Way leads on to way….

Scrolling down the UThink home page (and who minds a little scrolling when the content is great?) I found an entry celebrating UThink’s rapid success. As part of the celebration, Shane Nackerud compiled a list thanking “the early adopters, those people who created blogs without really knowing what UThink was all about” (which is a good description of how progress is made, in my book). On that list he included a blog called “Deception of the Thrush,” and singled out one of its entries for special praise: “Still my favorite post of all time on UThink: Nibbled to Death by Small Geese. If you haven’t read it, you are missing out.”

Who wants to miss out? Who could resist that kind of praise? Who could resist such a title? Not me.

Highly recommended.

I just stumbled on a fascinating site at the University of Minnesota.

Welcome to UThink: Blogs at the University Libraries
UThink is available to the faculty, staff, and students of the University of Minnesota Twin Cities, and is intended to support teaching and learning, scholarly communication, and individual expression for the U of M community. All you need to login and start blogging is your U of M Internet ID and Password. If you have any questions or comments, please send us an email at uthink@umn.edu. Give it a try today!

At first glance, the site seems an embarrassment of riches and a very compelling example of exactly the kind of rich teaching and learning environment I envision for my University. More to learn, more to emulate. Sigh, and oh boy!

I remember another John today: John Milton. He was born on this day in 1608, thousands of miles away from where I’m writing these words, and in a culture I can imagine, but only just. The birth of this child led to the creation of the greatest poem in English, Paradise Lost, and, to compare great things to small, to the faculty positions I have had at the University of San Diego and the University of Mary Washington (nee Mary Washington College).

In the summer of 2003 I was fortunate to hold a manuscript of his early poetry in my hands. I turned the pages and thought about the living hand whose writing I saw before me. I also thought about the life that writing had given me, and I gave thanks.

Happy birthday, John.

Remember John Lennon. 1940-1980.

Technology Review’s bloggers are working overtime. Now Simson Garfinkel has blogged on a site called “Ed-Heads” that features three virtual activities for all you guys and gals out there: Simple Machines, Weather, and Knee Surgery. Yes, knee surgery. There’s a virtual reception area, a virtual surgery, and a lovely set of full color photographs that are guaranteed to weaken your, um, knees. Luckily, the teacher’s guide warns that “some of the photographs and procedures in this knee surgery activity are rather graphic.” Ra-ther!

Just the thing for that restive third-grader.

Further learning occurs. On the Ed-Head home page, I see that humans “share 98.4% of their DNA with a chimp” (I knew that already), but we also share 70% of our DNA with a slug. Now I understand what Mondays are all about.

Can you imagine, all over the blogosphere, thousands of bloggers blogging on the fact that the online Merriam-Webster dictionary calls “blog” the most looked-up word for 2004?

That’s a meta-moment to savor. Or not.

Here’s the news story at the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. The Technology Review blog also covers the story, and points out that “online web site” in the M-W definition is redundant.

And now I know what “peloton” means, too. Not bad for a Monday morning.

There’s a fascinating article by Atul Gawande in a recent New Yorker about differences in how well doctors and hospitals treat their patients: complication rates, death rates, quality-of-life outcomes. Gawande writes:

In ordinary hernia operations, the chances of recurrence are one in ten for surgeons at the unhappy end of the spectrum, one in twenty for those in the middle majority, and under one in five hundred for a handful. A Scottish study of patients with treatable colon cancer found that the ten-year survival rate ranged from a high of sixty-three per cent to a low of twenty per cent, depending on the surgeon. For heartbypass patients, even at hospitals with a good volume of experience, risk-adjusted death rates in New York vary from five per cent to under one per cent—and only a very few hospitals are down near the one-per-cent mortality rate.

It is distressing for doctors to have to acknowledge the bell curve. It belies the promise that we make to patients who become seriously ill: that they can count on the medical system to give them their very best chance at life. It also contradicts the belief nearly all of us have that we are doing our job as well as it can be done. But evidence of the bell curve is starting to trickle out, to doctors and patients alike, and we are only beginning to find out what happens when it does.

Gawande goes on to discuss a cystic fibrosis specialist named Warren Warwick, who for forty years has directed the Minnesota Cystic Fibrosis Center at Fairview-University Children’s Hospital, in Minneapolis. This CF Center is considered the best in the U.S. What has taken it to the right edge of the bell curve? What accounts for its excellence? Science? Yes, but other centers also pay close attention to the latest research and methodologies. A focus on patient care? Certainly, but that’s not unique to the Minnesota CF Center, either. Other hospitals work very hard to provide top-quality care, both in and out of the hospital. No, it turns out that the distinguishing characteristic of the Minnesota CF Center is its director, Warren Warwick. And what makes Warwick so special? Gawande describes it as a “combination of focus, aggressiveness, and inventiveness”:

We are used to thinking that a doctor’s ability depends mainly on science and skill. The lesson from Minneapolis is that these may be the easiest parts of care. Even doctors with great knowledge and technical skill can have mediocre results; more nebulous factors like aggressiveness and consistency and ingenuity can matter enormously.

Let’s imagine for a moment that we’re discussing excellence in education, or in artistic performance, or in any human endeavor. Can the lessons Gawande learned in his analysis of health care outcomes be generalized to apply to other fields? I believe they can. In my own field of English literary studies, however, the sheer agency implied by words like “aggressiveness and consistency and ingenuity” is not very much in fashion these days. We study cultures, not persons, and the idea of a “great life” is sometimes greeted with disdain–if not outright derision.

Yet Gawande’s article teaches another lesson: that teams and collaboration are crucial, but true excellence requires personality. Without personhood, without decisive interventions by people with “focus, aggressiveness, and inventiveness,” excellence is unattainable. Worse yet, the idea of excellence may vanish, or be denied.

Near the end of his article, Gawande cites a Cincinnati CF center that has made considerable strides forward by adopting many of Warwick’s methods. “Yet you have to wonder,” Gawande says, “whether it is possible to replicate people like Warwick, with their intense drive and constant experimenting.” I don’t know about replication, but I do believe that education has as one of its primary goals the nurture and encouragement of those personal qualities. We teachers present information. We foster learning communities. We facilitate the learner’s progress through a course of study. Yet we should also coach our students in the focus, aggressiveness, and inventiveness that can lead to true greatness–a greatness that ultimately relies on personhood, and on personal agency.

Turns out many color laser printers lay down a pattern of colored dots that identifies the printer by serial number on every sheet it prints. The idea is to stop counterfeiters, a good idea on the face of it. The problem is that printer manufacturers are not required to tell consumers that their machines do this.

Apparently this practice has been going on for decades.