Last November I was honored to be the keynote speaker at the University of North Florida’s 3rd annual Academic Technology Innovation Symposium. The event brought me into contact with a number of talented faculty, grad students, and staff at UNF, and the sessions I was able to attend (I was on an unusually tight schedule) were fascinating. I learned a lot, and I tried to tweet out most of it. It was actually my first full-on conference tweeting in a while. It was good to get back to a practice I really enjoy. So I have UNF to thank for that, too. Special thanks go out to Deb Miller, Director of the Center for Instruction and Research Technology, who invited me and managed this fine event, as well as Yentl Dunbar and Justin Lerman, who very capably handled all of my travel logistics.

One of the greatest pleasures of the trip was a joyful reunion with a colleague and friend I’ve known for over fifteen years, the redoubtable Andy Rush. Andy’s working with some great folks, the job looks like a great fit for his talents and interests, and it’s hard to quarrel with the weather (at least in November), the seafood, or the beauty of that extraordinary campus. (Plus Danny Gottlieb works in the jazz program there–a program for which UNF is justly famous.)

And I’ll tell you something about Andy Rush: the man knows from bags of gold. An alum of the early days of the UMW-DTLT Dream Team, Andy is a powerful contributor to all things multimedia, multimodal, webby, and inventive. LIke we said, bags of gold.

So I saw Andy again, in action and in conversation, and I met cool smart people trying to bring all sorts of magic and collaborative inventiveness to teaching and learning … and I had the chance to try to work out some of my own ideas in the company of folks who’d help me think about them and make them stronger, better. Which they did. As you’ll see, a couple of the questions following my talk stopped me dead in my tracks, and usefully so.

Here’s what I was working on:

Blended Learning – A Taxonomy of Student Engagement

What do we mean by the words “student engagement”? My talk proposes that the answer is far from obvious. I will sketch out several possible meanings, describe what I take to be the character and outcomes of each variety, and suggest why school itself makes it particularly difficult to foster certain kinds of deep and sustained engagement. I will conclude with some thoughts about how hybrids of online and face-to-face learning experiences can best encourage such engagement.

That’s the abstract I submitted, and it’s fairly close to what I actually talked about. Along the way, however, I wove in some ideas the abstract only hinted at. In particular, I wanted to work the idea of taxonomy that I’ve had such trouble with in the case of poor Dr. Bloom. I wanted to keep the genre or framework, so to speak, but do something much wilder and messier and more passionate.

Part of my desire on the day of the talk was driven by events of just that week, including teaching I had done just two days before. The abstract indicates that I have thoughts to share with my colleagues at UNF, and that was certainly true. What I found, however, was that my life in the week had turned my abstract into a second-person query aimed at me: Gardner, what do you mean my student engagement? How would you map it? Why was that class two days ago so difficult and even painful for you? What had you hoped would happen?

Parker Palmer opens his magisterial The Courage To Teach with just such soul-searching. Although I didn’t think of it at the time, it occurred to me a few days later that I was following his example. I hope so. It’s a great one.

So here’s the video my friend and colleague Andy Rush made, on a day when layers of time and thought (as is clear from Andy’s blog as well) blended. A different kind of blended learning, perhaps, but no less important than any other.

And for the record, once again: I am so not kidding.