It’s been bittersweet and a tremendous education reading Tom Woodward’s series of “Long Goodbye” posts following his departure from VCU’s ALT Lab for a new position at Middlebury College. I’m part of the story, in the early going anyway, so I can hardly pretend (and won’t try to pretend) I don’t have a personal connection to the ongoing narrative. But it’s also fascinating to read how Tom thinks about the work he’s done and the work he will now do in a new setting. It’s something like a memoir, something like a journal, something like a set of comments in an long piece of computer code. Maybe something like an operating manual, too, though Tom’s a fine teacher and understands that in the end no set of instructions offers simple answers to complex questions.

The most recent post outlines Tom’s philosophy of design for WordPress-based learning environments. It’s an extraordinary post, maybe the best look I’ve ever had at Tom’s conceptual frameworks, which is saying something given that I worked very closely with Tom for nearly three years.

Tom was the one who taught me the phrase “low threshold, high ceiling” as a way to think about platforms and affordances that offered powerful results right away but could be extended, deepened, and refined into much more complex and sophisticated environments if one had the skills and interest to do so. I do think one can learn to want to want things, so skills and interest can be developed over time, but it’s a long journey and people learn at different rates. It’s just that I wish we could develop a consensus about the need for that journey and that learning, as we’ve obviously done for readig and writing.

It won’t surprise you to know that I think of language as the quintessential “low threshold, high ceiling” medium in our lives. It also won’t surprise you that I strongly believe that facility (or literacy or fluency, pick a word) with language uniquely empowers one not only to communicate effectively but also to imagine one’s own being, and that of others as well, more profoundly.

The alternative would be to have a phrase book in your pocket with 100 easy-to-use phrases that describe common needs and desires. For the rest, you’d have to point and grunt, gesticulate somehow, etc.

And the thing about striking out on a hard but rewarding journey of learning facility with language is that you’ll also be learning more about all the things language does (some of them will surprise you) and all the things it might do (which is where your voice comes in). That’s the meta-layer I prize very highly in all learning. You learn something and at the same time learn something about what it is to learn that thing, about the deeper implications of that thing, about why it matters and how it might be more deeply and beautifully experienced. You learn facility with language and the world turns into a more high-definition experience. I think the high-definition world awaits our facility with language and does not result from it, but we don’t have to engage in a debate about the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis to agree that there’s a unique richness of experience that one gains access to when one learns to read and write. And part of that richness is what happens when you’re able to share that experience with someone else, and they with you.

So when Tom puts this great image in his post, you might imagine where it takes my thoughts:

For me, having to work through the choices and complexity of something farther out to the right of that continuum means that one will learn not only how to make the Web do more intricate and sophisticated things, but also what “intricate” and “sophisticated” and “Web” mean in terms of this pervasive global light-speed telecommunications environment, a new medium. You learn how to speak Web without a phrase book. And because higher education never really made that leap of learning, and in many cases fought it, we have neither taught our students well nor set a good example ourselves regarding the most powerful communication medium our species has ever built, aside from writing and perhaps even language itself. And the real tragedy is that we might have, and we nearly did, somewhere around the dawn of the widespread Web in the mid-1990s.

I’m on record as saying the sweet spot is somewhere around that “domain of one’s own” area. I was challenged early on by folks who thought that asking people in general (let alone faculty) to run a server of their own was simply asking too much. Maybe that’s true. (I once gave a talk at a school that was running a Domain of One’s Own initiative, and as near as I could tell, only one of the faculty leaders actually had a domain of their own. Depressing but true.) But the core idea, then and now, was that until or unless people had to establish their own address on the Web, they would never feel at home there, and thus never feel empowered or responsible in the way that homeowners must perforce learn to be. To use Tom’s analogy, “you are in a rented apartment and you are not allowed to paint the walls. You can be evicted at any point for any reason and have no recourse.” But of course people want to be on the Web anyway, because we’re social and it’s fun and you can also do work on the Web. So we give ourselves to the landlords, where as it turns out, again quoting Tom, “You pay with your content and by giving them data.”

It is true that building a home on the World Wide Web with your own URL and your own server space can feel like terraforming Mars at first (I’ve been watching The Expanse lately), so maybe the best of all possible worlds, for now, is to have RamPages demonstrate, again and again, what’s possible, and thus extend the range of what’s desirable and imaginable. In that sense, RamPages is much more than a proof of concept. It passed that stage long ago. RamPages is the Zone of Proximal Development. And it is that in large part because Tom Woodward built it that way.