The Intro. to New Media Studies class today was pretty explosive. I had assigned excerpts in The New Media Reader from McLuhan’s Gutenberg Galaxy and The Medium is the Message. I was up this morning about 5, reading some insightful and tremendously inspiring blog posts from the class. A couple of the posts were especially provocative, hortatory, probing. As it turns out, there was one highly engaged post I couldn’t understand fully. On the way in to school, I puzzled over what had led the student to make what I was fairly certain, but not altogether sure, was a mistaken identification of one of McLuhan’s references. I concluded that McLuhan’s reference to Coleridge must have been the thing the student couldn’t quite pinpoint. As I considered what I thought to be the mistake and a probable cause, it occurred to me that the mistake actually pointed to a deep and important connection that I should consider more carefully than I had. In other words, what I thought to be the student’s mistake, and my own attempts to diagnose its cause, stimulated my thinking in some very fruitful ways, to the point that I couldn’t wait to get the conversation started.

When I got to class, I asked the student for clarification, and as soon as the student realized the mistake, the student became embarrassed. I was dismayed by the embarrassment and tried to tell the student how thought-provoking and rewarding I had found the experience of grappling with the question of whether a mistake had been made and if so, how. The student replied with more embarrassment. In my ardent attempts to frame the mistake as a portal, I finally blurted out, “Penicillin was a mistake!” and then carried on with some reflections on how we must trust each other with our mistakes. We must be willing to open our minds to each other as we learn, and endure our mistakes, and be alert to the possibilities of learning that mistakes can reveal or even inadvertently stimulate. I said to myself how terrible it was that schooling had kept mistakes from being turned into opportunities while the learning was taking place. What messages have the designs of schooling sent to me, and to my students, when the rightful desires for accuracy and precision become massive inhibitions that block the revelations that are one or two steps away?

I hope the penicillin story was helpful. I followed it up with one of my favorite aphorisms, from Pasteur: “chance favors the prepared mind.” I thought again how vital trust is for any community, but especially a community of learning. I hoped against hope that the student understood how grateful I was for a risk, a mistake, and an opportunity for deeper engagement with the essay.

We’ll see.

EDIT: Re-reading this post, I see I left out one of the more interesting small ironies: I was mistaken about what had caused the student’s mistake. It wasn’t the Coleridge reference, it was confusion over the name Adam Smith. But behold another portal! My search for a plausible error-diagnosis led me astray in terms of the student’s mistake, but led me on quite effectively to focus my attention on a passage I’d not yet fully mined. There’s some elasticity of inquiry here, as well as a willingness to be entertained and instructed by one’s own great big floppy clown shoes. I’m working on loving my clown shoes and following where they lead, when I have the patience and grace for it.

So write Alan Kay and Adele Goldberg.

Corollaries:

An introduction to New Media Studies is a metacourse.

The third pitch we throw had better be a metapitch.

The metalevel is the most generative level, the most frustratingly inexact level, the most emergent level, the level where experts and beginners can have interesting meetings. It can be a wide-eyed level, an untethered level, a level where imposters run amok by asking pseudo-profound questions. But each level has its irresponsible party-crashers. The levels below the metalevel have their own versions of irresponsibility, not least the droning mediocrity of lockstep apparatchiks.

I always thought the metalevel was where professors lived. Sometimes we do, I suppose. Other times it seems the level that professors protect for ourselves or our disciplines. Still other times it seems the place that “theory” pretends to go while always already stopping one step short. And finally, it seems the place that goes away in the press of academic production day-by-day. Articles must be written, courses must be managed, service must be done: who has time for the metalevel? And isn’t there something terribly unsophisticated about anyone getting excited about the metalevel? Self-awareness is more useful for sophisticated self-congratulation than for readiness to go out onto that unknown plain with the Red Crosse Knight, Una, the dwarf, and the donkey.

I want to extend the metaphor, but that will need to wait for tomorrow.

A too-brief follow-on to the previous post:

• I would much rather see learning objects in a container like David Wiley’s course than in any CMS (I refuse to call them LMS’s–just my little gesture of protest) I’ve ever seen, for all the reasons everyone’s pointed out.
• That said, I am still not enthusiastic about the “content” and “resources” I’m seeing here. I wish I were more excited. Four years ago I probably would have been. And yes, I understand that incrementalism is valuable, and that taken together the elements here constitute a significant advance. I suppose I’m wishing the steps had been taken in a different direction.
• I see that the course feeds out. But what feeds in to this course?
• Honestly, for resources that simply feed out, I’d much rather listen to a podcast of a really good lecture, or even a YouTube video of a great presentation, than see a set of links or an outline of a lesson. The links and the lesson are valuable, too, and I’d much rather see them exposed like this than sitting behind a Blackweb wall. But it’s the human context that I want to see, hear, experience.
• Maybe it’s the word “content” that gets me restive. I want to see content that’s more responsive to the medium. And I don’t think that such content necessarily replaces books, or essays, or any of the things we experience in schooling now. I think the digital medium, and the digital imagination, moves us off default positions and into a much more intelligent place from which to choose and craft the experiences we want to lead our students through–and to equip them to choose and craft those experiences for themselves. (Both are necessary, in my view–but I’ve written about my concerns about a completely learner-centered paradigm before.)
• As I understand it, learning objects did not really catch on for precisely this reason: a resource without a rich context is difficult to adopt, and not terribly attractive to a faculty member who rightly or wrongly believes that she or he is being paid to develop materials reflecting her or his own expertise and judgment.

Most of all:

I’m still finding my way with all this stuff myself. But I have a strong sense that we need to get to Alan Kay’s vision of the computer as an instrument whose music is ideas, and I don’t see this paradigm getting us closer. I could be wrong. Help me understand! It pains me to think that any part of the conversation would turn bitter.

I confess that I’m not feeling it yet, this heightened buzz about republishing/remixing content. To some extent, this looks like the second coming of learning objects, which is fine so far as it goes, but it doesn’t go nearly far enough. To be honest, I was a bit underwhelmed by David Wiley’s course site. (I say this with fear and trembling, as I’ve learned to take very, very seriously what Brian and Jim and Chris and others in this community get excited about.) It’s a spiffy site, to be sure, and the syndication is a huge plus, but the biggest challenges I face as a teacher are not about content or even content management. My biggest challenges are about inspiring learners, raising their consciousness about what they’re doing as learners and (especially) as a community of learners, enticing them to expose their own learning processes to each other and to me so that magic recursion takes place in which the mind of the class, exposed to the class, becomes part of the class and takes them to the next level. My challenge is to get to real school in which the administrative parts are all means to an end and are never, ever be confused with the course’s larger goals. I suppose that means I’m not likely to have a link that says “download this course” on any of my online materials, even though they’re open to the world. Though I do see how these materials can be helpfully repurposed, I don’t think we’re looking at the deeper opportunities online learning communities and the expression thereof can bring us.

What I’m seeing so far looks sometimes like open lesson plans, sometimes like open link farms, sometimes like open syllabi, sometimes like an outline for a textbook. Where’s the commenting, the student feeds back into the main feed, etc.? Where’s the recursion? Maybe I’m missing something here. I’ll look again. But so far, what I see isn’t blogging (not narrative or provisional enough, not enough of what Bakhtin terms “addressivity”) and it isn’t the mind of the classroom made visible and part of the meta-stream. And without the context of the advanced learner–the teacher–as he or she moves through the shared experience of the course, it’s just not all that interesting to me. When I click on “Using This Course,” what I see is “here’s how to get the materials” and “dive into the Syllabus.” When I dive into the blogging assignment, I see the blogging assignment and the resources, and these are great, but where are the links to the student blogs created as part of the assignment? Where do the students go to see their work entering the datastream of the course? Every course uses prepared resources and generates a datastream during the experience of the course of study, and I’m interested in ways in which the experiences of the prepared resources and the generated resources become symbiotic and mutually augmented.

In his comment on Chris’s first, more skeptical post, Brian Lamb argues there is something genuinely new here:

if there were examples of blog-based courses that were structured so clearly, in a format that will be immediately grasped by even the most mainstream audiences, I wish more people would have linked to them…

My own skepticism goes like this: the clarity of structure means that it isn’t really “blog-based,” and the format that can be immediately grasped can be immediately grasped because it looks like a more creative and pretty and easily-republishable version of what we’re already doing in an CMS like Blackweb. In some ways, it’s like RSS feeds for Powerpoint slides, except in this case they’re pages or posts in WordPress. That’s not nothing, and I’m sure happy for things like Slideshare, but they’re incremental gains at best, and don’t do much to rethink the activity of publishing the process and materials of learning as experiences and not as containers.

Trying to keep an open mind here….

Catching up on my back blog reading, when what to my wondering eyes should appear than this magnum opus from Alan Levine. What’s one level up from alpha dog? Whatever it is, he is it.

For anyone who wants a thorough and wonderfully graded approach to customizing WordPress, look no farther. Alan’s come up with some gems lately, but this one combines all his strengths: storytelling, experimentation, encouragement, and sheer smarts. I’m overdue for a WP upgrade–and I need to fix that silly footer-spam issue so I can get my flickr badge back–but I’m going to study Alan’s post long and hard for ideas and inspiration as I work on Gardner Writes.

Did I ever tell you about the first time I saw Alan at a conference? New Orleans, 2005, ELI Annual Meeting. A truly fateful meeting for me, as it was also the first time I saw Croquet, the first time I took a team from UMW to an ELI/NLII meeting, and the first time I did live blogging from an ELI conference. I heard John Bransford at that meeting. It was Diana Oblinger’s first annual meeting as the new Director of ELI. Martha did a poster presentation on bots and intelligent agents, getting that gig after her wonderful participation in the Cyberealspace experience at EDUCAUSE 2004.

And where was Alan? In Phoenix, of course. But also at the conference, by way of webcam hookup, gloriously on display during the Horizon 5 minutes of Fame event. (I miss those.) Little did I know that this guy would play such an enormous role in my own development. It’s been three years since, and only two years since we finally met face-to-face at ELI, San Diego, 2006 Annual Meeting–but Alan’s the kind of teacher who can put thirty years years of education into three years of friendship and collegiality.

So I figure I’m embarrassing the CogDog right now, but them’s the breaks: when you’re doing the kind of work he’s doing, you’ve got to expect some fanboys.

Thanks, Alan. I’ve got a lot more to learn. I couldn’t ask for a better teacher.

The book arrived from ILL today. (Carla Bailey, Queen of ILL, comes through once again. Please do not hire her away from us.) I ran across the title in a Google Book search on “cognitive resonance.” I’m starting more or less from a dead start here, but from a quick read of the first chapter the book looks quite promising: education, intuition, experience, and reason are the four pillars of a theory of abstraction, learning, and communication author Ben Lieberman builds up from the beginning. Art and modeling are coming up in chapter two. I love the synthesis, the eclecticism, the boldness with which this writer moves through disparate fields to pull together a book that seems to be about software, but at a deeper level promises to be a treatise on human understanding.

More as I move along.  Here in the meantime is the summary printed in the book:

Modeling complex systems is a difficult challenge and all too often one in which modelers are left to their own devices. Using a multidisciplinary approach, The Art of Software Modeling covers theory, practice, and presentation in detail. It focuses on the importance of model creation and demonstrates how to create meaningful models. Presenting three self-contained sections, the text examines the background of modeling and frameworks for organizing information. It identifies techniques for researching and capturing client and system information and addresses the challenges of presenting models to specific audiences. Using concepts from art theory and aesthetics, this broad-based approach encompasses software practices, cognitive science, and information presentation. The book also looks at perception and cognition of diagrams, view composition, color theory, and presentation techniques. Providing practical methods for investigating and organizing complex information, The Art of Software Modeling demonstrates the effective use of modeling techniques to improve the development process and establish a functional, useful, and maintainable software system.

Interesting two days, in this respect anyway: I did a presentation on Brian Wilson for Elderstudy yesterday, then explored “I Get Around” all the way through “Caroline No” for my Rock/Soul/Progressive class today. From senior citizens (I really don’t like that term much) to 18-19 year-olds. Brian spoke to all of them. This of course reinforces my sense that yearning, vulnerability, and an awestruck sense of the divine origins of beauty are trans-generational in their appeal.

Don’t worry, baby. Everything will turn out all right.

Don’t worry, baby.

The woods echo, and their answer rings.

Happy St. Valentine’s Day, everyone.

There’s a lot of great blogging going on in the Intro to New Media Studies class (always room for more, of course), much of it sparked by Ted Nelson’s Computer Lib/Dream Machines. We’re moving from Nelson to Alan Kay and Adele Goldberg next Tuesday, but before we go, I thought I’d share a recent response that gladdened this teacher’s heart.

According to Nelson, “we live in media, as fish live in water.” According to my anthropology professor, “we exist in culture like fish in water.” So I guess this means that culture = media. I never thought of this connection before. To me culture always meant customs, vernacular, superstitions, and religion. But never computers or the Internet.

You can read the rest of this fine post at The Jeshire Cat.

ELI’s just published an interview with me and Serena Epstein at the ELI 2008 Annual Meeting, held in San Antonio just a few weeks ago. Interviewer/producer Gerry Bayne did an amazing job of corralling me into coherence, both during the interview and (especially) in post-production. My thanks to him, and also to Serena Epstein (heard later in the interview) for joining me at the microphone. I’m also grateful to Serena for all the engagement, creativity, and inspiration she contributed to the New Media Studies class this summer. Equal thanks also to David Moore, our co-presenter at the preceding day’s presentation and another star from this summer’s class. It’s easy to do great work with students like Serena and David.

It occurs to me that the metaphor of “network” may be holding me (us?) back. I like to think about social networks, network effects, high-speed networks, and so forth. (Not that there’s anything wrong with that.) But the metaphor conveys a set of telegraphic connections, criss-crossing lines with nodes at the connection points, add-a-beads, point-to-point contacts and correspondences.

When I think about resonance, something else happens in my brain.

I think about resonance effects, about social resonance environments, about sympathetic vibrations and overtones and timbres and chords. I think about symbolism, and suggestion, about most resembling unlikenesses and most unlike resemblances (the way Milton described the relation of husband and wife in a successful–and happy–marriage). I think about complexity calling to complexity, about models that simultaneously simplify and amplify the power of the original as the models make the original more present, more resonant, to our minds.

Clearly some of my enthusiasm here comes from my love of music. I don’t think that’s the whole story, though. Something about the idea of cognitive resonance (where is that book? I wish for instant ILL–or for cheaper books–or both!) helps to place the affective dimension of cognition in a resonant place in my own mind. I’m still thinking about combination and connection, sure, but now the links are not simply established or embedded or realized. They’re tuned, and moving, and exciting sympathetic motion in other links and in the crafters and perceivers and tuners of those links. Rather than elaborate telegraphy, I imagine something more like strings on an instrument, a world-instrument, that we create, tune, and play together. Intertwingling, but more.

I feel I am restating the obvious, at least for artists, for whom resonance is (often almost) all.  Or perhaps there’s no handle here. I’ll need to read and think more, and be advised more, to know.