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.