FOO Camp 2012

Yesterday the unconference sessions got started. I want to record some memories and thoughts here. I hope to expand on them later, but I know myself well enough to know that if I don’t get something down right away, it will become harder and harder to get the headspace I need and the events deserve. All a longwinded way of saying “half a loaf ahead … better than none, I hope.”

Also, please note that about eight to ten concurrent sessions are typically going for each time slot. My experience, alas, will thus be a very very thin slice of the whole (half a loaf, and very thin slices as well; someone call the metaphor police, please).

SESSION ONE “Dave Winer Is Always Right.” Led by Anil Dash, one of the many folks whose name and face I recognized, while at the same time recognizing that I truly knew next to nothing about his work. I’ve had many such humbling moments at FOO Camp. I need a sabbatical or three. Nothing to do but keep working.

As I said in one of my live tweets from the session, I felt like I had just enough knowledge of Dave, his work, and the larger technical/cultural issues to be able to follow along. I was fascinated to learn more about Dave’s role in the tech community, including the way his stubborn insistence on certain core principles had earned him both respect and rejection. Personality aside (though this tribe is certainly personality-rich–I’m often reminded of the movie Real Genius around here, and one of the participants in this session looked exactly like Kevin Smith’s “Warlock” character in Live Free, Die Hard), Dave’s core principles were, by consensus, largely correct and consistently prescient, if one accepts the idea of a free and open Internet as a good thing (I certainly do, and the folks in the room did too). RSS beat Atom because RSS was good enough. While others debated standards, Dave developed RSS enclosures, teamed up with ex-MTV VJ Adam Curry, and made podcasting a vital force in the cybersphere. Dave’s idea of the “river of information” actually predicted the world in which we now live, where the experience of reading a constant feed informs the core experience of Facebook (even though all acknowledged that Facebook was not a model of a free and open Internet). The idea of a personal cyberinfrastructure (my term) that came up as a “local server for poets” went by very quickly and I didn’t get the reference, though it seems to be like the ideas Dave was expressing in his “Let’s Build A New Internet In Academia,” where he argues, correctly in my view, that “Every student should at least have a chance to manage their own infrastructure.” (I would add to this that the creation and management of that infrastructure should not only be viewed as creating and managing a tool, but envisioning and displaying a kind of cognitive architecture, a network that is also an artifact.) Two other impressions I took away from this session: this conversation has been going on a long time, and the participants were all acutely aware of the history and had in fact contributed extensively to it (another way of saying I was visiting another tribe, one I’ve tried to participate in with my distant, crab-wise, oblique strategies); and that there was a sense of nostalgia in the room for the more robust days of the late 90s through the middle of the first decade of the 21st century, a time when folks were blogging furiously about all the new modes of interaction coming online just as Web 2.0 kicked in fully. The folks in the room, most of whom looked quite young to me, talked about new developers who had “the arrogance of youth” and were busy reinventing mainstays like blogging in their own image. They spoke admiringly of this new generation, but also noted they “could teach them something, could help mentor them.” Not for the first time I was reminded how quickly Internet years pass, and how much has happened in just the nine years since I started on my own path in edtech. Part of the session’s praise of Dave Winer had to do with his stubborn persistence as a blogger–he just keeps talking, and never gives up. (I have taken this to heart.) Much more to say about this session–I felt like an elderly anthropologist, but also like a kid listening to the grownups talk about the old days. A strange mixture to be sure.

Session Two: “The Future of Reading,” led by Linda Holliday. This session was the most disturbing of the day for me, and I need to unpack it at much greater length. Here’s the short version. Many people in the group thought the purpose of reading serious nonfiction was to get the “ideas” from the text, and that books would be better if one could skip all the “narrative” parts (remember, we’re still talking about nonfiction here) and just get those “ideas.” The use case was Kevin Kelly’s new book What Technology Wants. Apparently Kevin writes his books by putting Post-It notes everywhere with his sources, ideas, etc. Then he connects those thoughts and sources with a narrative thread running through a long monograph. But wouldn’t it be better, the session asked, if we could just skip the “narrative thread” part and just get the original Post-It notes of “ideas.” I keep putting that word in quotation marks because, as I argued in that session, the notion of context-and-narrative-free “ideas” really didn’t match with my idea of ideas, which includes the richness of context and all the associative trails, as Vannevar Bush would say, that formed that web of context. There was more talk about how attention spans were shrinking and we needed ways for books to accommodate that fact. I of course think that we should be militating against shrinking attention spans (if they are in fact shrinking).

I’m all for exploring new forms of writing and publishing. The demo of Citia I saw was genuinely interesting: it reminded me of HyperCard and had very intriguing functionality with respect to highlighting, annotating, and storing favorite parts. Yet when the talk turned to “giving people what they want,” and what they want appeared to be a mere set of bullet points or sound bites instead of the rich experience of cognitive engagement shared by author and reader, I found myself increasingly disturbed. Skimming, sound bites, bullet points, dessicated and contextless “ideas”? At times it sounded as if I were hearing the reinvention of No Child Left Behind as a strategy for marketing books. One person (I’m not trying to call anyone out by name here) noted that she just couldn’t read the elaborate Victorian prose of William James’s Varieties of Religious Experience, and wished there were a more modern rendering available of “just the main and original ideas.” “Like a Cliff’s Notes,” another person chimed in, without a trace of irony. I confess I was appalled. We’re talking about losing the ability to appreciate and understand a wide variety of expressive strategies in language–and treating the 19th century as if it were Chaucer’s Middle English. Another person talked about how hard it was to read Shakespeare. Admittedly, there is indeed a language barrier there, but there are also many helps to get one to a more skilled reading of the original text. This person appeared to want the helps alone, and was ready to give up on understanding the originals. I could hear Joe Friday in my mind, repeating “Just the facts” over and over, as if facts derive or communicate meaning in the absence of context. Again, I must emphasize that the platform I saw was intriguing, and I fully agree that we need multiple modes of reading and communication. The bound volume made of dead trees is not the gold standard by any means. But the argument I was hearing wasn’t so much about formats or modes of expression so much as it was about what seemed to me to be an Evelyn Wood approach to skimming rich expressivity in search of brief, declarative sentences that would fit on the electronic equivalent of an index card, all in the name of saving us time and catering to our busy modern lifestyles. One participant did ask “what about the synthesis an author provides?” but that question didn’t really get answered, at least in my hearing. Jeepers. I wasn’t the only one pushing back here, but it did seem to me that I must experience and value reading in a way that’s very different from the other folks in this session. I found that disturbing.

Lunch: I had an interesting conversation with folks about education and analogous strategies for organizational motivation and productivity. When folks at the table asked what I did, I replied “I’m an English professor.” The fellow to my right said, “are you sure you’re at the right conference?” To which the only answer is, oh yes. One very interesting fellow across from me had the Christmas Story “Fragile” leg tattooed on his arm. I found this very charming. One of the great things about FOO Camp for me is seeing how far people are willing to go to assert their status as mavericks.

Session Three: After SOPA/PIPA, what? Led by Catherine Bracy. Here the basic question emerged of whether the recent (partially) successful defense of the open free Internet should be extended to other human rights questions such as prison reform. Should we try to encourage free Internet advocates to take up other kind of advocacy as well? There was no consensus. A strong point was made that advocating freedom of speech was qualitatively different from using free speech to advocate various other policy issues. (This struck me as an interesting platform-vs.-application argument.) I found myself in sympathy with the hope that the Internet community could rally to other causes as well, while at the same time believing, like Milton in Areopagitica, that disagreements and the “hewing of timbers” were not only inevitable but desirable in an open exchange of ideas, and the openness of that exchange is a different matter from the direction or conclusions of that exchange. Still, I recognize that these are very complex questions.

At one point, I raised the question of education: I argued we should be teaching the basic architecture of the Internet, and the values that informed its development, as part of civics lessons in middle school. I challenged the group to come up with three Top Reads they’d recommend to anyone who wants to know why a free and open Internet was created and why it matters. What emerged was John Barlow’s “Declaration on the Independence of Cyberspace” and Benkler’s The Wealth of Networks (I asked, “the whole thing?”). Perhaps there was one more–the discussion was getting a bit chaotic by that time, veering from lobbying to expert testimony to the question of whether democracy could really scale to 300 millions citizens. I didn’t get much traction with my challenge, in the end, though there was general agreement that a democracy depends on an educated citizenry, not just a bullied and manipulated and influenced citizenry. There were also interesting arguments about whether Congress was venal or simply clueless–many argued the latter. The limits of the apolitical and the political were also discussed, indirectly.

Session Four: Invisible Economies and the clothesline paradox. Led by Tim O’Reilly. Taking his point of departure from an essay in Stewart Brand’s “Coevolution Quarterly,” Tim asked us to help him capture examples of new monetized Internet economies as well as unrecognized economies born of the Internet whose values are not yet being tracked or measured, values that could play a role in new kinds of economies. The ideas are much more complex than I could possibly summarize here. Luckily, Tim’s been working on this idea in other venues, and Ethan Zuckerman has a very helpful and articulate account of Tim’s recent visit to the MIT Media Lab, where he discussed many of the same ideas he did yesterday at FOO Camp. Tim’s obviously stepping back at FOO Camp so this doesn’t become the O’Reilly show, and I certainly respect him for that. Still, it was great to be in that session with him and to be in contact with a mind and spirit I’ve got such tremendous respect and admiration for.

Session Five: The Quantified Mind–self-hacking to get greater cognitive gains. Led by Jeremy Howard. Jeremy told the story of learning Chinese as a cognitive performance experiment, and revealed that the CIA actually maintains a list of languages rated by their level of difficulty for Westerners. (Who knew?) In his learning, Jeremy did an experiment, and used a feedback program called Anki, a program like another, older program called “Super Memo,” to let him know what times of day, and what circumstances, led to greatest effectiveness in memorization. Also discussed: Amazon’s spaced-repetition Kindle highlights, Memory Theatre, Treadmill Desks, and (my contribution) the growing field of neuroeducation as evidenced in “Mind, Brain, and Education,” which seemed of interest to Ze Frank, which of course gave me a good feeling, being a fan of his work and all. (I really am working hard to keep up the self-confidence and not be too dazzled by all the Folks I Am Meeting In Person. Bear with me.)

Session Six: How to Build Community. Led by Hank Green (of Nerdfighters and SciShow) and Ze Frank. Issues discussed: best practices in moderating forums, encouraging followers to become mindful contributors, community-as-action and not just community-as-aggregation, the relation between online communities and communities in physical space. At one point, Kathy Sierra told the story of Java City and their policy of “no dumb answers.” The idea was to encourage community by lowering the threshold to close-to-zero for folks who wanted to pitch in and contribute answers to the knowledge community (and to keep the Java Jocks from beating up on the newbies so severely, though the newbies had to earn their way up, too.) I thought this was a fantastic idea. Note that she didn’t say “no wrong answers.” Of course there are wrong answers. But the word “dumb” means “we’ll never get anything good out of you, and how dare you speak at all.” Very easy for a newbie to get that message (I don’t think I’m just projecting here). When the idea of a “dumb answer” is taken off the table, we get to that sweet spot where we can talk about learning, about failing early and often, instead of about whether one deserves a seat at the table.

Session Seven: Debate about Academic Research. This was a corker. On one side the flip chart said “Academic Research Rocks.” The defenders: Arvind Narayanan and Hadley Wickham. The other flip chart read “Academic Research Sucks,” and the defenders were Anthony Goldbloom and Pete Warden. Issues discussed and questions entertained: Value of long-term long-range no-immediate-payoff work vs work driven by immediate competitive gains. On the other hand, value of more rapid churn vs entrenched self-certifying self-validating work that never answers to any real-world goals. The problem of academic writing (dry and colorless, with meaningless bans on using “I” that crush imagination–Pete Warden brought this up and I went into a sympathetic rant–sorry, but I hate writing pedants and the little red pens they rode in on, and hate is strong word). The problem of fear and loathing in academia, top to bottom. Altmetrics. How to recognize value of blogs, etc. One of the participants, as it turns out, was Josh Greenberg of the Sloan Foundation, who’s funding work of Altmetrics folks at UNC-CH SILS. Excellent. Need to communicate findings of scientists, etc. with public. No real mention of humanities scholars aside from Tim Carmody, who got his Ph.D. in comparative literature. (The problem of research in the humanities is a huge problem, as is increasingly apparent to me. Clark Kerr helped me understand the scientific-grant-driven multiversity, and I’m beginning to understand how humanities scholars have effectively removed their own reason-for-being by doing nothing but epistemology games. Generally speaking.)

There was also considerable discussion of whether researchers should be teachers, or whether there was any relationship between teaching and research. Andrew Downey of Olin College observed that undergraduate education was in a parlous state. Point well taken. Was tenure to blame? This is less clear to me. Again, the humanities simply did not figure in the argument in any meaningful way. Yet the humanities, among other things, help us understand the history, process, and possibilities of making meaning. I do not agree with my colleagues at Baylor University (most of them in the Great Texts program) who believe that scientists are soulless mechanics who desperately need a grounding in philosophy, ethics, and religion (presumably this would keep them humble? from doing science if it seemed irreligious? I never could figure this out). At the same time, the humanities do seem to me to have an important contribution to make to the ongoing process of human ingenuity in the sciences. I think poetry is exceptionally important in this regard, largely for the same reasons Bret Victor explores visual representation at his astounding website, though Bret’s work is so far beyond anything I can execute that I can only stand back and point, usually slack-jawed. Even with a slack jaw, though, I sense some resonances. I hope so.

At the end of the session on academics, I delivered myself rather strongly of my rather strong opinion that not only were most structures, processes, and practices in education ineffectual, but also that many of them were in fact unethical. The leaders of the session adjourned on that note–to my chagrin.

One thing that must be said: I think Hadley Wickham is exactly right to say that the onus is on the tenure candidate (or academician generally) to see to it that his or her work is maverick enough to be personally satisfying, no matter what the consequences–while at the same time trying one’s best to make it understandable to those who would like to support it. I could wish for much more collegial support, especially when the project doesn’t make sense; as I re-read The Dream Machine, I’m reminded of how many mavericks in the early computer age were simply blocked, stymied, or otherwise thwarted by dimbulbs and hostile forces in the academic bureaucracy above them. I cordially despise the ritual hazing and obligatory snarky adversarial interaction that characterizes much of academia (I’ll be taking up that topic in a subsequent blog post, now in draft). But Hadley’s right. Academics shouldn’t claim to be victims when the opportunity to do great self-defining work is theirs, at least for awhile. Many people don’t get that much of an opportunity. I’m reminded of my dear colleague Shelli Fowler’s beautifully relentless emphasis on agency. We do get to choose. Yes we do.

I then had a very stimulating dinner conversation with Stacey Aldrich, state librarian of California. Ridley Scott, prison libraries, futurists, archives. She approached me by saying “you’re the teacher, right?” Yes, I am. A lovely talk ensued. I hope our paths will cross again. The world needs (many) more futurist librarians, and librarian futurists. That Stacey was at FOOCamp gives you an idea of how eclectic and farsighted the roster can be–though of course that also means at least one runt may get in (namely me).

Ignite FOO Camp followed dinner. You can see a 360 panorama of some of the attendees by Rachel Sklar here. There were inspiring, funny, provocative talks on taxes, financial meltdowns, Boxie the robot, Einstein’s Brain (Steven Levy), and turning aid to Africa into Made In Africa. The whole thing was streamed live on Google+. It was great to be there, but I would have had a better seat in front of a PC/Mac screen–that’s me on the floor in Rachel’s photo, looking thoughtful and trying to see around a column.

I was psyched to attend the session on MOOCs planned for the 9 p.m. slot after the Ignite talks, but the room was dark when I got there. Seems that Saturday night was calling. I did get to meet Andrew Ng and speak with him briefly. I am deeply curious about Coursera and will be following its progress closely. (It was an honor to meet Andrew–I wish I’d had a chance to hear him talk.)

Two other bits of serendipity. I got to meet Bret Victor, whose worrydream.com site is one of the most astonishing things I’ve seen on the web, ever. Jon Udell turned me on to this wonder, and I felt very fortunate indeed to meet Bret and shake his hand there on the breezeway of the O’Reilly campus. It was hard not to gush so I didn’t even try. He was shy but very cordial and asked about my work as well. I hope there’s a longer conversation in our future. I’d love to bring him to Virginia Tech for a talk. Stay tuned.

The other bit was that Dave Winer himself tweeted something kind about FOO Camp, and I responded immediately with a “wish you were here!” He seemed to appreciate that. It was great to make contact, however briefly, with someone whose work has informed everything I’ve tried to do over the last eight years in the edtech domain. I felt I had been able to say “thanks,” and being able to do that always means a lot to me.

Welcome to FOO Camp.

They’re eating breakfast at FOO Camp right now. I’ll join them in just a few minutes, and tuck in for some geekery, some intellectual soul food, and some inspiration during the full day and evening of sessions ahead. Sessions and serendipity, too. The unconference format (this is my first unconference, by the way) is nothing if not a “designed serendipity” environment. The phrase is from Michael Nielsen’s new book on networked science Reinventing Discovery, where he cites the source of the idea, Jon Udell, who recently was at Virginia Tech as our first Distinguished Innovator In Residence. Jon was here at FOO Camp last year. I wish he were here this year. I always feel a bit lonely and lost at these new gatherings, so I try to throw myself into the proceedings as best I can. It’s easier with the extremely warm and welcoming staff at O’Reilly, who’ve done a great job of getting this party going (and to judge from prior years, keeping it going). And I’ve already started to meet some of my illustrious and driven fellow campers. Last night at dinner I met Eric Gundersen of Mapbox and had a fine conversation about our separate work and mutual obsessions, including our shared membership in the Jon Udell fandom. So I suppose Jon is here, after all, though it’d be more fun without quite so many degrees of separation.

I’m also following and contributing to the Twitter stream at #foocamp (Tim O’Reilly’s choice, though Sarah, who thought up the idea of FOO Camp originally, said the tag was #foo12–somebody bring in an aggregator here), and learning by the way about others who’ve been here in the past, as well as the thin stream of resentment that such gatherings occasion. One snarky tweet said attendees were “pretentious tools” who were straight out of the movie Metropolitan. I’ve always thought it would be interesting to be in a Whit Stillman movie–the people are acting, after all. And hearing the charge of “complicity” (a tool is complicit, yes? a house slave?) brings back not-so-fond memories of the bully colleague in a former English department who’d trot out that line every time anyone wanted to do something generous or trusting involving the administration. You know, “the man” who’s “doing us wrong.” Sometimes he is, of course. But I digress….

It’s a fascinating experience here already. I hope for more connections, and look forward to what the day will bring. I’ve signed up to lead a session tomorrow in the last time slot: “Helping Faculty UNCLENCH–about computers.”

I will continue to wrestle with my own worries and insanely cosmic dreams.

I’ll keep you posted on what transpires.

A cautionary salutary song for a Monday morning, for all who, like me, can use it:

Some folks see the world as a stone
Concrete dashed in dull monotone
Your heart is the big box of paints
And others, the canvas we’re dealt
Your heart is the big box of paints
How coloured the flowers all smelled
As they huddled there, in petalled prayer
They told me this, as I knelt there
Awaken you dreamers
Adrift in your beds
Balloons and streamers
Decorate the inside of your heads
Please let some out
Do it today
But don’t let the loveless ones sell you
A world wrapped in grey
Some folks pull this life like a weight
Drab and dragging dreams made of slate
Your heart is the big box of paints
And others, the canvas we’re dealt
Your heart is the big box of paints
Just think how the old masters felt, they call…
Awaken you dreamers
Asleep at your desks
Parrots and lemurs
Populate your unconscious grotesques
Please let some out
Do it today
Don’t let the loveless ones sell you
A world wrapped in grey
And in the very least you can
Stand up naked and
Grin

“Wrapped In Grey,” by Andy Partridge, from the XTC album Nonsuch

Lots of talk, when it comes to computers and education, about those who “get it” and those who don’t. Until 2004, I figured I not only “got it” but understood well what it was I was getting. In some important ways, I was right, but in many more crucial ways, I was wrong. I didn’t understand what I had been given, or why. I didn’t understand why the people who built networked interactive computing had done so. About the time I began writing this blog, I began that journey of understanding, a journey that continues.

The other day, i was preparing for the class I’m teaching this term, a new variant of my Intro to New Media Studies course that I’ve renamed and focused on what I feel was its true subject all along (and it only took me 4 1/2 years to find the focus): “From Memex To YouTube: Cognition, Learning, and the Internet.” The eerie thing is that once I found that focus, more discoveries began falling from the skies into my eager arms. Preparing for the class on J. C. R. Licklider’s “Man-Computer Symbiosis,” I re-read some material from Mitchell Waldrup’s epic The Dream Machine: J. C. R. Licklider and the Revolution that Made Computing Personal. I’ve read this book about three times all the way through, and I dip into it habitually to relive those defining moments of the emergent digital age–including the defining moments of rank unbridled idiocy that almost strangled the revolution in its cradle, such as the British Postal Service’s refusal to let the team that developed packet-switched communications develop their innovation, in any way, for any purpose. Too disruptive, you see; an entrenched bureaucracy and its reliable revenue streams were at stake. Precious years and opportunities for transatlantic collaboration were lost as a result. I have to think that the bureaucratic self-preservation also meant some spirits were bruised or even broken. Perhaps I’m just projecting.

Anyway, as I read The Dream Machine again, I fell upon a lovely Licklider quote that I’d seen before. This time, though, because the pupil was ready (at last–I’m running hard to catch up), the teacher appeared. Did he ever:

No one knows what it would do to a creative brain to think creatively continuously. Perhaps the brain, like the heart, must devote most of its time to rest between beats. But I doubt that this is true. I hope it is not, because [interactive computers] can give us our first look at unfettered thought.

The letters glowed as if lighted from within. “Where do you find time for all these Internet things, Dr. Campbell? Don’t you think we’re in danger of being overwhelmed? Don’t you think Google is making us stupid? Aren’t you a little bit, well, zealous about all of this? Don’t you think all the junk on the Internet is just time-wasting drek?” And just about half a century ago, Licklider dared to give the radical answer. “No one knows what it would do to a creative brain to think creatively continuously.”

But of course if we want to find the answer, we have to take care to help fashion and nurture and value creative brains. We have to think of unfettered thought as a worthy ambition. We have to acknowledge what Blake called our “mind-forg’d manacles” and yearn for them to drop away.

This time the words were on fire in that quotation from The Dream Machine, and I had to find the source of the flame. So I checked the reference, and found that the quotation came from a volume called Computers and the World of the Future, the proceedings of a 1961 conference at MIT held in their School of Industrial Management. Such a provocative title! And such an ironic occasion: as the rest of Licklider’s remarks made clear, this great man championed the digital multiuser computer as the device that could take education out of the industrial management paradigm and into something new, something as rich and bold and full of emergent potential as the human brain itself:

The impact of the digital computer upon university education, it seems to me, will stem mainly from the changes the computer will produce in intellectual activities generally. The pedagogical responsibility of the university is not to lecture or assign problems or grade them. It is to create a situation within which most bright students will automatically learn. The multi-user digital computer opens new horizons for anyone eager to create such situations. (my emphasis)

Licklider was greatly interested in artificial intelligence, and I part company with him in his over-valuation of the idea of teaching machines. Yet the core of his ambition is, I think, exactly right. I say “is,” even though Lick uttered those words above over fifty years ago, because I have many colleagues who share the ambition, the eagerness, to create those “situations in which bright students automatically learn.” Perhaps “automatically” is a bit too strong. Students need nudging, encouragement, a few jokes and some tough love to make it through some of the more arduous roads to understanding. Yet I take the spirit of Licklider’s words to be that when we aim to perfect our lectures, assignments, and grading, we may (and typically do) neglect our own eagerness, our own continuously creative brains, and the prime pedagogical directive of education: to create situations that stimulate curiosity and self-directed, intrinsically-motivated learning.

And let’s not get distracted by the word “bright,” either. Lick may have meant “highly intelligent,” but even if so, I’ll expand that to mean “any student whose eyes are capable of lighting up.” I’ve seen those bright eyes, and so have you, no matter what the Gf scores report. I’ve also seen the lights go out when school forgets its pedagogical responsibility within the compliant “industrial management” strategies of the so-called “learning management system.” We don’t need any more “learning management systems.” We need “understanding augmentation networks.”

Lick gets the last word:

The conclusion at which I arrive is that the present problem is not to assess the role of today’s digital computer in today’s university. It is to get to work on tomorrow’s computer and tomorrow’s university.

If we “get it” about computers and education, it’s because we were “given it,” decades ago, by the people who envisioned new horizons and the continuous creativity that those horizons could stimulate. So forgive me if I’m eager to create the situations Licklider describes above. The waiting is the hardest part–and I swear that I’m just about done (i.e., fed up) with it.

Works cited:

“Computers In the University,” in Computers and the World of the Future. Martin Greenberger, ed. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1962

Waldrop, Mitchell. The Dream Machine: J. C. R. Licklider and the Revolution that Made Computing Personal. New York, NY: Penguin Books, 2001.

I do not much like to take the tone of a moralist. But the danger of the baobabs is so little understood, and such considerable risks would be run by anyone who might get lost on an asteroid, that for once I am breaking through my reserve. “Children,” I say plainly, “watch out for the baobabs!” Antoine de Saint-Exupery, “The Little Prince.”

I’ve long thought of blogging as a way of unschooling or deschooling within the framework of schooling. Why not simply deschool entirely? Edupunk it all? For me, that’s a waste. The framework of school can be a helpful point of focus, and at its best can convey a sense of occasion that would not be so strong or inviting without the lovely intensity of an expert imaginatively convening a group of fellow learners, or a group of learners imaginatively convening themselves around an expert, a wise expert who knows how to prize students. I am painfully aware of how seldom one finds wisdom, love, intensity, strength, and prizing within the structures of school, especially these days with the almighty gods of assessment and accountability and so forth installed in a pantheon that has little to do with cognition or relationship. But the abuse of an institution does not necessarily mean the institution itself has nothing to offer. School at its best gives a shape and a collegial society to my yearning for betterment. “Do It Yourself” doesn’t mean “do it by yourself.” School ought to give one a way to find the former without concluding that the only way forward is the latter route.

But sometimes I wonder whether schooling’s distortions can be overcome–or to put it another way, whether school can create within itself spaces for deschooling, moments of release from the dead hands of “rigor” and professorial imitation. Where is the recess for the mind, the space in which freedom within a general sense of direction and purpose can elicit self-surprise, emergent phenomena, essayistic discovery?

For me, blogging has been that recess. Its rigor arises from the non-trivial effort it takes to focus on something while one is exploring it, to focus on it by exploring it, and then to try to create an enjoyable, interesting experience for the reader.  Joy, interest, and focus are rare in the land of college writing, even when one requests or invites them. Instead, at least in my experience, one gets book reports, meandering attempts to ape authoritative writing, or rushed slapdash vacuity that can’t have made much sense even to the desperate writer during the overnight frenzy it took to produce it.

I began using blogs in my classes because I was very tired of papers beginning like this: “For hundreds of thousands of years, men and women all over the world in society have….” I was tired of my best writers producing stilted academic prose. I was tired of my worst writers either stressing so much over the mechanics that their papers got worse, or paying so little attention to what they were thinking and writing that any spark of interest or joy or wisdom that lurked beneath the awkward diction and inept sentence boundaries was snuffed out long before the comma splices began.

To use blogs in this way, I have had to develop an entirely new vocabulary of encouragement, nudging, framing, and evaluation. I have had to examine my own allegiance to the academy (frankly, I find myself working harder to justify the academy surrounding me than I do to justify the blogging within it). And as I have worked within the academy to help my colleagues understand the value and nature of this essayistic endeavor–and to recall that the word “essay” means attempt, not accomplishment–I have had to meet, greet, and push back against many objections. How will I grade it? What justifies this terrible invasion of the student’s privacy? Why should I endure–even encourage–sloppy informal writing that’s not up to academic standards? These questions and their many kin imply assumptions I no longer share, a separation that makes it difficult for me to find persuasive replies. I find we may no longer speak the same language–and given the pervasiveness of these assumptions within school, I feel like the foreigner. But I still try.

Several months ago, I was talking with a colleague about an opportunity for his students to blog, and I tried to explore the new vocabularies and conceptual frameworks I’ve tried to develop as I seek the recess of the mind blogging affords. (Yes, I hear you: “recess” signifies both what I advocate, a kind of cognitive playfulness and inventiveness, and what my colleagues fear, or say they fear, which is a receding emphasis on rigor, formal argument, etc.) I advocated blogging as a place in which Carl Roger’s “freedom to learn” is vividly present as an ongoing source of strength and inspiration within the course of study, even over a lifetime of learning. The blog offers a space, I said, in which the teacher can exercise the humility and delight Heidegger recommends as the highest and most strenuous calling within education, the teacher’s willingness “to let learn.” My colleague replied, “It may be learning, but it’s not academics.” I’d never heard that distinction made so sharply and explicitly. I was amazed by the implication that learning alone wouldn’t make the grade.

In my mind’s eye, I could see the baobabs of academics surrounding the little asteroid of learning, a little asteroid soon to be split into pieces, its fragments sent spinning through a void that must one day, in an ultimate irony, consume the baobabs themselves. But not until those sad and wandering little spheres are reduced to rubble.

Colleagues, I say plainly, and to myself as well: “Beware the baobabs!”

Last week two examples of these baobabs came into my view. In both cases, I’m sure that the professors meant well–and I do not mean that at all condescendingly, since not every professor does in fact mean well. Yet the awful pressure of academics upon learning is everywhere within these articulations, dismayingly so. Even as I write, I feel my own failures and struggles emerging, but I have to say it anyway: it’s probably better not to require blogs at all than to require blogs that are strangled by the baobabs of academics. Save the academics for term papers and other more formal assignments! Instead, preserve a zone in which we can “let learn,” in which there is genuine freedom to learn.  I won’t link to the authors’ websites, as I do not intend to attack them, and because what I believe to be the problems with these specific examples represent a far wider set of attitudes and practices. I single out these two assignments as examples only, ones I happened to run across. It would be unfair to hang the entire weight of my critique on them alone. I also want to salute both these teachers for actually putting their syllabi online instead of trapping them within a “learning management system.” But I feel I must speak plainly.

Here’s the first example.

Blogging (15%): One of the key aspects of your work this semester is our course blog, on which you’ll write frequently, using your posts to respond to our course readings, to draw your classmates’ attention to articles and artifacts you’ve found, and so forth. You are required to post at least one entry each week, which should directly engage with the week’s readings, before the start of class on Monday; this entry should be as formal as a printed reading response would be, paying attention to the quotation, citation, and explication practices involved in close reading. Other entries are greatly desired; these can be as informal as you like. You can explore issues that have been raised in previous class discussion, but you must significantly expand on that discussion and not simply rehash what’s already been said. You can skip two of these reading response posts with impunity. You are also required to read your classmates’ posts and leave at least two comments each week, before the start of class on Wednesday. (Note that you don’t have to post the the two comments at the same time; just make sure that week-to-week you get those entries and comments in.) This weekly requirement is meant as a minimum acceptable level of participation; I hope that you’ll all contribute more, creating an ongoing, engaging dialogue.

Some observations. The tone veers between encouragement and a kind of hectoring, with occasional instances of what feels like peremptory insistence on what the students “will” do, what “is desired” (by the teacher, presumably), and what kinds of behaviors will not be punished (skip two posts “with impunity”). I have no problems with requirements when it comes to blogging, as I’ve written elsewhere, but I do think it’s unwise to try to require commitment by specifying all the forms it must take; one gets commitment to specifications, not to values, and it’s almost certain that the fundamental desire for “an ongoing, engaging dialogue” will not be fulfilled. Instead, one is most likely to get, at best, a simulacrum of such a dialogue geared to what students believe the teacher will find engaging, not what the students themselves find engaging. There can be overlap there, of course, and I fully believe the teacher can and should lead the students into much deeper engagement than they are likely to encounter or realize on their own. But that requires detection and extension of what they’re already engaged by, and this blogging assignment doesn’t appear to be framed in that way.

To state it more simply, the item missing from the initial catalog of what students will use the blogs for is “to explore your thoughts, interests, and puzzlements in relation to this course of study.” Then the reader’s response is over-specified, and we end up with an academic assignment, not a blog. At what point is “what is desired” awakened within the learner, not simply imposed upon him or her? Such awakenings need canny nurturing and all the arts of intellectual seduction.

Even more seriously, the required reading-response post is a formal assignment whose strictures are so definite and school-familiar that I can’t imagine the completion of that required post will feel like an invitation to more informal posting afterward. That’s not to say that a formal reading-response exercise is not valuable. On the contrary. But I wouldn’t call it blogging, and I think the assignment inadvertently conveys a set of values and expectations that is antithetical to the real power of blogging within a course of study.

The professor must judge the difference between significant extension and rehash, between committed effort and lackadaisical coasting, between emergent insight and irrelevance. No question. But blogging provides a space in which that judgment can be rendered flexibly, lightly and joyfully, as an invitation to exploration and quality of commitment.

Here’s the second example. Given that there’s a list, I’ve commented item-by-item.

Blog Participation

1. Comments of 500 words or less on the class blog that are helpful to the class will be worth 10% of your grade.

 2. You may make as many comments per week as you like. However, you will only receive credit for up to two comments in any given week. The real goal of the blog comments is to help you internalize and think about the material on an ongoing basis. Cramming comments does not help you with that, nor does going back to comment on old subjects . I will have random cut-off dates for participation grading throughout the semester. They will not be pre-announced. Therefore, you should consider every day to be a possible cut-off date.

I understand that commenting doesn’t work if students either flood the channel with thin and thoughtless material just to get “extra credit,” or bunch their comments together after several weeks of ignoring the ongoing dialogue. I certainly agree with the “real goal” as it’s articulated above. That said, the idea of random cut-off dates brings in a note of surveillance and gotchas (every day’s a hangin’ day!) that doesn’t invite commitment so much as it inspires either a) dread or b) a desire to find another way to game the system. It’d probably be better to discuss these issues in the class meeting without trying to over-engineer an airtight system of discipline in this way. But then I’ve never agreed that a syllabus should be a contract. The commitment needed for a rewarding course of study is too big and too delicate to be specified exhaustively within a single document. If one tries to do so, the result is legalistic behavior on the part of the students, in my experience.

 3. I expect to see at least 5 well thought out comments, with links to other sources, posted over the course of the semester by each of you. Less than 5 that will result in a bad Blog Participation grade. , but sheer volume of comments will not get you a good grade either.

Along those lines, I also miss, here and in the first example above, any thought that linking to other bloggers and commenters is valuable and encouraged. That’s a shame, as such links are part of the soul of blogging. They demonstrate a valuable way to “think like the web” and participate in the care and feeding of the noosphere. They also encourage an ampler, more imaginative view of what libraries and books are all about in relation to that noosphere.

4. You must sign each comment with your first and last name. If you prefer to use another identifier, like a screen name, you may discuss with me.

Every time the teacher speaks or writes, the students encounter not only information but a meta-statement about the nature and purpose of the relationship between teacher and student. A syllabus loaded with lists of desired-by-the-teacher behaviors sends a powerful meta-statement that in the case of blogging robs the medium of its primary value for learning. Ditto over-engineered and over-specified assignments within a student blogging requirement. Once again, learning has been transmuted into academics. Sadly, that’s the philosopher’s stone in reverse. Or to return to my initial metaphor, it’s a growing asteroid done to pieces by the destructive, voracious root systems of School Baobabs.

For my students, I hope blogging will be that visible, share-able space that records and thus feeds their own curiosity–and that of their peers as well. Blogging should be like Steve Crocker’s “Request For Comments.” For a moment, the learner can think aloud without so much fear and without striving to be a bon élève. For a moment, we can remind each other that On ne voit bien qu’avec le cœur. L’essentiel est invisible pour les yeux. There will be time for all the rest of what we should do or believe we should do in school. Blogging is a time for something else.