I’m in the midst of A. S. Byatt’s Possession in my Intro. to Literary Studies class, working up to assignment one, which asks students to work with symbolism in Byatt’s romance. The idea of symbolism is quite complex (the etymology alone is intricate and fascinating). Students are accustomed to talking about imagery, themes, character, even the writer’s biographical and cultural context. Symbolism, however, is something new for most of these freshmen and sophomores.

Over the years, I’ve tried various ways of explaining symbolism to students. The most satisfactory ways I’ve found to depend on close reading that enacts the drama of symbolic suggestion as a kind of unfolding awareness of connections, of patterns, of possibilities of meaning. That kind of going-through works well. Yet I’ve always felt the lack of some more communicable conceptual language, one that would convey the complexity of symbolism and its effects without reducing symbolism to something like The Da Vinci Code or merely the kind of thing students are used to in high school English classes.

Courtesy of a brilliant linguistics colleague, I’ve become aware of the idea of cognitive resonance and its connections to meaning-making. I’m trying to follow this idea up, piecemeal, in my spare time between other tasks. I’m becoming intrigued. The idea involves networks of assocations that resonate between people because of shared models, or even shared modelling. I know about constructivism and ideas of scaffolding learning, but the metaphor of model-making makes deeper sense to me, as it involves a certain kind of abstraction that nevertheless can both resonate with the original concept or thing and create a kind of cognitive resonance with others in the same meaning-making environment.

What this means for Possession is that I want students to be able to make interesting models that represent (abstract, demonstrate, enact) networks of suggestion and resonance within the romance, particularly as those networks emerge from ways in which physical realities come to suggest immaterial or abstract realities. And I want them to build models that resonate with those networks of suggestion and resonance. I particularly want them to attend to (and respond to, and model in response to) the ways in which Byatt signals her own modelling, her own concerns with networks of suggestion and resonance. A tricky business, but aided immeasurably by the rich and often obvious ways in which Byatt trains the attentive reader to experience and represent those cognitive resonances. In many respects, the romance is the story of ultra-alert readers who come to a richer experience of cognitive resonance (symbolic responsiveness) in their own reading.

I’ve located a book called The Art of Software Modelling that discusses cognitive resonance in some very interesting ways. One sentence in particular caught my eye:

So for any system of sufficient size,  the rule of thumb is that for anything too complex to entirely encompass within one’s mind, it is necessary to sacrifice some accuracy in favor of understanding.

There’s a world of complexity and even paradox within that sentence. I suppose one thing I’m trying to teach my students is how to find that sweet spot where the model demonstrates understanding, while knowing that they cannot and should not strive for a simple 1:1 replication. Building the model prepares for resonance, and results from it; yet resonance always involves suggestion and resemblance, and is not merely a reproduction.

I’ve been meaning to mention this Washington Post article for several days now. In it, three disturbing things emerge right away. One is that terrorists are using metaverses like Second Life for easy, often untraceable communication and money exchange. A second is that there are predictable and troubling calls for increased surveillance within these metaverses. A third is that Linden Labs, far from protecting users’ privacy, is assuring intelligence officials that adequate surveillance is already built into the system.

Yet only at the end does the truly surprising observation emerge:

Jeff Jonas, chief scientist of IBM Entity Analytic Solutions, who has been examining developments in virtual worlds, which have attracted some investment from the company, said there’s no way to predict how this technology will develop and what kind of capabilities it will provide — good or bad. But he believes that virtual worlds are about to become far more popular.

“As the virtual worlds create more and more immersive experiences and as global accessibility to computers increases, I can envision a scenario in which hundreds of millions of people become engaged almost overnight,” Jonas said.

Looks like someone’s expecting a tipping point sometime soon.

There’s a lot I want to blog about, especially the fascinating distributed work on alterity, collective intelligence, and the individual being done by Alex Reid, Lanny Arvan, and Rafael Alvarado. Rafael and Lanny are working on Web 2.0 and teaching, with an eye on the way collectivism can turn either to thin gruel or to Kool-Aid. Alex writes on the issues raised in and around a recent book called Liberal Fascism. (More from Alex on other questions of collective intelligence and authorship here and here.) Each of these writers engages with crucial concerns in very thoughtful ways. I want to take up a very small part of the discussion myself, thinking about the market economies surrounding popularized notions of performative identity and contingent values.

But I have no time to do that tonight. Instead, I offer a quotation from e. e. cummings, by way of Steve Martin’s magnificent autobiography, Born Standing Up. Steve embraced this quotation for his development as an innovative comedian. Something here for teachers too, I’d say:

“Like the burlesque comedian, I am abnormally fond of that precision which creates movement.”

An abstract for an upcoming talk–sort of an extension of the “digital imagination” material I’ve been working on lately:

Emily Dickinson once wrote, “If I read a book [and] it makes my whole body so cold no fire ever can warm me I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry.” Can that experience be true of computing as well? Can the experience of computing reveal metaphors, compelling forms, rhymes, even meter in our encounters with knowledge, virtual worlds, and each other? Do some people resist a deep exploration of computers for the same reason they shy away from poetry? In A Poet’s Guide to Poetry, Mary Kinzie writes, “I believe the craft of writing is actually to entice readers into the same domain as the creative imagination.” Is there a similar craft of computing, a digital imagination no less creative than the verbal, musical, and artistic varieties we have known for centuries?

I believe the answer to all those questions is “yes.”

I will share my thoughts with you, listen to your ideas and engage with your questions, take us through some opportunities for creativity, and seek some provisional conclusions with you. By the end of our time together, I hope you will feel the exploration has yielded at least a few valuable insights into learning, teaching, creativity, poetry, computing, and the schools we have built—and may yet build.

At EDUCAUSE 2007, outgoing President Brian Hawkins delivered heartfelt and inspiring farewell address in a special session on lessons of leadership. It was pure Brian, and it was marvelous. At one point in the talk, Brian gave us the stern warning to “avoid incrementalism.” I tweeted that moment, and Chris Lott, a blogger of tremendous depth and insight and a wicked sense of humor, tweeted back, “Hear, hear! Incrementalism is a wasting disease, the bovine spongiform encephalopathy of educators.” Or words to that effect. (See what creativity the 140-word limit inspires?)

I thought of Brian and Chris today when my Introduction to New Media Studies class wrapped up our three days with Engelbart and his Augmentation Research Center. We were discussing Engelbart’s disappointment with a personal computing environment that for the most part mimics paper and desks. In their introduction to today’s reading, the editors of The New Media Reader pointedly compared the ARC vision and the way things have actually turned out–so far.

A couple of students noted that the widespread adoption of the personal computer actually depended on a more incremental approach than Engelbart imagined, and persuasively argued that the kind of leap Engelbart advocated would have made for a very small circle of initiates, and blocked the great wave of adopters who have made the Web as rich and varied as it is.

That’s an excellent point, indeed. And I’m a committed traditionalist when it comes to preserving what’s worth preserving. I don’t want to immediately abandon something wonderful just because a shiny object has materialized in front of us.

And yet I’ve been thinking a lot lately about alternate means of composition, of how one might express abstractions and concepts and extended arguments and analyses in sound, image, video, and so forth. Language is still the foundation, I’d say, but I wonder what would happen if more writers ventured into the territory of an Alfred Hitchcock or a Stanley Kubrick in terms of conceptual montage expressed outside a language-only enclave.

Suddenly I had to show the students Croquet, and tell them something about how the ideas of “documents” and “communication” were reimagined in that environment. I went to the website and read the introduction with them:

Croquet is a powerful new open source software development environment and software infrastructure for creating and deploying deeply collaborative multi-user online applications and metaverses on and across multiple operating systems and devices. Derived from Squeak, it features a peer-based network architecture that supports communication, collaboration, resource sharing, and synchronous computation between multiple users on multiple devices.

I first saw Croquet three years ago in New Orleans. Since then I’ve been in intermittent contact with primary project honchos Julien Lombardi and Mark McCahill–more frequently with Mark, who has family near UMW and who actually came to our school in late spring, 2005 to do a demo for a small group of interested folks. Today, reading Engelbart, thinking about his vision, trying to give the advantages of incrementalism their due, I revisited Croquet and lost my head again to a vision worth having and a leap worth risking.

I know from my own little tiny bits of sad experience that leaps can break things. But once again, Engelbart and Kay and Lombardi and McCahill remind me that what’s needed is patience with the mending, not a reluctance to jump.

Image from Martha Burtis’s “Risky U” site.

I’ll share this bit of the story–more to come.

My Rock/Soul/Progressive class just finished James Miller’s Flowers in the Dustbin. At our last meeting, I decided we’d use what Miller says about Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band as a test case for a)  evaluating the idealism and folly of the Sixties, b)  evaluating Miller’s take on the Sgt. Pepper’s phenomenon (and by extension, the Sixties as well), and c) thinking about whether the current generation my class represents has anything in its experience of popular music to correspond with the Sgt. Pepper’s phenomenon.

My students argued intensely that Miller was disillusioned, bitter, dismissive. Better to dream than not to dream. Better to have a beautiful illusion than a paltry reality.

I pushed back. It was hard to do since I agree with them, but I felt I had to. They were answering too quickly.

They pushed back, harder.

We went back and forth. It hurt me to push the pain and cynicism of decades of post-Sixties withdrawal on them, but they needed to know what they’d have to invest to maintain their positions. I was as kind as I could be even as I bore down. They were kind too as they responded with passion and, at times, real soulfulness.

Finally I said to them, “If you think Miller’s all wrong, if you think he’s a bitter man, if you think he’s giving up on that dream too easily, write him. He’s a professor at the New School. Find his email address and write him. Be courteous, don’t be confrontational or mean, but tell him what you think and invite his response.”

They were silent.

Then one student said, “You know, there was an assignment in my high school that asked us all to write to someone who’d inspired us. One guy wrote to John Lennon–well, John Lennon was dead of course, so he wrote to Yoko Ono about how John Lennon had inspired him. And you know what? She wrote him back!”

I spread my arms wide: “I rest my case.”

“Well,” she went on, “he was a really smart guy, our valedictorian, a really great writer. He wrote three beautiful pages in that letter.”

I said, “If you’re worried your own writing isn’t up to that level, why don’t you all write a letter together?”

A young woman on the other side of the table looked up and said, “I’d like that. It sounds like fun.”

I said, “Great. Now, who’ll organize it for you?”

“You will!” they responded.

“No I won’t,” I said. “Do you know why?”

“You don’t want to be associated with student writing?”

“You don’t think we’ll do it right?”

“You don’t want to make Miller angry?”

“No, no, and no. Doesn’t anyone know why I won’t organize your project?”

Silence.

“Because this project needs to be yours, not mine. Organize it yourselves. When you’re done, if it’s ready to go, I’ll be happy to put my name on the document. But this needs to be your project. Get together, talk it over, set it up. I can help if you need it.”

Class was over. Folks headed for the door. One student said, “I’m going to take you up on that.”

Three hours later, I saw that she had.  She cc’d me on her email to James Miller. Her email was heartbreakingly beautiful.

Later that evening, I got an email from her telling me that she and Miller had been emailing back and forth.

Today, in another class she’s taking with me. I asked her if I could see the exchange when she was ready. She said she’d share it with me. A student from last year’s freshman seminar, also in this other class, asked what had happened. I explained it to her, and she was round-eyed with wonder.

Amazing.

Rangey stuff today. I hope it cohered. A partial list of what we discussed:

Several books–What the Dormouse Said, The Dream Machine, Dealers of Lightning, Tools for Thought.

The Engelbart Demo–GUI’s, alternate keyboarding devices (the five-key “chord”), display technologies, the various diegetic worlds inhabited by Engelbart during the demo (the text he was working on, the display showing him, the text, and the team supporting him), the mouse as a pointing device, alternate pointing devices (in particular, the light pen), the reception and influence of the demo.

The “Ease of Use” problem (aka, “did you ride your tricycle to work today,” as Engelbart likes to ask). Do we miss our best augmentation opportunities by concentrating on ease of use?

Categories and ontologies: is Engelbart more associative (a la V. Bush), or more hierarchical (a la J. C. R. Licklider)?

Fractals, microcosms/macrocosms, and the tripartite information architecture Engelbart imagines: Specification, Organization, and Content (each stage of which has its own similar tripartite structure–i.e., Specification has within it elements of Specification, Organization, and Content, etc.)

Alternate text-entry devices, which led us to a discussion of haptics (one student’s blogged about this already–found an interesting paper on the topic, too–very cool).

Collective IQ vs. Hive Mind (I desperately wanted to bring up the discussion at ELI 2008, especially Lanny’s very thoughtful blog post, but we ran out of time–maybe Thursday).

All of these topics grew out of their continued reading of Engelbart’s “Augmenting Human Intellect” and their watching the Demo (included on The New Media Reader‘s supplemental CD-ROM).

By the end, my mind was completely abuzz, all lobes singing.

Then came the afternoon class, Rock/Soul/Progressive, and a most surprising turn of events. To speak truth, it was overwhelming, deeply moving. It will take more time than I have tonight to tell this story, and I need to make sure the student involved is okay with my sharing the story–but I hope to be able to share it soon.

I’ve just begun listening to this audiobook, and so far it’s terrific. The book’s charming, poignant, and observant (not to say obsequious, purple, and clairvoyant), and Steve Martin’s delivery as a reader adds an extra layer of wistfulness and wonder that has me enthralled as I listen. This is really something quite special.

Martin’s career took off just at just about the midpoint of my undergraduate career. I knew him only from his records and a couple of SNL sketches (I pretty much stopped watching TV when I got to college). When he came to Wake Forest University in the fall of my junior year, I was excited, but not a big enough fan to understand just what I would be seeing. I soon found out.

It was an extraordinary show in every respect. Martin seemed able to transform anything he saw or heard in the moment into part of his comedy. At one point he spotted someone taping the show on a handheld cassette recorder. He chided him–“ah-aaaah-ah”–walked down to the man, got the recorder, went back up on stage, rewound the tape, and began playing back the recording. When the playback got to a big laugh on the tape, he looked up and said to us, “Hey, listen, that’s you!” The way he said it, as if he’d never seen the miracle of tape recording before, was funny beyond belief.

Something rich and strange in this man’s comic imagination. Hearing the autobiography doesn’t explain the gift, but it does tell a story of how gifts look and feel as they emerge. Steve Martin’s interior life is as full of yearning as Brian Wilson’s–and nearly as melodic. Highly recommended.

At last I’ve got the aggregation (or “dashboard”) site up: view it at http://rocksoulprogs08.umwblogs.org. Illness and travel slowed me down, but not most of the students, who are already busily exploring their musical lives, what they’re learning from each other, and what they’re learning from James Miller’s Flowers in the Dustbin, our first book. We finish Miller on Tuesday, moving to Nik Cohn’s Awopbopaloobop on Thursday. With any luck, I’ll have a couple of podcasts to publish by then as well.

I’ve disabled comments on the aggregation blog. If you feel moved to comment on a particular entry, please click on the author’s name (at the bottom of the post) and comment directly on his or her blog site.

On our way to lunch yesterday, Jim Groom came by my office and gave me the last bit of official support on UMW Blogs: he showed me how to get the Spam Karma 2 self-promo banner out of the way of Pete Townshend’s smiling face. A wholly appropriate finale–though I know where Jim lives and will ask for the occasional “professional courtesy” as I get myself into snarls I can’t get out of. 🙂