fo physics to his dog, or his discussions of explosions in the laboratory. The content ranges widely,but as you read, a pattern starts to take shape: you start to understand at least a little about how an experimental physicist views the world:L what he thinks is funny, what he thinks is important, what he finds irritating. You may not necessarily agree with this view of the world, or completely understand it, but it’s interesting and transformative nonetheless. Exposure to this view of the world has always been possible if you live in one of the world’s intellectual capitals, places such as Boston, Cambridge, and Paris,. Many blog readers no doubt live in such intellectual centers. But you also routinely see comments on the blog from people who live outside the intellectual centers. I grew up in a big city (Brisbane) in Australia. Compared to most of the world’s population, I had a youth of intellectual privilege. And yet the first time in my life that I heard a scientist speaking informally was when I was 16. It changed my life. Now anyone with an internet connection can go online, and get a glimpse into how scientists think and how they view the world, and perhaps even participate in the conversation. How many people’s lives will that change? (168-169)
I suppose the answer to Nielsen’s question depends on the willingness of professional trail blazers to keep an open Memex, and the willingness of other trail blazers to make their own Memexes available to help even more trail blazers to discover the work of those professionals … and the scaffolding of their delights and serendipities, the records of insight in the context of their lived experience, the context we provide to each other, to keep each other encouraged to keep looking.
Nielsen writes:
Science blogs show in nascent form what can happen when you remove the barriers separating scientists from the rest of the community, and enable a genuine two-way flow of information. A friend of mine who was fortunate enough to attend Princeton University once told me that the best thing about attending Princeton wasn’t the classes, or even the classmates he met. Rather, it was meeting some of the extraordinarily accomplished professors, and realizing that they were just people–people who sometimes got upset over trivial things, or who made silly jokes, or who made boneheaded mistakes, or who had faced great challenges in their life, and who somehow, despite their faults and challenges, very occasionally managed to do something extraordinary. “If they can do it, I can do it too” was the most important lesson my friend learned. (167-168)
Vannevar Bush’s idea of “associative trails” extends that insight in yet another direction, one that links the professional trail blazer sharing connections and scaffolding with the amateur trail blazer, the disciple, who realizes, as Nielsen’s friend realizes, that associative trail blazing is a human birthright, one to be exercised within freely chosen following as well as idiosyncratic non-following. The idea is that we should attend to our own thinking, and learn from it, and respect the humanity of it, and let that respect free us into agency: “If they can do it, I can do it too.” To which the best mastery will reply, “Yes! Go discover and create your mastery!”
Vannevar Bush writes:
The human mind … operates by association. With one item in its grasp, it snaps instantly to the next that is suggested by the association of thoughts, in accordance with some intricate web of trails carried by the cells of the brain. It has other characteristics, of course; trails that are not frequently followed are prone to fade, items are not fully permanent, memory is transitory. Yet the speed of action, the intricacy of trails, the detail of mental pictures, is awe-inspiring beyond all else in nature.
Man cannot hope fully to duplicate this mental process artificially, but he certainly ought to be able to learn from it. In minor ways he may even improve, for his records have relative permanency. The first idea, however, to be drawn from the analogy concerns selection. Selection by association, rather than indexing, may yet be mechanized. One cannot hope thus to equal the speed and flexibility with which the mind follows an associative trail, but it should be possible to beat the mind decisively in regard to the permanence and clarity of the items resurrected from storage.
There are holes in the argument, things to critique, and (regrettably, as one sees from the Hypothesis annotations online) occasions for smuggery and snark. First, however, hospitality: the “speed of action” in our minds that creates an “intricate web of trails” and “detail[ed] mental pictures” is “awe-inspiring beyond all else in nature.” The human mind: as we say to our toddlers when we walk them to the mirror, “Look, that’s you!” The associative trails within each of our minds, linkages that include others’ associative trails as well as the results and modes of professional trail blazers whom we follow, constitute the poem of the self that we draft each day, writing ourselves into being yet once more. How can one not feel interest, surprise, wonder, awe, or even liberating confusion, all of the feelings Paul Silvia calls “knowledge emotions,” at these daily rites, profoundly individual, profoundly shared? Perhaps more open and opening Memexes will bring us more occasions for wonder, at ourselves and at others. Perhaps wonder will open the way to equity, reverence, love. Perhaps we have something to say about that.
So what does all of this have to do with mind-liberating education? Dear reader, fellow traveler, you have some of my scaffolding and some of the trails they support. If you’re part of my network, as very many of you are, I have some of your scaffolding and the trails they support as well.
As you’ll hear, Bush’s phrase “associative trails” appropriately wound its way throughout the conversation. I encouraged Jon and Jeremy to reflect on robust resource linking across collaborating minds as well as the more idiosyncratic and sometimes apparently “random” associative trails that are forged within our individual brains. I had probably registered this distinction myself in one of my many earlier passes through this endlessly fascinating essay, but today the distinction became newly vivid for me, and helped me understand areas of connection and disjunction within the essay itself.
Since a classic blog-based distributed conversation brought us together many years ago, I have interacted with Jon on numerous occasions. Some of his own associative trails have grown familiar (and dear, I must say) to me, but he’s always full of surprises, too, and I remain consistently challenged and stimulated by his ongoing work with the Web as a platform for co-constructed knowledge. I have been fortunate to spend more time with Jeremy lately, learning of his literary and musical background, and learning much more about his work with educators who are adopting Hypothes.is in their teaching as a way of helping students learn to scaffold and extend their own learning. It’s fascinating to see two people who are quite distinctive in background and personality who are nevertheless strongly united in their commitment to building a better world out of deeper, more thoughtful, more educated, and more robust human interaction.
I’m confident you’ll detect my own enduring concerns and commitments here as well. As I reflect on today’s conversation, I can see how my own work, and perhaps my personality as well, are situated almost at the meeting point between Jeremy and Jon. I hope that middle-ness helped to elicit the uniqueness, and the tremendous connections, these two thinkers brought to bear today. My thanks to both of them. I hope we can do this again, and soon.
Dr. Laura Gogia practices leadership in “connected learning,” a paradigm that shaped the work of Virginia Commonwealth University’s Academic Learning Transformation Laboratory (ALT Lab), and one that continues to inform vital research and practice around the world. This “way of life,” as Laura describes it, also helps to describe the many powerful links between AAC&U’s Faculty Collaboratives project and Open Learning ’17.
Laura sat down with me recently to describe her background and how her work first as a physician, and then a Ph.D. student in educational research, led her to the practice of openly networked learning. In part one of our conversation, Laura tells the story of her search for community, and how as Open Learning ’17’s “connected learning coach” she will help our community of learners find their own paths to more effective networked learning.
Please click on the image below to see and hear our conversation.
In part two of the interview, coming soon, Laura discusses strategies for the most effective kinds of connected learning. She also points out important connections–or “crosswalks,” as Susan Albertine calls them, between connected learning and the “mind-liberating education” Dr. Albertine and the AAC&U advocate as an essential part of all higher learning.
You can read more of Laura’s impressive and soulful work on her website, Lauragogia.com, where you will also find a link to her blog, “Messy Thinking.”
Bart truly was the Wizard of Rock. He was also one of my best and most generous teachers.
The summer of 1977 was golden for all sorts of reasons. Star Wars premiered. (We didn’t yet know it was “A New Hope,” much less “Episode IV.”) I met the young woman I would end up marrying–well, met her again, but that’s another story. And I had a dream summer job. Three of them in fact. All of them were radio gigs. All of them were strange.
For three afternoons each week, I worked at Beach Patrol, a weather-forecast service managed by the celebrated Dave Moran and sponsored by Hawaiian Tropic, “the tan of the islands” (thanks, Dave, for the correction here!). I sat in a house in landlocked Salem, Virginia, and called radio stations at various beaches up and down the Eastern Seaboard. Over the phone, I’d deliver a customized weather forecast tailored for each beach area, and I’d play a Hawaiian Tropics commercial. All very professional, and all very theatrical. Radio magic. For extras, Dave told side-splittingly funny radio stories, and one of my colleagues was Gary Cooper. No, not that one, the other one.
On Sunday nights from 7 p.m. to 5 a.m. Monday mornings, I’d babysit the banks of automated 10.5 inch reel-to-reel decks loaded with “beautiful music” at WLRG (“Large FM,” 92.5). I’d also program the commercials for the next day, putting pins into holes to trigger the cues that would play the spots at the correct times throughout the day. Most scientific.
Each of those gigs was thrilling in its own way, even the overnight mushy music gig. But the best gig of all was the graveyard shift at WROV, 1240 AM, midnight-6 a.m. every Sunday morning. There I was, playing rock-n-roll on the hottest hometown station, the one I’d listened to since elementary school on a little green JC Penney six-transistor radio. I was in the control room where all the greats had inspired my rock dreams: Jack Fisher, Rob O’Brady, Fred Frelantz, more. All extraordinary, larger-than-life disc jockeys, the guys who’d answer the phone when I’d call in and try to get concert tickets, the guys (and they were all guys, then, alas) who seemed to have eerie powers of concentrated hipness and wit.
But the greatest of all was Bart Prater. And in the summer of 1977, he was my boss.
I had followed Bart Prater (rhymes with “crater”) since he’d joined the WROV roster in the late 1960s. Up from Marion, Virginia, the new guy started out as the nighttime DJ, “young Bart” the upstart, the one with the long hair. As a joke, the other WROV DJs trapped him one afternoon, dragged him into the studio, and cut his hair, live on the air. Well, that’s what they said they did. It was radio, after all.
Within a few years, Bart’s career went supernova. He moved to afternoon drive after Jack Fisher left. He became program director, responsible for hiring, firing, and managing all the on-air talent. In 1974, he helped break the Doobie Brothers’ immortal “Black Water.” And in 1975, he arrived: Billboard named him DJ-of-the-year for markets of under 1,000,000 population.
Bart’s voice was an utterly compelling blend of deep baritone resonance and crisp, cutting consonants. He spoke with the same cadence and timbre as Rod Serling. Bart didn’t seem to have to work at producing the sound. He just spoke, and every syllable was imbued with his intense, witty, sometimes loopy, sometimes nearly surreal on-air personality. He’d say things so quickly, without underlining any punch line or milking any response, that I sometimes wouldn’t get the joke until the song had been playing for a minute or two. His wordplay could rival Dylan’s, or Steve Martin’s. You could almost accuse him of muttering, but he was such a stickler for great articulation that he was the farthest thing from a mutterer. It was just that his jokes and patter were so inside, so self-contained in Bart’s own world, that it really did sound sometimes as if he were talking to himself–but you were welcome there too.
Sophomore year at Wake Forest University, I took a course called “Radio Practicum.” I fell in love with radio all over again, this time not just as a listener, but as an announcer myself. Classical, jazz, progressive free-form FM rock. Heaven. As the academic year came to a close that spring, I wondered if I could find radio work at home for the summer. I could indeed. Three part-time openings to apply for. Beach Patrol. Large FM. WROV.
I went down to the converted Quonset hut that housed the WROV studios, identified myself at the front desk, and sat down to wait for Bart. I had my little reel-to-reel tape with me so he could hear how I sounded on mike at Wake Forest’s WFDD-FM. I looked around the reception area and tried hard not to hyperventilate. I’d been there before, not only to pick up the occasional contest prize but also to visit the broadcast room itself as a WROV High School Correspondent. This time, though, was different. This time I was going to ask the Wizard of Rock for a job. The lowest spot possible in the line-up, but what did that matter? I would be a DJ on WROV, and my boss would be the Wizard of Rock–if I got the gig.
An office door opened and Bart Prater stuck his head out. He looked around, saw me, asked me if I was Gardner Campbell (I believe I said yes, but who knows? I was petrified), and invited me in to his office. He asked me to sit down. I vaguely remember doing so. Bart was very low-key, very polite, and very focused. He threaded the tape up, listened to my voice, and apparently liked what he heard enough to offer me the job. I went from petrified to elated in half a second. Then he asked me a question I had not anticipated.
So, Gardner, what will you use as your air name?
I hesitated.
Well, Gardner, I’ve always thought Bob Van Dyke would be a great air name. Bob was our WROV Diamond Keeper last spring, and I really do think the name would suit you well. What do you think?
What did I think. I thought he could suggest Tommy the Tuba as my air name and I’d agree enthusiastically, if it meant I could be a DJ on WROV. I didn’t say that, of course. I just said, “Sure! That sounds great!”
And so my gig began. Every Saturday night I’d come in about 11:15 or so and get ready to go on the air at midnight. As Bob Van Dyke, I’d do my thing on the Rock of Roanoke, Oh Lordy 1240, playing the songs, hitting the network news feed at the top of the hour (a special skill I finally mastered), filling out the transmitter logs, noting when the commercials ran. And every time I clicked the microphone on, I’d try as hard as I could to be as funny, hip, and memorable as Bart. As you might expect, I failed to reach that goal, in part because I was trying too hard, but mostly because Bart was inimitable.
My air shift was effectively over at 5 a.m. each Sunday morning. The last hour was all religious and community programming on LPs with a half-hour on each side. That left me with about an hour to roam around the station, looking at the old 45s, the production rooms, the moderne-styled transmitter with its tubes aglow and faintly humming, and the pictures hanging on the walls. Several of those photos were of Bart. One framed item was not a photo at all, but Bart’s first-class FCC license. That license meant Bart was qualified not only as a DJ (that required a “third class license with broadcast endorsement”), but also as an full-fledged radio engineer. In other words, Bart was qualified to be on the air, and he was qualified to build and run an entire radio station all by himself. I could only look on in wonder. I had no idea.
But best of all, even better than the weird phone calls and the stalkers (yes, there was one), even better than the thrill of sending out Heart’s “Barracuda” to the entire Roanoke Valley from the fabled corner of 15th and Cleveland, even better than all of these, was the weekly critique session with Bart Prater. For it’s true: every week Bart would sit down with me, the guy who was as green as grass and on the lowest of the low shifts, and spend nearly an hour listening to my airchecks and offering me private lessons in effective radio announcing. Bart taught me that things move forward in time, so the song title should be the very last thing you say before the music hits and you stop talking. Bart taught me to let my voice come out naturally, without forcing it, and certainly without the exaggerated tonsil-swinging AM style he called “puking.” Bart taught me to slow down, to trust the moment, and to enjoy myself.
As we listened to my airchecks, I heard some howlers I just knew would get me fired. I’d step on–that is, talk over–the song’s vocal. My patter was sometimes bad in ways I can’t easily describe. “Dumb” doesn’t quite do justice to the insane irrelevancies and flat “jokes” I would hear spilling out of my mouth. Once to my horror, on that little cassette that recorded my airchecks, I heard a record take about five seconds to come up to speed as I was introducing the song and yes, stepping on the vocal. Those turntables did not reach the right speed instantly, and I hadn’t taken that lag time into account when I cued up the record. So the beginning of “Hey Jude,” which starts with the vocal of course, sounded like “hohhhhhhaaahhhhhhhheeeeeeeaaaaaaaaayyyeeeeeeee Jude”–really loudly, because the station’s audio compressor was tuned for maximum impact. And all the time I was bleating away. I was mortified and couldn’t look Bart in the eye as I heard the song wowing its way to life as I kept on talking over Paul McCartney’s voice.
Bart never mentioned it. He had some kind of strange gift that could distinguish between lack of aptitude and lack of experience. I guess he assumed the latter was susceptible to education, and the mistakes would be fewer and farther between as I learned. A simple gift, really, but surprisingly rare.
And he was right. I got better over the summer. A lot better. I grew confident. My patter improved. I had more fun. I could experiment more, with better results. I could answer the phone, cue up a record, get the next spot ready in the tape-cartridge player, check the transmitter meters, and prepare to hit the news at the top of the hour with no more than a second’s lapse. And I was ready to say something short, sweet, and rocking when I clicked the microphone on.
At the end of the summer, at our last meeting, Bart looked at me and said, in the voice of the Wizard of Rock, the only voice he had and the only voice he would ever need, “Well, Gardner, you’ve improved about 1000% since you started working here. Good job.” I shook his hand and thanked him, and I said goodbye.
That was the last time I saw Bart Prater. The next summer I worked construction–the pay was better, but my heart wasn’t in it. The summer after that, I graduated from college, got married, and started working at a station in Fredericksburg, Virginia. And every time I’d go back home to Salem to visit my folks, I’d listen for Bart. I heard him in the last glory days of WROV, and I heard him when he jumped to the new FM rocker, K-92. On that new station with no static at all, Bart was still great, but it wasn’t the same. The Wizard of Rock belonged on the Rock of Roanoke. Bart Prater belonged on WROV. And in that golden summer of 1977, Bart made me believe I belonged on WROV too. What began as a polite fiction for the benefit of a young student just starting out in radio became a reality by the end of that summer. The student was ready, and the teacher appeared–one of the best teachers in the land. The Wizard of Rock himself. He taught me essential things about radio, and he taught me some vital things about teaching, too.
I paid tribute to Bart and the Rock of Roanoke at the Digital Media and Learning conference in 2015, with an Ignite Talk about radio.
But no tribute is enough for the gratitude and admiration I still feel for Bart Prater. His death last Wednesday hit me hard. I was moved by two hometown remembrances, one an article in the Roanoke Times, and one a great 1997 interview with Bart done by WDBJ television:
And I resolved to write this post.
Bart ended every one of his air shifts with, “never whittle toward yourself, or spit into the wind.” Good advice, though I also remember that other lesson he shared with me, in one of our first private conferences: things move forward in time.
Sometimes I wish they didn’t, because those things now include a big empty space where a wizard once lived.
Thank you, Bart. I won’t forget.
EDIT: I just found a remarkable “scoped” aircheck of Bart from 1972. (“Scoped” means spots, news, and voice breaks.) The aircheck showcases some fine examples of Bart’s great delivery and wicked ad-libs.
We join Bart as he shares his summer vacation slides … on the radio.
It’s also a fascinating time capsule. Those commercials, those jingles … and don’t miss the news about 14:00 in. Muskie vs. McGovern vs. Jackson vs. Humphrey. Vivid stuff.
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