Just about the length of a good pop song.

At the wonderful NITLE Summit back in April, Steve Greenlaw and I did a poster session on what since 2005 the dream team at UMW has been calling “The Bluehost Experiment.” More than anything else that happened on my watch as Asst. VP for Teaching and Learning Technologies, this experiment (a perpetual pilot, and darn proud of it too) proved transformative. Not only that, it has been a constant source of inspiration and a wonderful opportunity for learning throughout the entire community: students, staff, faculty. I think it’s an example of positive deviance, though I’m hardly an unbiased observer.

There’s plenty of stuff floating around the ‘net about our adventures in the sandbox. Here, in the grand tradition of “Minute Shakespeare,” is the abridged version, presented for the “Three Minutes of Fame” poster-session advertisement at the NITLE conference. The most ingenious part of the presentation was the slide template we were furnished, which was set up to advance automatically every thirty seconds. A very clever person thought of that–and I’ll probably nick the idea for something to try in the classroom someday soon.

Special thanks to Steve Greenlaw for, well, everything, but particularly for his help in thinking about this presentation.

As I prepare for my new job at Baylor University, I’m even more alert than usual to the many analogies, metaphors, and parables out there that help me think about education.  My reading this summer has been unusually rich in that regard. Over the last few days I’ve been deep into Atul Gawande’s Better: A Surgeon’s Notes on Performance. I don’t think I can recommend this little book too highly. Parts of it are expanded versions of essays that originally appeared in The New Yorker. Parts of it are new to me. All of it is insightful, inspiring, thoughtfully cautionary.

Two parts I’ve blogged about before, in their New Yorker incarnation: the story of Virginia Apgar and her scoring system for assessing newborns’ health, and the story of Warren Warwick and his zealous devotion to the best possible outcomes in treating cystic fibrosis.  Both of these stories strongly influenced my work in the classroom over the last eighteen months, and both have helped me think more complexly and imaginatively about the vexed issue of assessment in education. I suppose that’s one reason I bought Gawande’s book earlier this week: I had just finished working with a colleague on a conference proposal for a seminar on assessment and I wanted to revisit Gawande and test my current thinking against his. I was inspired anew.

At an even deeper level, though, Gawande’s book strikes me as perfect reading material for all of us who live in what Nassim Taleb calls, with haunting precision, “the antechamber of hope.” Why do we struggle? To what end? With what hope of success? Why do some intense efforts yield extraordinary, lasting results while other lead to muleish opposition and setback after setback? To cite just one of Gawande’s examples: why have the enormous strides in antisepsis in the operating room not been matched by widespread, thorough habits of handwashing in doctors? Why are some simple, basic barriers to dramatic improvement so immoveable?

The Virginia Apgars and Warren Warwicks of the world seem to breathe a purer oxygen than most of us do. They are awake, and indefatigable. They also love the idea of improving our processes of improvement, what Doug Engelbart calls the “bootstrapping” level of augmentation. Most of all, they are curious, game, scrappy, always thinking, always pushing. They are what Gawande calls “positive deviants”: outliers who make change possible, and life better, for everyone.

Here’s how Gawande sums it up at the end of his story of medicine in India, where truly dire conditions have not blocked great innovations among the doctors there:

True success in medicine is not easy. It requries will, attention to detail, and creativity. But the lesson I took from India was that it is possible anywhere and by anyone. I can imagine few places with more difficult conditions. Yet astonishing success could be found. And each one began, I noticed, remarkably simply: with a readiness to recognize problems and a determination to remedy them.

Arriving at meaningful solutions is an inevitably slow and difficult process. Nonetheless, what I saw was: better is possible. It does not take genius. It takes diligence. It takes moral clarity. It takes ingenuity. And above all, it takes a willingness to try.

And as Gawande notes in the story of Warren Warwick and the treatment of cystic fibrosis, it takes a willingness to be open with one’s efforts and candid about one’s failures.

So there’s the adventure: become a positive deviant. The two words describe the task well, for they suggest the tension and difficulty inherent in making true deviation truly effective, and not simply an exotic nuisance (or worse, a scapegoat).

I haven’t quite finished the book. I see the Afterword approaching: “Suggestions for Becoming a Positive Deviant.”

I’ll report back.

Inspired (nudged, prompted) by a recent e-mail from Janet, I’m trying to catch up with that builder and curator of a cabinet of wonders who calls himself Michael Wesch. Watching him and his work is like watching a time-lapse photograph of the Empire State Building going up. Every morning a new story appears. Amazing.

So this morning I got onto his blog entry about “Context Collapse,” actually an excerpt from a paper he’s submitted to a journal, and by the time I realized what was going on I’d composed a rather longish comment. I then wrestled with whether I should leave the comment there, or just post my thoughts here and link to the post. Tired of wrestling, I decided to do both.

This isn’t the blog post I’d planned to write–I need to do a follow-on to the one on blogging, where the comments have been truly mind-blowing and have added immeasurably to my thinking (as well as filling my heart). But I post it here in the hopes that some account of my response to Michael’s post will perhaps add a little to the conversation and, if nothing else, encourage a few more folks to go take a look at what Michael has written and the comments that have followed. And add their own.

Michael,

Fascinating stuff here. I’m eager to read your article and grateful you’ve shared part of it with us here.

Three things come to mind immediately:

1. The idea of “face-work” (great phrase) jibes interestingly with the arguments in Goleman’s “Social Intelligence.” Far from being opaque to each other, in f2f contexts we are almost comically transparent as our brains work below awareness to stimulate complex physical signals that share our subjectivity with each other. The sharing induces synchrony: heart rate, brain rhythms, etc. Massive social benefits emerge from this kind of synchrony, which blurs the lines between physiology, affect, and consciousness. But of course lower-bandwidth connections (webcams, writing, etc.) make these kinds of synchrony more difficult–though also more interestingly concentrated at times, a true paradox. (Call it the “stick-figure” paradox, in which a few bold suggestions of form can be more compelling than complexly realized CGI, perhaps because of the “uncanny valley” effect?)

2. In some respects, what I do when I teach students how to write more effectively is not so much to teach them a set of self-correcting techniques (I do that too, sure) as it is to teach them what it means to do “face-work” in the medium of prose. Language is both highly supple and highly resistant in this regard, difficult to master but capable of intense synchronicities when writer and reader are well-practiced in the varieties of “face-work” available to prose. Sometimes the goal of this practice is called “finding your voice” (necessary for the reader as well as for the writer, I think) which of course is also a kind of “face-work,” one even more intimately connected with the magic land between deliberate action and upwelling response. (Much to say here as well with regard to aesthetic arrest and altruism.)

3. It occurs to me that Mikhail Bakhtin’s seminal essay on “Speech Genres” could be mapped onto webcams/vlogging in interesting ways. I’ve always been haunted by his concept of “addressivity,” which he defines as “the quality of turning to someone.” Imagining addressivity, combining it with what he calls “internal dramatism” in which one might say the notion of “face-work” becomes part of the very dynamics of self-presentation and self-expression, a canny nod to the reader that generates not irony so much as a shared awareness of the heroic joint effort in that moment to create a context that, however provisional, will not collapse (at least for now), offers some philosophical/linguistic models that might prove useful.

Thanks, as always, for the work you do.

about blogging in my classes. What is my method? How do I communicate to students the reasons for blogging, and how do I get them to commit to the exploratory spirit of the endeavor in a school context that emphasizes frequent incremental assessments of items on a task-list?

As I talked to Jim, I realized that I do have a method, or methods, but in the spirit of those methods I’ve resisted writing much about them here. In my experience, the paradox of real school is that it’s extraordinarily powerful when it happens, and at the same time very fragile along the way.  (Robert Frost on poetry: “The figure is the same as for love.”) As I try to get to the magic and guard the fragility, I try not to talk about either too much or too analytically. That said, and at the risk of talking both too much and too analytically, I also try in several ways to encourage the class (encourage=give heart) to blog as part of the journey to the magic. Here are a few scattered thoughts, with no time to edit or polish them, about some of the ways I’m aware of trying to encourage the class.

1. In my mind, and in the way I talk about blogging, I distinguish between a requirement and an assignment. Blogging is required, but not assigned. My requirement is simple: blog x number of times a week, blog in relation to what we’re studying together, comment on another blog x number of times a week, blog and comment substantively. I go back and forth on the quantitative requirement. Specifying a number is a sure way to turn a requirement into an assignment, and I resist it, but we are all human and time can’t be ignored altogether, so I’ll typically specify a number. What I will not specify is what “in relation to” means, or what “substantively” means. I will however discuss and muse aloud about what they mean, and emphasize with all my heart and mind the many ways in which we can (and should, and hopefully will) conceive of relation and substance as we study together. And I will try to take some of the pressure of “what does the teacher want?” off our minds by reminding them that I do not “grade” the blogs, but instead consider them holistically as evidence of their general commitment to this course of study.

None of those ideas is in any way unique to me. To name but one obvious influence, there’s the way Barbara Ganley talks about and dwells within blogs in her teaching. (The first time I heard Barbara talk about blogging, in New Orleans in 2005, I realized that my intuitions about blogging were sound and could and should be extended even further. What an inspiration Barbara’s presentation turned out to be! I owe her much.) But even here (and I think Barbara would agree) the trick is to bring a version of the blogosphere itself into the use of blogs in the classroom. Otherwise, it’s new wine in old bottles. Students will rightly view blogging as merely (insert traditional assignment here) by other means.

I suppose if students are not a little confused about blogging at first, they’re not really on the road to grokking it.

2. I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the distinctions and relations between community and culture. I’m thinking that the problem of scaling is the problem of transition from community to culture. Civilization offers many ways to think about (and despair over, and hope for) such transitions. Education offers relatively few outside of team activities. Michael Wesch seems to me to have grokked the relation between community and culture–aided no doubt by his own training as an anthropologist, but even more crucially aided by his proclivities as a digital artist. He teaches at a large state school. He doesn’t often, if ever, have the luxury of six students in a seminar, the extreme luxury I’ve just enjoyed in my UMW Milton seminar. Yet he’s figured out how to empower both community and culture in his teaching, and how to make that culture recursively pervade each community within it. (Jerome Bruner’s The Culture of Education becomes ever more important for me in this regard. Why has this book not changed the world already, or at least permeated the conversation about education? Perhaps it has, somewhere, and I need to find that somewhere….)

For me, blogging and the peculiar character of its distributed conversation makes that community-culture continuum especially visible and accessible to thought. Such a peculiar genre, blogging; it accommodates and facilitates many different uses, as Gene Roche has been exploring recently. In my own experience, learning from the folks who inspired me to get into this and sustain this in the first place (Gene, Jon, Bryan, Brian, Barbara,  to name only five early influences), the blog combines the essay, the lecture, the letter (“this is my letter to the world”), the message-in-a-bottle, the Q&A session, even the delicious bits in a jazz solo that quote (allude to, link to) motifs and melodies from other jazz solos. (I love the bit in Toots Thieleman’s solo in “The Man I Love” that quotes his own melody in “Bluesette.”) There’s a both-and character to blogging that resonates very deeply with my other portmanteau commitments, my other complex devotions. Plus it can be insanely, shake-your-jagged-locks-in-the-sun playful (and often is). And recursive and gloriously bootstrapping.

So when I talk to my students about blogging, I try very hard to emphasize how they’re likely to experience both community (tighter bonds with their fellow learners in the course of study) and culture (participation in the greater blogosphere, with unpredictable and often lovely results). Fractal returns, spiraling in and out depending on where one is looking at the time. And whenever we get pinged from the outside, I talk it up with Jim-Groom-sized enthusiasm the next time we meet. It’s easy, because I’m just as jazzed by the phenomenon as I hope they will be.

3. This last bit is probably the most important, and one of the many reasons I hate to fall silent here for any length of time. I offer to my students my own testimony about the ways in which blogging augments my own work as a learner and teacher and writer. For me, it’s no different than the way I talk about books I’ve read, movies I’ve seen, thoughts I’ve had, thoughts my students have inspired in me. My blog is an account of my journey as a learner, a process of shared inquiry that both documents and shares the quests for knowledge and meaning–and collaborates on the building those quests inspire.

Sometimes faculty worry that student blog posts will merely share ignorance and error. Students worry about this too. No one wants to be wrong, particularly out in front where everyone can see. I have three thoughts in response to this entirely legitimate concern. One is that any conversation about what one is learning will tend to reinforce one’s commitment to that task. One’s learning is reinforced even through sharing questions and uncertainties. (I think I’ve got some good neuroscience on my side to confirm this thought.) The second thought is related to the first: blogs are great for sharing knowledge and the experience of meaning, but they’re also great–perhaps even greater–at cultivating and sharing a habit of inquiry and a set of heuristics of inquiry. Blogs are hydroponic farms for heuristics, hypothesis-generation, metacognition that continually moves out to other metacognizers and back to one’s own reflection. The third thought, and I say this with some caution, is that there’s a way of conceiving blogging that lets us say, to paraphrase the poet Phillip Sydney in his “Defense of Poetry,” that “the blogger nothing affirmeth.” That is to say, the activity of the blogger is not primarily to assemble facts into a persuasive argument, though one can do that and there are many shades of argumentation possible in a blog. Instead, the blogger’s voice sounds through its many wanderings as it imagines a better world that might emerge from this “brazen” one (again quoting Sydney). Or to get even more fanciful, while still poetic, the blogosphere can be the place where we collaborate on a beautiful Grecian Urn and also, in the face of overwhelming odds against it, witness our collaborations come to life, so that we need never choose between frozen perfection, authentic mourning, exuberant joy, and deeply shared life.

And then, among other things blogging means being intellectual in front of other people, and helping to broaden the definition of “intellectual” in ways that are, in my view, desperately needed in higher education and at large. Much more to say on this in another post.

I told my students this summer that Milton imagined a life, a marriage, a community, a culture that would be defined but dynamic. It seems to me that much human endeavor aims to unite those two excellences. Defined, so we can have identity and know the other *as* the other and not just an extension of self.  Dynamic, so we can grow, merge, combine, split, overlap, move in an exquisite dance of personhood and family, individuality and deep belonging. Blogging is thus just another way–but what another way!-to experience that human dream, and to make some little part of it come true.

A little over a month ago I was privileged to attend and speak at the 2008 SUNY Conference on Instructional Technologies, splendidly hosted this year by SUNY-Genesee Community College. (You’ll need to use IE to get to the program pdfs; at least, I did.) The theme was “Are We There Yet? Teachers and Learners in a Digital World.”

I met some extraordinary people there and once again was encouraged by the way imaginative faculty and staff have persisted in their visionary efforts to make sense and good use of computers in teaching and learning. As I listened to folks’ stories and learned something of the history of the conference and of FACT (Faculty Access to Computer Technology, the primary sponsoring group over the years) I was struck by the commonalities with my own experience, as well as with the stories I’ve heard from similar groups: early adopters, early resistance, the slow growth of a critical mass, the difficulties with communication and cooperation and resource allocation that come with all large organizations, the successes, the professional networks, the immense satisfactions. Most of all, I came away inspired by this community’s enduring playfulness, curiosity, and devotion to innovation and improvement (indeed, augmentation) in teaching and learning.

The day was full of magic. I met the justly famous NY Mary, whose blog PowerPop is a musical education, a constant inspiration, and great great fun. (It’s also one of the most well-written and heartfelt blogs I’ve read. Indeed, its excellence motivated contributor Steve Simels to start writing about music again on a regular basis, which is an endorsement at the Very Highest Level.) Mary and I got to talk about everything from graduate school to Joyce to Flann O’Brien to XTC. Doesn’t get much better than that. I met Harry Pence, a professor on the verge of retirement who is more energetically visionary than most professors half his age. I met Jim Greenberg, who used to be Andy Rush’s boss. (Yes, we traded classic Andy stories.) Craig Lending, current chair of the SUNY FACT Advisory Council, was a marvelous host and a fascinating conversationalist. Nancy Motondo organized a great conference with amazing stamina and patience. Patrick Murphy, director of the SUNY Center for Professional Development, made me feel right at home and gave me a great overview of the conference and its history. I got to reconnect with Alex Reid of Digital Digs (Alex is at SUNY-Cortland–more on Alex and Cortland in a forthcoming post). I met with the FACT Emerging Technologies group and talked about everything from Second Life to haptics. I’m confident I’m forgetting someone–if so, my apologies. I plead packing amnesia.

The whole experience was intense, revelatory, and encouraging. My only regret is that I couldn’t stay longer and take in more of the conference.

Here’s the abstract for my keynote presentation:

“How to Get There from Here: Building an Imagination Infrastructure”
We’ve been waiting nearly half a century for computer-based information technologies to revolutionize education. While some in authority (including vendors) may supply glowing reports on the progress we’ve made, visionaries and pioneers like Doug Engelbart and Alan Kay insist we’re not only “not there yet,” but that we haven’t yet fully grasped what “there” might mean. I’ll offer a highly selective tour of the optimism, pessimism, triumph, and disappointment that have characterized the use of computers in education, and offer some thoughts on how we might redirect our footsteps and rediscover a truly radical perspective on information technologies in education, a perspective that might enable more consistent progress toward more idealistic goals.

The audio is at the end of this post. Caveat auditor: something went awry with my Edirol recorder–I think I didn’t plug the external microphone in quite firmly enough–so the audio is mostly listenable but not pristine. (And the questions in the Q&A aren’t always intelligible; I hope they become so in context. Yes, I should have repeated the questions, something I habitually forget to do.) I hope the content, and my attempts at some postproduction cleanup, make the experience worthwhile. I tried hard in this talk to articulate something of my vision for personal learning environments constructed by the students themselves as part of a larger personal cyberinfrastructure project that would be the unifying activity for all four years of college, an activity that would stimulate metacognition, foster innovation, and by the way offer opportunities for learning and using valuable digital skills.I did a workshop later in the day titled “Simile, Metaphor and Symbol in Web 2.0: Playing Education.” No audio from this one–the format didn’t really lend itself to audio capture–but here’s the abstract:

This interactive workshop will give participants the chance to use their imaginations to play with ideas in a learning community, to amalgamate new wholes from that play, and to recognize the poetry hiding in plain sight within Web 2.0. Come with your favorite information and imagination technologies (laptops, pens, pencils, paper, colored markers, you name it)and come ready to be creative, thoughtful, and spontaneous. My goal is to stimulate us to think about how the experience of Web 2.0 creates meaning for the user, and how those thoughts might be of value as we consider our uses of Web 2.0 in teaching and learning.

I had a lot of fun with this workshop, which was an elaboration of part of my presentation at the 2006 regional conference of the New Media Consortium. The workshop participants made the whole thing come alive: they were playful, inventive, and willing to take some risks. Mark Smith, an Information Systems Librarian at Alfred University, introduced me with a great (and cautionary) display of the power of Google. (Suffice it to say that he had the goods on yours truly, making me glad that I at least try to heed Jon Udell’s call to use the Web to present my professional self deliberately and thoughtfully.) Best of all, at the end of the workshop Eric Feinblatt, an art professor from NYC’s Fashion Institute of Technology, came up to me with a poem he’d looked up on the Web. The poem is “Ezra Pound’s Proposition,” by Robert Hass, and it was a breathtaking coda to a workshop devoted to exploring connections and the power of the imagination to perceive and create those bonds.

So imagine the moment, dear reader: I was pumped up from sixty minutes of shared inspiration and imagination and creativity, as well as from a day of intense conversations and intense learning on my part, and there I stood in the lobby of the building where the session had just ended, looking at a laptop carried by a colleague I’d met just hours before, experiencing with him a poem he had looked up on the Web via a wireless connection and a portable computer that he cradled in his arms as he shared the screen and its beautiful contents with me, making an indelible mark on my consciousness and spirit.

How could I not love teaching and learning technologies when such fascinating people make, use, study, and discuss them? At their best, the technologies are nothing less than compelling instances of those very people at work and play.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (35.2MB)

Dr. Elizabeth Phillips in her office in Trible Hall at Wake Forest University. I’m not sure when the photograph was taken, but this is how I remember her from my first class with her in the fall of 1975. Whatever I say here will be too little or too much or not quite right. I persevere in the saying because of the light Elizabeth Phillips shared with me, and shares with me still.

Dr. Phillips died last Tuesday night at the age of 89. Here is her obituary. Here is a news story about her death. (Edit: both links are now broken.) She was born the same year as my mother. As it happens, she died in the same hospital where my mother died almost nineteen years ago, Baptist Hospital in Winston-Salem, North Carolina.

Now I have lost two mothers, for Elizabeth Phillips was surely my intellectual and academic mother. To say that she inspired me to become an English major is to say far too little. Elizabeth inspired me to think that there was a place in school for someone like me, someone lost in wonder and and confused by his own relentless exuberance, someone who loved ideas but kept veering from the analytical to the figurative in his work, someone who had given up on the idea that studying literature in a classroom could be anything much to savor. She not only inspired me, she welcomed me, encouraged me, corrected me, and was my first and deepest lesson in what it means to be an intellectual.

I remember the room where I first heard her speak.  No one in my immediate family had been to college. I had no idea what to expect. After that class, I left the room feeling dizzy, giddy, elated, and not a little anxious, for everything had changed, and I knew I had to at least try to be answerable to that revelation.

Elizabeth Phillips always gave me the courage and desire to be answerable. She was an extraordinary teacher whose “pedagogy” consisted of intense thoughtfulness, challenging material, a willingness to let us witness how deeply the literature mattered to her.  I was asked recently if I had thought about just how Elizabeth Phillips worked her magic in the classroom. Of course I had thought about it. I think about little else when I try to do my best in the classroom. But how exactly had she done it? I had no complete answer. She read beautifully. She had a wonderful sense of humor: sometimes a line of poetry would begin with a throaty rumble and build to quavering glee. She was smart as a whip and curious about everything. She knew me by heart. She never once coddled me and never once turned me away. She introduced me to verbal art with a level of intense, total engagement that I had never known before and have rarely seen since. She trusted my instincts and taught me to trust them too. I took every course I could from her. Is that a methodology? I am skeptical it can be so reduced. All I can tell you is that of course Elizabeth Phillips brought the literature to life for us. But she also let us see how, and to what extent, and with what consequences, literature brought her to life for us. This without a whiff of the maudlin, the confessional, or any cloying insistence that she was “one of us.” How could she be one of us? There was only one Elizabeth Phillips.

Once when my mother came to visit me, I asked her to come with me to Elizabeth Phillips’ class. My mother and Dr. Phillips liked each other and asked about each other for the rest of my mother’s shortened life (my mother died of leukemia in 1989 at the age of 69). Not everything about my college education strengthened my ties to my family, but Dr. Phillips could strengthen any bond, and the connection between these two mothers of mine filled me with hope for a future I’m still trying to work toward.

In memoriam, I offer five items. One is a tribute to Elizabeth I was privileged to contribute to a whole series of such tributes at a luncheon in her honor in May, 2007. Elizabeth was in the audience, so I take some comfort in knowing that she knew, as precisely as I could articulate it, how I felt about her and what she had meant to me. I share this tribute with you so that you will know it too.

Following the video, I have put up four lyrics from a set of poems my dear friend and college roommate Michael Thomas and I recorded Elizabeth reading in the summer of 2005. I am very grateful to Michael for arranging this occasion. These readings are extraordinary testimony to the depth and power of Elizabeth’s poetic and critical sensibilities. I hope they give you at least some idea of what was so compelling about her, and what we have lost now she is gone from this earth.

The first poem is Edna St. Vincent Millay’s “Dirge Without Music.”

The second is Theodore Roetkhe’s haunting villanelle “The Waking.”

The third is a great poem about faith in the here-and-now, Marianne Moore’s “What Are Years.”

The fourth is the conclusion to Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself,” and it will explain part of the conclusion of my tribute to Elizabeth.

Lux aeterna.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (1.6MB)

Inspired by Alan’s post–and amazed he’s not in a coma after the high-energy marathon of the NMC annual conference just concluded–I offer my own Wordle del.icio.us tag cloud. Jonathan Feinberg has built a compelling visualization tool that can generate a tag cloud from del.icio.us or a word cloud from any text. (I just saw an amazing Wordle made from Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “I Have A Dream” speech.) Because the image is more interesting–elegant, pretty, intriguing–it’s actually more informative, at least in my view. The emotional design bespeaks a fellow netizen with a deep understanding of the beauty of mutual augmentation.

Thanks as always to the big dog for the link.