Some of you may be imagining a yellow LP cover bearing the image of a man in a straw hat–good–but I will propose another answer here. I’m writing very quickly because I need to get to the office, so I invoke, even more strenuously than usual, my blogger’s rights: if I mess this up, I get to try again later. Work in progress, quarter-baked, huh? etc.

Shannon’s latest post over at Loaded Learning is remarkable even for her, and that’s saying something. It’s got me in a deep mull. Go read it, and after you catch your breath, come back. I’ll wait.

Jeff’s comment is precise: “I am wholly unfit, but I am willing. Consider yourselves warned” could well be the motto for the entire caravan. I’d like one of those bumper stickers too, please. Perfect. Perfect.

But still I mull on. I think, “is it true that Shannon is nothing ‘particularly special’?” I have an answer; I am bold to say I have the answer to that question. It is not true that Shannon is nothing particularly special. I know she’s not fishing for compliments and I know that disagreeing with her statement could make her think that I think that she is–but I just have to ignore those crisscross thoughts and get to the point and say, “if Shannon’s nothing particularly special, then no one is particularly special, and I’m being inspired by echoes in my own brain,” which I don’t believe for a second.

That said, I understand, deeply I believe, where Shannon’s statement comes from. Even more deeply, I understand how confusing it can be to feel privileged, to feel chosen, to feel called. Why me? Why Shannon? Why here, and now, are we entrusted with energy and strength and vision and a community of astonishing, continually inspiring caravanistas? And then, aren’t we arrogant to think so? And then comes the spiral downward … but that’s no good either, right? And when things go wrong, did we lose our calling? Were we wrong all along? Hearing things?

Which brings me to the point, if I have one: if “unfit” means “out of shape, not strong enough, not ready, not devoted enough, not focused enough, not confident enough,” then I am unfit, for sure. But if unfit means unworthy–and I know Shannon may not have meant it that way–I’m not sure. Turning my gaze outward, I feel very sure indeed of the worth of my fellow caravanistas. Part of that feeling comes from my inventory of their particular gifts–inventorying others’ gifts is one of the best parts of being a teacher, actually–but there’s that other part too, that understands and loves their capacity for what Keats calls the “wild surmise,” the catch in the breath that acknowledges the possibility of something transformative, the capacity to hear a calling and follow it. Isn’t that readiness a kind of fitness, a kind of “worth,” even if one doesn’t remember deciding to be ready? (The ending of Simak’s “Immigrant” always gets to me in this regard.)

Energized by Shannon’s post, thrashing about like a fish in a Gallilean net, caught and loving it–maybe air is breathable after all?–I turn to the OED to investigate the etymology of this word “worth.” The meaning very quickly centers on notions of value, particularly in exchange for things. I turn my empty soul pockets inside out and say, “that is not what I meant, at all.” There’s another meaning, “manure.” Oops. The OED says that’s probably a mistake.

I want to wrestle a little longer. I see that I may be forcing connections in the best folk-etymology fashion. (That’s for my philologist colleague Terry the K.) But I need the poetry. And then, there it is, in the first entry for “worth” as a verb (spidey-sense tingling like mad, now): the word “worth” seems to be related to the word “ward,” as in direction: “forward,” “backward,” “homeward,” “heavenward”:

Common Teut.: OE. weoran, wuran (wear, wurdon, eworden) = OFris. wertha, wirtha, wirda (WFris. wirde), OS. weran (MLG. and LG. werden; MDu. and Du. worden), OHG. werdan, werthan (MHG. and G. werden), ON. and Icel. vera (Norw. dial. verda, verta, MSw. vara, vardha, Sw. varda, Da. vorde), Goth. wairan. The stem is prob. the same as that of L. vertre, OSlav. vrtti, vratiti (Russ. vertjet’), Lith. versti (stem vert-), Skr. vit (vártat, vartti) to turn, the sense in Germanic having developed into that of ‘to turn into’, ‘to become’. Cf. -WARD suffix.

Go look for yourself. It’s worth it, and so are you.

Reading Brian’s post on his splendid EDUCAUSE Review mashup article (go read it right this red hot second–you will thank me, I promise), I realize I have yet to blog on my essay in the Sept/Oct. issue, or post a link to the podcast, or give my thanks. Although this post cannot begin to express the gratitude I feel, I will give it a shot anyway.

Thanks first and foremost to my editor, Teddy Diggs. It sounds presumptuous to call her “my” editor–after all, she edited Brian’s piece too, and hundreds of others–but she is so open and interested, so focused on bringing out the best I have to offer, that it feels as if she’s devoting her entire attention to me and only me for the duration of the project. If there’s writing in me that can come out, Teddy will see to it that it does. And her editing is just as subtle and effective as Brian says. I take notes on her technique so that I can improve my own work with my students in this regard. She’s a gem, and I’m deeply grateful she asked me to contribute to this issue.

Those of you who’ve followed my ups and downs over the past year will probably understand why I found the essay very difficult to write at times. It’s a memoir, so the research demands were comparatively light, and the conceptual framework was what I decided it would be. The difficulties came as I tried to think about an aspect of my intellectual and professional life that has occasioned some very intense times for me of late, both good and not-so-good. On a very mundane note, my laptop’s hard drive crashed right after I sent the final draft in to Teddy. It’s hard not to read that event symbolically. (Okay, I confess: I do read it symbolically.) Maybe I bore down on the keyboard a little more heavily than usual. As I wrote the piece, I had to consider whether this long strange trip had been worth it, after all. I had to take stock of a large commitment of most of my adult life, a commitment I hadn’t been fully aware of before the spring of 2003, and one that grew explosively in the three years following that spring. An explosive commitment: yes, that just about describes it.

So I want to thank my wonderful family–Ian, Jenny, and especially and always my longsuffering wife Alice–for enduring the explosions, and continuing to live through the intensity. I don’t typically shy away from an outpouring of profuse sentiment, but in this case I’m afraid I might outmaudlin even me, so they will have to be content with the depth I hope they know is behind these words.

There’s a long list of other people to thank, “with more warmth than a list can suggest,” as my Milton teacher once put it: Brian, Bryan, Dennis, Diana, Brian (not a misprint–there are two), Larry, all my Frye buddies (especially Andrew), Rachel, Cyprien, Jon, Barbara, Karen, Alan, Bill, Phil, Dave, Terry, Claudia, Bart, Freff, Kevin, Mark, Terry, John, Wes, Jill, Doug, Robin, Wendy, Rob G., Michael, Marcia, M.C., Steve, Jeff, Gene, Chuck, Vidya, Vicki. Many others; I fear I’ve left someone out. I cannot forget my beloved students–many of them now friends as well–who are particularly adept at keeping the marvels coming in all my adventures. They are beloved, oh yes they are. I hope they can bear up under that burden.

But finally, given that my subject was my involvement with computers, I pause a moment to thank Chip, Martha, Jerry, Andy, Jim, and Patrick. They continue to inspire me in ways I cannot begin to measure. They are patient and playful with me as I make my slow way back to the land of marvels. Special thanks to Martha, who read early drafts of the essay and generously encouraged me to keep at it.

There’s no orchestra here to start playing and stop my speech, so I’ll have to step in and stop me myself. My apologies to Alfred Bester–I’m spacey enough that this just might work, a little, as a once and future epigraph to my computer romance:

Gardner is my name,

Terra is my nation;

Deep space my dwelling place–

The stars my destination.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (17.8MB)

“The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom.” William Blake, Proverbs of Hell, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

The road of cool can lead there too.

It doesn’t hurt to be a little skeptical of the oh-wow, gee-whiz, how-cool gadgetry with which we’re surrounded, or by the same responses to information technologies and the latest-greatest therein.

But it may hurt to be a lot skeptical.

Sometimes we should take a look, maybe even try something risky, just because we think it’s cool. “Cool” taps into a moment of wonder, surprise, pleasure, delight, and intrigue that can lead to all sorts of encounters, with ourselves and with others. As Donald Norman very persuasively insists in Emotional Design (a very cool book full of pictures of very cool things), the pleasure we take in design need not be fleeting or superficial. Instead, that pleasure can be the foundation for deep, purposeful cognitive activity, an agent of lasting engagement.

Cool can be something to run toward, not away from. Seeking out cool need not be a sign of immaturity. Rather the opposite.

I was talking this blog idea over with my wife, a children’s librarian, who gave me the crowning story and urged me to post it. (Very generous of her, seeing as how she has her own venue–but she’s got lots of stories, so I don’t feel too bad about taking this one with her permission.) She told me of a storytime in which a young child, just learning to toddle, had obviously found his new walking powers to be so cool he just couldn’t stop ambulating around the story circle. He did his toddler walk. He did a Frankenstein’s monster walk. He demonstrated to everyone in that story circle just how cool it was — to be able to walk! As my wife pointed out, that moment of cool was an essential moment of maturation, one propelling that child into a lifetime of wonderful destinations. She spoke as well of young babies finding their hands for the first time, sensing their power to grip, to throw, to flex, to drop, again and again. How cool it is to have a hand!

Things of beauty, grace, power, and agency surround us. Some of them are built in. Some of them we find. Some find us. Some we share with each other, as we watch our faces light up in shared delight. From these moments we step forward, together. On the road.

Postscript: Don’t miss the William Blake Archive, one of the cooler sites I’ve discovered lately. In fact, I discovered it when I went to write this blog. I’d like the site’s words of welcome to be inscribed above my office and written all over my classroom walls:

“We are pleased to offer its resources to you for pleasure, study, or intensive research.”

Cool.

I will use Twitter to teach me what I can use Twitter for.

I understand that logic doesn’t scale, and that one cannot explore everything all the time in self-directed recursive learning (although now that I think about it, that’s not a bad way to imagine Paradise). But having learned another lesson from the kind of contact Twitter enables, I thought that in my heady state I’d be bold and provocative. Blame it on the altitude.

So what did I learn? Well, I was in an SAC session on gaming in education with the redoubtable Rachel Smith of the New Media Consortium, and the discussion in the room turned to the differences between games and simulations. (That question proved much more interesting and tricky than I’d imagined–nice, and very shrewd of our facilitator.) At one point, as Huizinga’s Homo Ludens popped into my head, I spoke up and said, “We play games. But we don’t play simulations. What do we do with simulations? What’s the verb there?” No one in the room, including me, had a ready answer. It’s always a cool moment when no one has a ready answer.

I had Twitter up in another window, so I put the question to my Twitter friends. I’d had such good luck with the streaming video question that I had great hopes for this inquiry. I got my answer, all right, and fast–fast enough to share with the group and continue that moment of shared inquiry. But that’s not the most interesting part of the story.

My answer came from a fellow blogger named Claudia Ceraso who teaches and learns in Buenos Aires, Argentina. She responded that the Oxford Dictionary of Collocations said “carry out” or “run” were verbs typically associated with “simulation.” (She also expressed some amusement that my question required her to consult a paper source first.) I’d never heard of the Oxford Dictionary of Collocations. I immediately looked it up on Amazon and learned that it’s a reference work devoted to helping non-native speakers of English speak more idiomatically. This extra bit of information sparked my imagination in several ways. First, I thought “what an interesting reference work.” Second, I thought “what a great way to start a conversation about language with native speakers.” Third, I thought “I’ve never heard the word ‘collocation’ before.” So I did a Google search on “define: collocation” and got this back:<!–

I have several (dozen) blog posts brewing (distilling, fermenting, cooking), but this isn’t one of them. It’s merely some links and embedding experiments coming out of last night’s NMS final projects festival. Ustream.tv was new to me–I learned about it at about 2 p.m. yesterday nearly simultaneously from Catherine, Vidya, and Alan via a timely tweet. A similar timely tweet elicited this warm and wonderful blog post from Chris Lott.

Looks like I can’t embed more than one thing at a time–not that I’ve tried that before. So I can’t embed the plain chat viewer or “off the air” window for the “show.” Andy has an example of the latter here.

Next, the URL for the “show” (in Ustream lingo):

http://ustream.tv/channel/nms-final-projects-night

Next, the URL for the archived recording:

http://ustream.tv/Gardner/videos/KZox0b,UlUhPpLkHAH0JGwUyBKjIDFx4

Next, the embedded viewer for the archived recording:

I don’t think the chat was recorded, alas. I did notice during the recording that the chat window was scrollable for some time, then scrollable no longer. I suppose we overflowed the allotted space, but I don’t really know.

As the author (or initiator) of last night’s recording, I’m also able to download the 0.5GB Flash video file but for some reason I can’t get it open in Flash MX 2004. Experiments continue.

Can’t shake the weird feeling we just made the jump into hyperspace. Many steps to get there, and a jump at the end. Each step was fun.

Then the jump crowds the sky with stars.

Regarding Mike Caulfield’s latest thoughtful post:

On one level, I couldn’t agree more. I write this post after long silence not to refute Mike’s ideas, wonderfully expressed, deeply encouraging.

But I’m driven to respond because the matter is not simply one of awakening from a “hasa” world into the brave new “isa” world. If only it were that simple. “Hasa” and “isa” are not alternatives. They are partners in a dance. They are both parts of the inescapable, imperfect, provisional, necessary work of conceptualization itself. Of identity.

There’s a “hasa” element in our experience that we should not reject, lest we swing from one mistake to another.

What I’m finding this summer, for example, is that the course of study, as an experience, does indeed have its own integrity and identity, and that students in some cases want to keep their front page (let’s call it) unique to each class. (Yes, I understand that RSS makes this possible and even trivially easy, but there’s more to it than that.) Example: I have two students who decided to start a new blog for a new class, with an entirely separate URL, because they wanted to craft their work in a different “room” (see below). They didn’t want simply to tag their work in one common space and feed those tagged materials into separate places. They wanted to start in those different places, perhaps to recombine the work later in different ways, perhaps not.

I hope they do find the connections and decide to explore recombinations, of course. Not only do I hope it, I encourage it. Part of the problem is that many students will have to be taught to understand the linking and cross-pollination opportunities the web and a CMS like WP present to them, because those opportunities are hidden by systems like Blackboard, and because for many reasons those opportunities are what schools say they provide when what’s truly rewarded is High Compartmentalization. Sure. But we who provide these opportunities also need to understand that students may want to work through, experience, and communicate in different environments depending on the course of study (or the nature of the experience), a course of study that is itself an experience locatable in time and (often) in space. And that location can matter in beneficial ways, like measures in music or a frame around a picture. Context yields meaning. The trick is to teach people that context is not always a given. It too can be shaped by our decisions. There’s a metacontext, after all, or before it….

(Maybe it’s the difference between a narrative and an interactive game. We need both experiences to help us shape our understanding. Folks who speak of the boring “linear” narrative vs. the exciting “interactivity” of a game are missing the glories of each. But I digress.)

A container is not necessarily a bad thing. It all depends on how we create, understand, and use those containers. Identity is a container, for example, and often a problematic one. But without identity there’s no alterity, and without alterity there’s no love, no freedom. But of course the identity-container needs to be both whole and open, both bounded and permeable.

Or maybe it’s like having different rooms in a house. Sure, it’s one house, but having different rooms is a way of acknowledging the different facets of one’s experience, even though all the experiences are at home, and home is indeed uniquely personal and intimate.

The typical LMS, of course, is not like different rooms in a house. It’s like different peeling-paint waiting rooms in different grey buildings in Anywheretown. Instead of open doors leading easily from one room to another, there are walls and gardens locked away from view, etc. The horror: Blackboard and the many administrative conveniences it serves and mirrors give us all the malignancy of difference with none of its real benefits. In many respects, there’s no real “difference” in these different locked grey buildings at all….

But the impulse of which the LMS is an institutional perversion is not, I’m beginning to think, wholly wrong. The challenge is to re-imagine school so that the boundaries can be artful, changeable, semi-permeable, and the result of creative decisions, not administrative convenience.

Most of all, learning management itself should be part of what a student studies and crafts, part of what the teacher models, not a one-size-fits-all monstrosity that keeps all the work and all the teaching materials hidden and hermetically sealed. Every course of study, in one way or another, should ask of its teachers and students, “What do you make of this? What can we make of this?” And, yes, the ethical question: “what should you make of this, and what should we make of this, and while we’re at it, what should we make of this you-me-we thing, anyway?”

Sadly, as I realize every day (I seem to forget it every night), many students, faculty, staff, and administrators will view this freedom and self-reliance as at best a nuisance, at worst an attack on carefully ordered and compartmentalized lives. To a considerable extent, the educational system we have is the system most people apparently want. It’s a transactional system, not a community of shared endeavor.

I am not sure what to do about this situation. I do feel strongly, however, that we must immediately abandon talk about “learner-centered” or “student-centered” education vs. “teacher-centered” education. That dichotomy seems very appealing on the surface, especially because it seems very democratic, and also because of the home truth that only the student can decide to learn. I embrace that home truth, wholeheartedly. No teacher can decide that a student will learn, and no system can simulate that decision for the student in any truly effective way. No system should try. Nevertheless, “student-centered” starts to sound like “power to the people” to me at times, and I’m increasingly skeptical that it means what we want it to mean. Who are these people and what is the power we imagine? (Related question: Why do we think most students are unhappy with a transactional model? I’m not sure that most of them are.) I also think, with all due respect, that “student-centered” can all too easily become a communitarian fiction that hides the real power, and the real value, of teaching, and teachers, and mastery.

Worse yet: it’s one short step from “student-centered” to “customer-driven.” David Wiley’s post, linked to by Martha above, is relevant here as well.

For me, at this point, all real school must be “learning centered,” that is, devoted to identifying and shaping and nurturing a community that has devoted itself to learning. Real school is centered not on people, per se, but on people’s commitments. It’s a crucial distinction. Our rights, responsibilities, and identities as members of this community are conveyed not automatically, or statically, or unthinkingly, merely because we’re on the payroll or registered for a class. Those rights, responsibilities, and identities are conveyed because of shared commitments. Commitments born of trust, commitments reflecting each person’s willingness to risk, to contribute. Commitments born of each person’s decision, like the books in Donne’s heavenly library in his “Mediation 17,” to lie open to each other, to read, and be read by, the other.

That commitment is our homework: the work we do at home, and the work that builds a home.

I don’t have the whole answer, but at least for this day, I do feel I understand one part of it: any educational system, whatever its design or ideology, that hides, downplays, avoids, or otherwise redirects our attention from the absolute necessity of shared, wholehearted commitment is, in my view, deceptive and destructive. Specifically, anti-human.

Our identities are real, and meaningful, but their meanings are activated only in relationship.

I began this post in darkness, several hours ago. Now light frames my basement window. What do I see? I’m not sure. Do you see what I see? I’m not sure of that either.

S’io credesse che mia riposta fosse
A persona che mai tornasse al mondo,
Questa fiamma staria senza piu scosse.
Ma perciocche giammai di questo fondo
Non torno vivo alcun, s’ i’odo il vero,
Senza tema d’infamia ti rispondo.

http://tinyurl.com/yv2yad