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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This is all something of a revelation, apparently.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It’s the alternative that frightens me.

I’m always in the mood for rich analogies.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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