Day two of this semester’s Introduction to New Media Studies class, and the meeting went in some directions I hadn’t quite anticipated.

We didn’t discuss the readings for the day in a very systematic fashion. In no small part this was the result of the readings themselves, particularly Borges’ “The Garden of the Forking Paths.” This is the second time I’ve used this text (The New Media Reader) and thus the second time I’ve begun the term with the Janet Murray introduction, the Lev Manovich introduction, and the Borges’ story. This time, though, I found myself more vulnerable to the Borges that I was the first time through. That’s not unusual for me. The first time I work hard to achieve enough mastery to make a decent guide for the class’s work. The second time I’m more relaxed as I read the material. The result is usually more engagement, not less. Today I found that when a couple of vocal students brought the story up in the context of our discussion of techno-utopian and techno-dystopian possibilities, I fell immediately under the Borgesian spell, so much so that I found myself trying to explore the ideas in the two introductions not in terms of, but within, the very strange, beautiful, dissociative world of the Borges story. Oddly, that approach seemed illuminating–perhaps only to me–as it made the connections between computing and consciousness sudden, explicit, and intense. But of course the experience also felt labyrinthine, recursive, elusive, refractory: not the kinds of adjectives that typically make for clear instruction or any kind of closure.

At a couple of points I felt my own mind becoming quite webby (sounds strange, I know) and my awareness of emergent possibilities felt heightened as a result. But the time was over all too soon, and I could feel some stamina ebbing away as the students tried to hang on to an experience that had few handles. And as always, I wonder about the silent ones. Several students were passionately involved in the discussion, committed to the “swarming feeling” Borges’ protagonist describes as multiple layers of time and possible outcomes co-inhere within a narrative moment of awareness. Many more sat there silently. Some of them seemed engaged. Some seemed confused. Some seemed engaged and confused–those are the ones I’m usually the most hopeful about. And I felt that to honor the multiplicity present in the texts before us, I had to experience some aspects of that confusion myself, while at the same time being careful not to let every single rendezvous point disappear into the meta-fog.

For a few moments after class was over, I worried that the entire session had been too much of a mess for learning to have occurred. Oddly, I found I could remember most of the things that had happened in the class session, and found also that many of what seemed to me to be the most important points in the two introductions had in fact come up for discussion as we worked through the webs of connections. What I don’t know yet is how many of the students were able to detect, note, mark, learn, inwardly digest those important points without the more explicit scaffolding I usually supply (without lapsing into merely “going over the material”–I shudder even to write the phrase).

Sometimes I feel the drama of such an explosive and unstructured discussion becomes an important design element in the course experience, or at least a microcosm of the real, raw work of cognition that genuine learning entails–the real, raw work that is often hidden or evaded by usual schooling practices.

Other times I feel quite differently. I wish more students had chimed in. I know the things I could have done to elicit more participation, but today that felt like too much intervention–in fact, a bit stilted, and not at all true to the Borgesian spirit. Next time, I imagine I’ll be ready to move in another direction.

There’s a tension here that I can see I’ve been exploring in several recent blog posts. Today, Borges brought that exploration and that tension into sharper focus for me–and I hope that focus somehow made itself useful to my students as I guided them or at least tumbled before them. Very hard to say. What I do know is that the editors of this textbook are canny alchemists for placing that short story next to those introductions, and immediately before our next reading, Vannevar Bush’s “As We May Think.”

The connections here are truly overwhelming–but such oxygenation!