Good evening.

In its way, this is a blog post about blogging–and perhaps about learning and creating, generally.

Dan Aulier has compiled one of those bedtable books that one can read for months, an anthology called Hitchcock’s Notebooks: An Authorized and Illustrated Look Inside the Creative Mind of Alfred Hitchcock. It’s a great big festival of a book, a delight to roam through. It also has plenty of food for thought to carry into the new academic term that begins very soon. Here’s one table of the banquet, an excerpt from writer and actor Hume Cronyn’s memoirs as republished in Aulier’s omnibus. Cronyn writes,

“Early on in our working relationship, I discovered a curious trick of [Hitchcock’s]. We would be discussing some story point with great intensity, trembling on the edge of a solution to the problem at hand, when Hitch would suddenly lean back in his chair and say, ‘Hume, have you heard the story of the traveling salesman and the farmer’s daughter?’ I would look at him blankly and he would proceed to tell it with great relish, frequently commenting on the story’s characters, the nature of the humor involved, and the philosophical demonstration implied. That makes it sound as though the stories might be profound or at least witty. They were neither. They were generally seventh-grade jokes of the sniggery school, and frequently infantile.

“After several days’ work together, punctuated by such stories, I challenged him–politely.

‘Why do you do that?’

‘Do what?’

‘Stop to tell jokes at a critical juncture.’

‘It’s not critical–it’s only a film.’

‘But we were just about to find a solution to the problem. I can’t even remember what it was now.’

‘Good. We were pressing….. You never get it when you press.’

Cronyn concludes:  “And while I may have failed to appreciate Hitch’s jokes, I’ve never forgotten that little piece of philosophy, either as an actor or as a sometime writer.”

Compare Walker Percy’s endorsement of the “indirect approach,” as well as the phenomenon known to astronomers as averted vision. I’m particularly intrigued by a deeply paradoxical notion that emerges in every case, a notion that certainly rings true to my own experience: it takes practice to “not press” successfully. It’s not at all the same as slacking or snacking. Sometimes it seems that the art of “not pressing” is the hardest art of all to master, and also the most necessary to move from one level of expertise to another. And in another paradox, once one has a feel for not pressing, for the indirect approach, for averted vision, one can go to that zone almost immediately when a novel situation or a new level of learning appears.

These ideas form a constellation in my mind with several others. “Beginner’s mind” (shoshin). The third stage of learning that brings back wonder and self-motivated learning, a progression that Paulo Friere and Seymour Papert discuss.  Poincare and creativity.  I am struck by how often similar ideas recur in various guises. Knowing how to know to not-know. The vanishing light around the rim of the unknown unknown can be seen only through such practices, I think.

Brian Mathews’ latest Ubiquitous Librarian blog poses a question that may be obliquely related to some or all of the above (and fittingly so). I don’t know that early adopters who move through change more quickly and with greater joy have mastered the arts of not pressing, along with the arts of averted vision and the indirect approach, but it’s interesting to consider. Certainly those arts can keep us from falling into the trap of substituting elevator pitches for voyages of discovery.

Postscript: I have had to train myself over many years to answer direct questions (typically from administrators and other gatekeepers) about the character and value of a project, the specific plan for an exploration, the criteria for successful “outcomes” (and all the assessment apparatus that entails) (and I’ve learned it may be bad form to confuse “learning objectives” and “learning outcomes”), and so forth. One wants to be responsible, to be granted resources for action, to exercise due diligence, to act like a grown-up. Indeed, and no question. Yet I always hope, and in my own practice strive, to find a moment or two, or more, for the not pressing and the averted vision. An indirect approach, an open space, like a cup for Elijah, who might one day return to demonstrate the poverty and dessication of spirit that often conceals itself behind bullet points and elevator pitches.

One of my holiday books–a birthday present from my sister-in-law and her husband–is Keith Richards’ memoir Life. I understand I’m a little late to the party. I really did need to read Pete Townshend’s memoir first. But now I’m there, thanks to family and surviving another trip around the sun.

As many others have reported and experienced, it’s a terrific book. Those who are skeptical about Keith’s powers of recall after a life of storied dissipation have obviously neither seen him organize the ultimate Chuck Berry concert in Hail Hail Rock ‘n Roll!  nor thought very deeply about the Rolling Stones. The man is whip-smart, generous of spirit, albeit sometimes dangerous of mood–and obviously, attractively so. He’s also tremendously insightful. So in the midst of all the stories of glory days and decades on parade, thrilling as they are, there are also extraordinary moments that reveal a spiritual intensity, and devotion to music, not unlike Pete T.’s own. Keith is quite open and compellingly articulate about his own search for the music of the spheres.

And along the way, I found a passage that reminded me, very strongly, of much of what I value about large parts of the open-education movement, those parts in which the activists are large and generous of heart. The passage celebrates records.

I’ve learned everything I know off of records. Being able to replay something immediately without all that terrible stricture of written music, the prison of those bars, those five lines. Being able to hear recorded music freed up loads of musicians that couldn’t necessarily afford to learn to read or write music, like me. Before 1900, you’ve got Mozart, Beethoven, Bach, Chopin, the cancan. With recording, it was emancipation for the people. As long as you or somebody around you could afford a machine,  suddenly you could hear music made by people, not set-up rigs and symphony orchestras. You could actually listen to what people were saying, almost off the cuff. Some of it can be a load of rubbish, but some of it was really good. It was the emancipation of music. Otherwise you’d have had to go to a concert hall, and how many people could afford that? It surely can’t be any coincidence that jazz and blues started to take over the world the minute recording started, within a few years, just like that. The blues is universal, which is why it’s still around. Just the expression and the feel of it came in because of recording. It was like opening the audio curtains,. And available, and cheap. It’s not just locked into one community here and one community there and the twain shall never meet. And of course that breeds another totally different kind of musician, in a generation. I don’t need this paper. I’m going to play it straight from the ear, straight from here, straight from the heart to the fingers. Nobody has to turn the pages.

Now of course there’s a great deal to criticize, modify, and otherwise nuance in this panegyric. And as a rock and jazz musician (barely, in most cases, but still) who can also read music and loves classical music as well as all the electrified (and otherwise popular) idioms, I do wish Keef were not so eager to trash the results of trained musicianship.

But still…. Listen to the melody of his words, and for “machine” think “networked computer,” and for “what people were saying, almost off the cuff,” think “blogging,” and for “how many people could afford that?” don’t contradict Keith with free concerts in the park so much as remember the nearly unavoidable class distinctions enforced by the experience of formal symphonic performances, and remember too that Keith was working-class and council-house through and through. Feel the liberation he’s feeling, and evoking. He’s honest enough to admit, readily, that not every note of recorded popular music is golden. But the care and thoughtfulness with which he evokes the experience of his own emancipation as a musician, and his deep gratitude for having this creative path, this mode of knowing and expression, opened to him–these, yes, are the deep and moving confessions of a person whose talent would not have found its glorious expression before this stage of technological development.

“And of course that breeds another totally different kind of musician, in a generation. I don’t need this paper.”

We are now at an interesting moment–yes, partly because of MOOCs and partly because of what web-builders and OER advocates and other educational activists have been doing for many years. And that moment could go in any number of good or bad directions. And “some of of it can be a load of rubbish,” and is. Yet I wonder if this interesting moment is like that moment in which recorded music began to breed another totally different kind of musician. I wonder if we have begun to see the beginning of a critical mass of varied open educational opportunities and experiences, and if we will breed another totally different kind of student, in a generation–or perhaps less. A student who doesn’t need this paper. A student for whom learning goes straight from the heart to the fingers, and back again. The formality of the experience isn’t necessarily bad. Keith’s story reveals his own hyperfocused, obsessive, diligent practice of his art. He is a scholar. But the scholarship was mediated differently, and his compositions too, and these would have been lost without the turn in the technology. This turn enabled deeply committed work to emerge. Musical notation can and does too, of course. That itself is a technology, like writing. Keith misses that. But he gets the need and the liberation, and the technology’s role in feeding both. He learned his music. And while music in its origins was learned without pages, it’s a  lead-pipe cinch that Keith wouldn’t have made the connection with a culture half a globe away, the connection that opened himself to himself, and to us. For him, the records were open educational resources, and conveyed an openness of spirit within the medium that could not otherwise be conveyed, or shared.

Not always, and no guarantees. But perhaps often enough, if we think with at least some of the spirit Keith shares with us here, and keep searching for the music of the spheres, wherever and however it may be sounding.

Life, p. 71.

A few days late, alas. I had this one done in time for Christmas, but with one thing and another it’s only now I’m posting it.

As Warren Zevon once sang, “And Johnny is my main man.” Of late, in addition to my other projects, I’ve been working steadily on a couple of scholarly projects involving John Milton. I’ll finish an essay on temptation this week. Well, I won’t finish it, as writing is never really finished. I’ll simply abandon it–but not until I’ve given it one version of my best shot.

To keep the mood going and the context fresh and vital, I thought I’d do a podcast of Milton’s first mature publication, “Ode on the Morning of Christ’s Nativity.” I describe it a bit in the first part of the podcast. Suffice it to say that, like all great art, this poem proceeds from many sources and emerges into many vectors. Some of these are exhilarating. Some are admirable. Some are worth wonder. Some are scholarly curiosities. Some represent the struggles of a believer in many things, not all of them consistent. You’ll notice that Milton lingers, very lovingly and harshly too, on the pagan gods the Christ child has come to banish. I think Milton had many mixed motives and ambivalent emotions as he did so. To believe in anything is to disbelieve in other things, no matter how broad one’s outlook. Milton knew and felt this reality more keenly than any other great artist I know. The struggle was costly, and revelatory, and complex. My own critical position is that Milton understood the struggle and the cost, and created astonishing art to represent these complexities out of both certainty and uncertainty, settled conclusions and wandering appetites. He tells us so, pretty explicitly and quite beautifully, in all his work–if we’ve a mind and heart to read it so.

But now I’m writing my essay, and time is my tedious post should here have ending. Wherever you are, geographically or politically or epistemologically or religiously, I hope you enjoy this example of a 21-year-old poet exulting in his newly fledged artistic powers and taking the measure of some of the best poetry ever written in English. As I read it, I felt again the sensation I had in the fall of 1980 when I read this poem for the first time–the sensation that here was a verbal imagination that could achieve any effect it wished to, an imagination whose wishes were born of the desire for human progress, human justice, and human community. A desire more fierce and visionary than that of any other poet. A desire that could also embrace tenderness, and poignancy, and order serviceable.

Happy birthday, 2013.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (12.4MB)

How could anyone resist a session with this title–and this layout for the schedule display?

So I went to Bret Victor’s session, arriving about fifteen minutes after he’d begun. There was an animated fish on the screen, and a worm on a hook, and sometimes bubbles, and sometimes a little wheel (that I later learned was a timing element). Bret was demoing the most recent iteration of his Dynamic Pictures research. The idea, as I understand it (and my understanding of it is just beginning, so this is all memory, exploration, interpolation, and probably full of mistakes and gross oversimplifications), is that math is not only about language, as in an abstract set of symbols, either mathematical symbols or programming code. Instead, math is also about geometry, visual representation that can move and be acted upon directly through a UI that nevertheless asks the user to think abstractly about what’s happening “concretely” in the visual representation one is manipulating.

Bret’s project is to use the computer to allow for new methods of reasoning–or perhaps not “new” so much as “newly applied.” We now have the tools to allow us to think, to reason, in differently mediated ways. Why not use them to do so?

The session was mesmerizing and so … different … that I had a very strange sensation as I tried to take it in. I felt at the very edge of my zone of promixal development. That is, I could understand what Bret was saying as he was saying it, but that cognitive bubble was very small, so small that I found myself with no extra resources for deep metacognition. At the same time, I also felt as if I had had this experience already at various times in my life: when I fingerpainting in kindergarten, when I got my Radio Shack 50-in-1 electronics kit for Christmas, when I got my first stereo and began to understand what “soundstages” were in audio reproduction.

Picture from an Ebay seller. Mine is in better shape (and in Texas right now).

What all of these experiencs shared was a strange, almost surreal link between the world of objects and the world of thought, as if a sufficiently intense thought could create something material, or as if a sufficiently intriguing, provocative, or alluring material object could somehow emit thoughts as if those thoughts were embedded within it. Longtime readers will recognize that the “meaning” and “doing” modalities here are part of my obsession with poetry, with the myth of Orpheus, with John Donne and T. S. Eliot, with computers and stereos and electronics generally. Bret is an obsessive’s obsessive whose mental landscape must be a mashup of Magritte, Tufte, Mike Oldfield, Cervantes, Alan Turing, and Ada Lovelace. To name only a few.

Doug Engelbart came strongly to mind during Bret’s demo, as his ideas of hypersymbolic communication and the next stage of human evolution seem eerily realized and advanced by Bret’s work.

If I recall correctly, Bret himself cited Seymour Papert’s work with LOGO and the programmable turtles as an influence. The interesting difference here is that Bret takes Papert’s turtles and re-abstracts them into the realm of visual representation, with the twist that dynamic visual representation then becomes the origin point, not the result, of programming. It’s as if one programmed the computer by moving the turtle–but the motion is realized with the precision and yet also the familiarity (tactile, motor, cognitive) of a simple drawing. A virtual turtle that moves the mind that imagines it.

Bret’s website–actually, I’d call it his cognitive exoskeleton–is worrydream.com. It’s actually (online) cognitive exoskeleton 3.0. His previous websites, linked on the new one, also repay close investigation. The biographical sections are very interesting, as the representation of self in language, to my mind (heh), is analogous to what Bret is doing with his dynamic pictures.  The precise modes of “interaction” and dynamism that linguistic self-representation enacts (particularly in poetry) are extraordinarily complex, of course, and more than I can get into here. But I wanted to register the resemblance.

To bring in one more of my favorites, I don’t believe I’ve ever seen a more convincing elaboration or illumination of Alan Kay’s aphorism that “the computer is an instrument whose music is ideas.” (I just learned that Alan Kay knows Bret’s work–of course he must–these circles are unbroken–lovely to see this.)

The climax of the session for me was “part three,” in which Bret performed a short video uniting myth, the creation of life, the rise of cities, space flight, and a panoply of human voices that, unlike the ones Prufrock hears, wake us and we breathe…. You had to be there. You’d have heard the whoop than rang through the room as we responded to what we’d just experienced.

Tweets for Bret Victor’s demo at FOO Camp 2012

I sensed it’d be something special, and I did make an iPhone video that works for me as a souvenir. I don’t know how intelligible it would be for others. Perhaps all you need to see are the gestures, the timing, the slight swaying-to-the-beat. Here’s one frame from the video, toward the end:

See the way that fellow is leaning forward? Take that as a representation of what I think we were all feeling at that moment.

Bret’s Twitter page has a one sentence profile: “The Prerequisite Is Hope.” Bret’s logo is a windmill. As I write of this remarkable session, I find myself wishing I could spend a semester (or more) of advanced study as a cognitive apprentice to this young man. Anyone who gives Papert’s The Children’s Machine seven stars on a five-star scale is someone I would gladly know better. Perhaps our paths will cross again. The trick for me will be to retain the enthusiastic naivete that would keep me hopeful, instead of the all-too-easy sinking feeling that would make my naivete cower in shame. That’s a roundabout way of saying that if I’d known as much about Bret before FOO Camp as I’ve been learning since, I’d have been too self-conscious to rush up to him and say hello the way I did the day before. And that would have been a great shame and a greatly wasted opportunity.

EPILOGUE:

After Bret’s session, I wandered to the big tent for the closing session. I was a bit disappointed. Tim and Sara spoke briefly. Tim said he thought the Camp had gone very well indeed, and that it was a fitting 10th-anniversary iteration of the grand idea. Sara thanked all who’d made it possible. We yelled out our thanks in return. There was applause. And that was it. I’m not sure what kind of closure I expected or wanted. I know everyone was worn out. But I wanted more reflection from the leaders, I guess, more of a sense of their hopes and dreams. Sometimes one wants a sage on a stage–the key word here being sage. I have no problem with the sage on the stage when I feel there is wisdom to be gained, as I did here.

So I walked around for a bit afterward, looking at the now-empty spaces where just a few  moments before there’d been such a buzz of activity and conversation. I like walking through such spaces and hearing the mental echoes of the presences I’d experienced there. I learned those pleasures when I did theatre in high school and college, and found I enjoyed walking around the set after everyone had gone home, or even after the play had closed. Something about moments and people and the places we inhabit, something about the relation of mental space and emotional space and physical space.

As I kept on wandering, I found myself heading upstairs in Building B to look at the Make Lab, one place I hadn’t been during the weekend. There I found a set of folks still busily engaged in various activities, as if the weekend were still going strong.

In this corner of the O’Reilly multiverse, the Camp hadn’t ended after all. I now understood the sign I’d seen on the Conference Schedule wall earlier in the day:

I have a sneaky suspicion Bret Victor made this sign.

Unparadoxically (guess I watched my steps well), it turned out that it wasn’t too late to get a 3D printout of my head. A “bust of Gardo.” I got in line, got scanned, and got my printout in the queue. “Come back in about an hour and a half,” I was told. So I did, and you can see the results here.

Many thanks to Sabrina Merlo for that ultracool photo. Special thanks to Eric Chu for his patient, welcoming work on the scanning and printing, and on answering my many questions about the process, all long after folks were vacating the campus. Really, everyone at Make Lab was amazing. I felt a depth of connection there that took my breath away and helped me feel less like an outsider and more like a fellow geek. It was a superb ending to the FOO Camp experience, one in which I had many conflicting emotions, chief among them my great desire to make the most of the time I was there by contributing to it in some meaningful way.

I found that “making the most” was difficult for me this go ’round. In other experiences like this, most notably the Governor’s School in Virginia and the Frye Leadership Conference, I’ve found the “come on in” portal sooner, or more securely. I didn’t really find it here until I found the Make Lab on the final afternoon. Having found it there, I could see the places the portal might have been flickering earlier in the weekend–or even places I might have walked through that “come on in” portal without knowing it. Hard to say.

But as you can tell from this series of blog posts, my first blogging in (I regret to say) over three months, the experience made a huge impression on me. Looking back a week later, I can see that these posts came out of a strong sense that if I hadn’t found a way, I had to make one. Just like the tagline says. So these posts are my portal, and for what they’re worth, my contribution.

One last thought. Before I got my invitation to FOO Camp, I may have heard of the gathering, but I had no idea, really, what it was, or why it was, or who had been. During the Camp, several tweets appeared in the stream from folks who weren’t there. Some were angry, some were rather snarky and resentful. For some reason it always surprises me to see such things, which is very strange, as such responses are utterly predictable and have a long history in all things human. While it wasn’t fun to hear virtual raspberries, especially when I felt very much the outlier and was trying hard to make sense of it all myself, I am gradually becoming more aware of FOO Camp’s place in the larger hacker/maker/thinker culture in which it exists. All very complicated, to be sure, but in some ways I also feel as if I’ve been here before: the always-difficult balance between community and exclusion, between the drive for excellence and the gradual narrowing of one’s criteria for excellence.

I was bemused (not amused–there’s a difference–see definition one) to see this tweet shortly after the Camp ended:

Required reading for all #foocamp-ers -> The Inner Ring by C. S. Lewis lewissociety.org/innerring.php

— Jason Huggins (@hugs) June 11, 2012

A salutary caution indeed. Yet the care the FOO Camp leaders take to refresh the group each summer by making fully half of the crowd new attendees suggests the leaders are mindful of these dangers as well. And there are outliers–more of us than I might have imagined–who have little or nothing to do with Silicon Valley or hacking or web development. Still: point taken. And I did reread the essay. At one point Lewis writes, “Until you conquer the fear of being an outsider, an outsider you will remain.” Interesting that his caution can apply equally to people who believe themselves “in” and to people who believe themselves “out.” I guess it comes down to motive, to “desire” (Lewis’s word), to the why of one’s participation or ambition. But here I feel a Milton essay coming on (all these topics are covered in his work, to stunning effect).

So that’s it for now. To all at FOO Camp, but especially to Tim O’Reilly and Sara Winge for leading the Camp, and to the person or persons (you know who you are) who suggested I be invited, my thanks. I’ll be thinking about this experience, and working through it, for a very long time to come.

Thanks also to Virginia Tech and the good folks in the Division of Learning Technologies for supporting my travel and participation.

A dream we dreamed one afternoon long ago.

Inch your way through dead dreams to another land.

This day didn’t turn out as I had planned, but though that was hugely disappointing (more on this below), what did happen was, it turned out, very important. I wish there’d been some way to have it all, but then I always wish that. Someone has to wish that. Otherwise, we don’t get as much as we might. Or so the story goes (i.e., the one I’m sticking to).

Session One: FIX COLLEGE, led by Allen Downey of Olin College. I’d seen Allen at several of the sessions I’d attended. I was curious to see what his session would be like. Like the Academic Research debate the day before (Allen also attended that one), this session was very lively and quickly got to some core issues, which of course was a very good thing. Allen listed “what needs fixing” on one board as the audience contributed a long and familiar list of candidates: cost, access, curriculum, narrow vision, lack of intellectual integration, etc. I contributed “absence of creative participation in Internet culture,” which for once, I’m happy to say, actually made sense to a group of discussants. Most higher ed people have little or no idea what I’m talking about when I say “creative participation in Internet culture,” I’m sorry to say, because most of them do not creatively participate in Internet culture themselves. Several people in this group actually help define current Internet culture–Nerdfighter/SciShow maestro Hank Green was sitting right in front of me–so they grokked what I was saying immediately. In fact, someone piped up right away to say, “yes, though many universities seem to believe they are actually ‘using technology’ in their teaching and learning strategies–the term “Internet culture” demonstrates what they aren’t doing.” As I look back on FOO Camp, that moment was one of the true highlights for me, one time when I felt that a true, deep grokking had happened that typically eludes me in other contexts. I will also say, here and now, again, that without creative participation in Internet culture, colleges and universities are fooling themselves with regard to their strategies for progress in the age of online learning. The nightmare scenario, of course, is that colleges and universities will not only fool themselves but turn us all into (bigger) fools as well, as they’ve shown themselves to be completely capable of doing with the industrial models of education and “learning management” they’ve perpetuated in what should have been a Golden Age of digital learning comparable to the Golden Age of the early days of networked, interactive computing itself. The next stage, of course, will be to find ways to use analytics and flipped classrooms and climbing walls and big-time athletics and whatever else comes over the transom to make learning manageable (and profitable) (and effective at creating tractable, non-disruptive “citizens” out of free democratic agents). Then we’ll have what we have now, but even more commodified, and probably cheaper too, except for the finishing boutiques available to those who can still pay the stiff tuition and/or endure the crippling debt.

But I digress. (I delivered a burst-screed not unlike the above at the session and elicited the response “tell us what you really think,” to which I responded “well, the play was terrible, too.” Hey now, hey now.)

One of the participants (I think it was Hank Green) pointed out that graduates are likely to be expected to know how to blog, but of course universities aren’t doing much of this. (I’m proud to be an exception and to be helping more VT colleagues move in that direction; I’m also proud to have had a hand in the BIg Exception led by the exceptional folks at the University of Mary Washington.) Instead, it’s still term papers all the way down. Right. This is a tough needle to thread. I don’t want students to be blogging because that’s something General Electric wants them to be able to do. On the other hand, blogging has such a wonderful potential for disruption (if it’s really blogging and not just PR by other means) that I do want a generation of graduates able to practice their potential disruption–and its twin, innovation–on company time. Oh yes.

Lots of lively discussion in this session, with a closing emphasis on “what can we do?” Allen shared his proposal for mini- or even micro-colleges that would have few students, a completely set shared curriculum, no classrooms (only co-working space), no classes (all studio-style learning, with direct instruction mingled with coaching, mentoring, apprenticeship, etc.), no dormitories (students find places to live in the community), and a huge emphasis on having the students work within the community, and share their learning with the community. Kind of an “embedded studenthood.” There’d be next to no student services. The students would provide their own extracurriculars. An entire layer of administrators and support personnel could be eliminated. The resulting cost savings would mean about 10K per year per student in tuition.

This is a wonderfully audacious vision and there’s a lot to like about it. Fact is, I’d love to work at a college like that. The biggest downside, as one participant noted, is that students would have to have decided not only on a college but on a particular curriculum before they’d even enrolled. Allen agreed this was a problem, but pointed out that the cost of switching would be low. Some folks responded (I among them) that the larger goals of intellectual development and the acquisition of a cultural toolkit that could be used to change the culture might also be lost in this plan. Allen conceded these were difficult and important questions. But I remain intrigued by the idea of a network of minicolleges, learners embedded in their communities, curriculum and learning vastly reimagined. Intrigued, and inspired, and grateful to Allen for convening the session. We ended by nominating “weird schools” for ambitious students and wise parents to consider. I gave a loud plug for Hampshire College. Another person gave a shout-out to Warren Wilson, which her parents had attended. Everyone pointed out the value of internships and (especially) study abroad. And at one point, someone proposed a survey of who among us had graduated from a “top 50” undergraduate college. Fewer than half of us said “yes.” Fascinating.

Session Two: O’Reilly.edu. This session never really started, as the facilitator didn’t make it in to start it. So four of us sat around and talked for awhile, which is itself a good outcome, even though it wasn’t the one I had anticipated. The best part of the talking for me was a very intense and passionate conversation with a professional skateboarder named Rodney Mullen. This was the most direct, electric connection I felt with anyone during the camp. It deserves a blog post all its own. Suffice it to say that Rodney listened with astonishing energy; when he focused on what you were saying, the focus was of such high quality, so generous, that the saying took on a life of its own. I found myself near tears as I tried to articulate my own practice and ambitions as a teacher and a learner. We went from New Media to Milton and back again within two minutes of blazingly intense exchange. I didn’t feel his commitment to our conversation waver at all, even for a nanosecond. And he was equally generous in the way he talked about his own work, his own life’s journey, and his own struggles with imposter syndrome. I was floored, gobsmacked, humbled, inspired. It was a great gift and the one moment during the entire experience where I felt a complete high-bandwidth connection with another person, where I felt my need to be understood and my drive to understand were in perfect synchrony, mutually reinforcing, and making their way to another land. My thanks to Rodney for those thirty minutes. They made all the difference.

Session Three: I had signed up to lead a discussion on “Helping Faculty UNCLENCH About Computers.” I had struggled with the title, at first calling it “Bring Me  A Higher Love (for participatory culture),” but then thought that would be way too abstract, or perhaps even coals to Newcastle in this setting. What I really wanted to talk about was my ongoing (and distressingly desultory) work with the New Media Faculty-Staff Development Seminar.

As it turned out, it didn’t matter what I called it, as no one showed up.

I sat there for fifteen minutes or so. I spent a few minutes wondering what the heck I thought I was doing and who was I fooling anyway? I watched Ted Nelson’s very strange little video entitled “Silicon Valley Preview 1.3,” which I’d been dying to see since Anil Dash brought it up in the very first session. Then I decided to pack up and head for Bret Victor’s session, “Stop Drawing Dead Fish.” As you can imagine, I was pretty crestfallen (ok, maybe even crushed) that my session drew zero interest. On the other hand, I had wanted to see Bret’s session anyway, and was disappointed when we turned out to have selected the same slot on Sunday.

So as it further turned out, it was a good thing to have seen Bret’s session. A very good thing indeed. I’ll try to explain why in part two of my write-up on FOO Camp, Day Three.