I’m still working on Nudge but the basic concepts are in the early going. The second half of the book works through how these nudges might be implemented in various public policy issues: health care, school choice, marriage, etc. There are still many fascinating bits in the public policy discussion, and of course it’s easy there to see what’s at stake, but true to form I’m most interested in the way the conceptual underpinnings lend themselves to various kinds of analogies, especially analogies in teaching and learning. (There are powerful analogies and even outright connections here as well for my work on Paradise Lost and Milton generally, but I’ll save that for another time.)

Tonight I want to meditate just for a moment on Thaler and Sunstein’s use of a psychological concept called “framing.”  The authors explain this idea with a simple example. Credit card companies didn’t want customers to perceive that they paid more when they bought something with a credit card. Nevertheless, the government decreed that credit card companies could not force retailers to charge the same price for credit as for cash. So the credit card companies “framed” the choice this way: the credit price was a normal price, and if one paid cash one could receive a “cash discount.” At first blush, the idea seems too transparently manipulative to work. But work it does.

The credit card companies had a good intuitive understanding of what  psychologists would come to call “framing.” The idea is that choices depend,   in part, on the way in which problems are stated.

But why would so simple a technique actually work? Stated in cold prose, the manipulation is not only transparent but almost ridiculous. Who could be fooled by such tactics? Part of the answer lies in the way our brains have evolved. Our “blink” brain (to use Malcolm Gladwell’s terminology) tends to have a fast, all-at-once, go-from-the-gut response, typically linked to emotion and fight-or-flight reactions. Its speed was critical to our survival on the savannah, and Gladwell argues persuasively that there’s often an eerie trustworthiness in these rapid responses, as they are less susceptible to certain kinds of biases in our more executive brains, what psychologists call our “reflective systems.” This reflective system is slower but more rational. (The paradox that Gladwell explores is how this very rationality can methodically and persuasively lead us into cascading errors of judgment–but that’s another story.) Thaler and Sunstein argue that people employ their “reflective system” erratically, largely because there’s so much information to process (and that’s just in everyday life–online doesn’t enter into it) and because decisions have to be made fairly quickly. The result is that even simple kinds of framing can have enormous effects. The authors explain:

Framing works because people tend to be somewhat mindless, passive  decision makers. Their Reflective System does not do the work that would  be required to check and see whether reframing the questions would produce   a different answer. One reason they don’t do this is that they  wouldn’t know what to make of the contradiction. This implies that  frames are powerful nudges, and must be selected with caution.

Here’s where my ears perked up. It’s one thing to say that people are lazy and unreflective. Even to the extent it may be true, it’s not a very inviting doorway to understanding–more like an invitation to a good upbraiding. Box the apprentice’s ears and make him work harder next time. It’s also not a very effective strategy for awakening the joy of learning, in my view (though I suppose everyone needs some of this extrinsic motivation now and then). By contrast, it’s another thing altogether to consider that people don’t think about the framing itself because “they wouldn’t know what to make of the contradiction.” To put it another way, a way I think is consonant with Thaler and Sunstein’s argument, to think about framing is not just to detect and denounce various kinds of manipulation. Rather, it’s to awaken one to the intensely provisional quality of most of understanding itself, since all understanding happens in a context, and contexts appear relevant to a large degree depending on how questions and choices are framed. To think about framing, then, is to explore (to a certain extent) the instability of the boundary between context and irrelevant detail.

If you think I’m going too meta with this train of thought, re-read Hamlet. Or talk to any theater director. I was doing just that a couple of days ago, and she said something quite wonderful about context: the prop on the stage, placed within a charged context, acquires weight–that is, meaning and significance. And it’s the placing within that context (“framing” not only as the order of choices but the placing-within-a-context) that’s the larger point Thaler and Sunstein are making, I believe. Ultimately, what they term “choice architecture” depends on the time-and-space marker of the frame. And thinking about the frame in those terms makes folks feel uncertain, a feeling they’d like to avoid.

But of course asking our students to dwell within these thoughts, uncertainties, and contradictions is at the heart of what we call education. As Jerome Bruner points out in Toward a Theory of Instruction, inquiry is born out of “conjectures and dilemmas,” while too often education is about reporting results. And insofar as students sense their job is to memorize and spit back those results stripped of the conjectures and dilemmas that lend them meaning and human significance (honestly felt with uncertainties intact), they will naturally be suspicious of any effort to get them to think about framing per se. Yet thinking about framing, and learning the art of reframing, is at the heart of the mystery of human consciousness.

I’ve thought a good deal about framing lately. Sometimes I call it “tuning,” to evoke a musical analogy. Either way, it’s a participatory meta-perspective I try to urge upon myself and my students, not so we all join Hamlet in his rest, but so we can become better choice architects ourselves.

Still thinking all this through–definitely a work in progress. And while I’m sure there are very sophisticated philosophical reflections available on this topic, and I hope to find them and welcome their insights, I have to say that Scott McCloud gets to the heart of the matter mighty well:

From "Understanding Comics," by Scott McCloud

At the Baylor Academy for Teaching and Learning, the program I am learning to direct, our tag line is “shared inquiry and transformative conversations.” In at least one article I’ve been quoted as saying I have “faith in the conversation.” In this article the writer got an even better quote out of me:

“I’m a big believer that the conversation tells you the way the conversation ought to go,” Campbell says.

Now, I don’t rely on emergent phenomena alone. When folks at the leadership conferences say (loudly) “Fail to plan and plan to fail!” I nod vigorously in agreement. And I really mean it.

But that still leaves many skin-prickling moments when the tables rise and wonders appear and darned if I can detect the plan–unless giving oneself to the conversation constitutes a plan (as I believe it does).

Among many other things, OpenEd 2009 was a conversational feast with many remarkable instances of champion parley, but one conversation in particular gives me goosebumps just to think about it. It was intense, rich, complex, playful, wide-ranging, all the way from movies to Hobbes and Rousseau and many stops in between. What gives me goosebumps, though, is not just the memory of the caliber of the conversation, extraoardinary as it was, and as wonderful as my interlocuters were. (Here I raise my glass to Jon, Alan, and Jim.) What really gets me going is the way as soon as the lunch was over and the conversation had faded into the backdrop of city sounds in Vancouver, British Columbia, I suddenly had a rush of specific insights into how I should tweak the presentation I was to give about an hour later. Here’s the thing: the insights had no direct relation to the conversation whatsoever. Try as I might–and perhaps my lunch companions can do better–I cannot find any direct connection. I can’t believe I would have even mentioned my presentation, since getting butterflies in my stomach wouldn’t have been a very effective digestive aid.

No, I think I know what happened, and it maintains my faith in conversation, in its inner logics, in the way even what seems to be mere banter can, if one has the right partners in the conversation and if the spirit of the questions is urgent but not adversarial, release a torrent of inspiration to dissolve even the most stubborn blocks. Blocks one may not even have known were there. I had my presentation ready (or so I thought). Slides all done, thoughts all considered, everything in order. But something was missing, and I found it, and neither I nor my friends knew what we were seeking on my behalf. Nor do I know what we might have been seeking on everyone else’s behalf as well.

Perhaps what I’m groping for here is the sense that fellowship is not merely about comfort or solace or like-mindedness, though it may be all those things. For me, on this day and on many days, fellowship in conversation grants insight. So I believe.

Here’s the video of my talk, “No Digital Facelifts: Thinking the Unthinkable about Open Educational Experiences.” I thank my lunchtime companions for a gift they may not have known they were giving me: shared inquiry and transformative conversation.

Special thanks to Jim Groom for generously encouraging the Q&A during the time he was scheduled to speak–a gift I won’t soon forget.

I’m working my way through Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth, and Happiness. The book’s argument is fascinating and full of implications for education. I keep mapping the authors’ thoughts by analogy onto everything from curriculum to instructional design to advising to student life. So far they’ve not talked about any of these topics directly, but the ideas and examples they do discuss offer themselves readily to analogies in teaching, learning, and schooling generally. Although their advocacy of “libertarian paternalism” probably won’t please either the rigid high-stakes testers or the unschoolers, it does (so far) offer in my view a very interesting model for education that takes into account the need for expert understanding and guidance of the developing learner.

More thoughts as I move along.

If the exhibit at Baylor’s Mayborn Museum had it right, none of Leonardo’s flying machines actually worked. The notebooks in which he sketched them were untidy, disorganized to the point of apparent recklessness. Sometimes he was so far off in terms of scale or proportion that one has to wonder what he was thinking. To cite but one example: how could a parachute too heavy to carry up a hill ever be tested?

Yet Leonard’s breathtaking powers of invention and visual expression continue to inspire us. Such powers set the standard. In a way, they guarantee their own success, if not in their time, then certainly in the time that follows. If we take the long view, Leonardo’s inventions did in fact work. All of his flying machines flew. His vision would not let us be satisfied with anything less. We created to the standards he helped to set, and that’s one of the big reasons we remember him with gratitude, though I’m confident he was a pain in the neck to be around most of the time. Never content, always off in another galaxy, never facing facts.

If one thinks of Leonardo’s vision as a kind of song, a music that challenges us to shed our mannered attention to the grinding and broken processes of our wonderless calculations, it is a music that may well shake us out of our grim and measured comfort zones.

He stood among a crowd at Dromahair;
His heart hung all upon a silken dress,
And he had known at last some tenderness,
Before earth took him to her stony care;
But when a man poured fish into a pile,
It seemed they raised their little silver heads,
And sang what gold morning or evening sheds
Upon a woven world-forgotten isle
Where people love beside the ravelled seas;
That Time can never mar a lover’s vows
Under that woven changeless roof of boughs:
The singing shook him out of his new ease.

In “The Man Who Dreamed of Faeryland,” Yeats reflects on the hazards of vision. Sentimental? Only if the emotion is out of proportion to its object. And who is to make such a judgment? Is a cabinet of wonders or a rag doll a waste of time? Are all matters of consequence obviously so?

You see where this is going. Stubborn visionary optimism can seem pretty naive, even dangerously so. Perhaps it is both naive and dangerous, some of the time. But I will say that the better part of our highest accomplishments as a species has been driven by stubborn visionary optimism, insistent hopefulness of Engelbartian proportions. Half measures and incrementalism just don’t seem to get us very far, certainly not when it comes to education. The “grammar of school” is simply too vigorous and resilient.

What am I advocating? Nothing in particular beyond  a commitment to the highest hopes and grandest ambitions. Within my lifetime I have seen things you people wouldn’t believe: if not quite C-Beams glittering off the Tannhauser Gate, then certainly wonders on a scale nearly as large. I type these words and send them to you in a blog-shaped bottle upon a sea of articulate connections that depends on daily miracles born of technological innovation. Many of those miracles need tending. Probably not all of them are sustainable, at least not in their present form. But I am grateful to live among them now and to be part of the effort to understand and use them in the central activity of any civilization: the transmission of culture, and the tools to modify that culture and innovate within it, through education.

Whatever we call this age we live in–the information age, the computer age, the network age–I think we do live in a great age, with the chance to be part of a world-changing moment. We may be forced in the circumstances of our various lives to work on smaller scales, but even a modest contribution may change the world if one is inspired by the vision of that possibility.

Sometimes in the middle of reading Paradise Lost or The Faerie Queene, or after we’ve watched Citizen Kane or Fast, Cheap & Out of Control together, my students will turn to me and voice their incredulity that a human being actually made that thing, imagined it and realized it in conversation and collaboration with others, to be sure, but nevertheless in a way that only they could do, and that no one else would have dared. Sometimes, overcome with wonder myself at the vast accomplishment of these artists, I can do little more than shake my head and say, slowly, “You know, there are extraordinary people on this planet. You’ve just seen something of what our species at its best can do.” And though I know these marvelous information and communication technologies we live with every day are fraught sixteen ways from Sunday, I believe they are also a kind of poem we have written together, a film we have made together, a medium that has enabled what Clay Shirky identifies as “the largest increase in expressive capability in the history of the human race” (Here Comes Everybody). That increase happened because we wanted it to, because we have not yet found the boundaries of our ambitions for connection and expression. I have high hopes for the results of this increase in expressive capability, not because I am a techno-utopian (or any kind of utopian, for that matter), but because of what I have learned and will continue to teach of the great expressive accomplishments, in every discipline and domain, of humanity’s history.

I believe I am called to such hopefulness, though there are many days that call sounds faint or ridiculous. You may have a word other than “vocation” for your sense of your own answerability to this moment. Either way, a great age beckons, and I’m glad we can answer together.

Steve over at Pedablogy has an insightful post about note-taking, an activity that I find crucial for my own cognitive focus and ordering when I’m at any kind of presentation. Lately I’ve found that tweeting is a great form of social note-taking, as I can get back my notes *just from me* but at the same time enjoy the benefit of a kind of more-or-less synchronous conversation about the notes as I take them. I’ve even gotten great feedback about the clarity of my attention and articularion from the remarks of my Twitterfriends who are not present at the event. It’s an interesting exercise, like trying to describe a sight to someone over the telephone (that is, before we had the ability to just take a picture and send it along–which frankly, I prefer, even though I love the verbal challenge).

So given that experience, given what Steve says, given the Twitter experiment done by the history prof. at UT-Dallas, and given my own stubborn insistence on varieties and uses of collective and individual intelligence, I came up with an idea that I can’t quite execute, at least not the way I’d hoped. Perhaps you can help, dear reader.

My vision is to make a way for real time notes, observations, questions etc. to be posted to Twitter, and then to flow from Twitter (via a hashtag feed) into a wiki, automagically, and then be groomed, ordered, shaped, and begun to be answered by students in the class after the class is over. They’d probably be assigned as “wiki managers” or whatever on a rotating basis, but perhaps not. Back back back in the day, I was told that note-taking was the first step and note-revising was the second and even more important step, for there the mind began the process of review, consolidation, assimilation, etc. So my notion is that students will take notes individually and revise notes collaboratively. Not a new vision, really, but the cool part for me is having the aggregation take place more-or-less automagically as a demonstration of the resource we’re all building together whether or not we realize it. I’m convinced that Bruner’s “consciousness-raising about the possibilities of communal mental activity” depends first and perhaps foremost on consciousness-raising about the fact that we are acting in a communal mental fashion at the same time we’re doing our individual cognitive projects. The automagic part may not work. We may have to rely on copy-and-paste. But it would be cool to do it automagically as a kind of object lesson in the one-and-the-many idea that I’m trying to convey.

Right now I’m stuck with embedded RSS readers within wikis. The readers will bring the Twitter stream in automagically but a) not display all the stream at once (RSS readers typically limit the number of entries shown, for good reasons of course) and b) not embed the Twitter stream within the wiki as clear text–i.e., not write to the wiki. What I’m imagining may well be impossible. My analogy is FeedWordPress and other republishing affordances that will aggregate and republish content. I do understand that writing to a wiki is a bit different–or is it? In any event, I’d be grateful for any leads, ideas, or cautionary advice. The one lead I’ve not run down yet is something with SimplePie writing to a MediaWiki instance. That one I’ll probably investigate this weekend, unless someone here tells me not to bother trying.

EDIT: It occurs to me that an open MediaWiki site can easily be written to by spammers, as I know to my sorrow. I wonder if there’s a way to use this openness for my own purposes–while of course I’ll need to be vigilant about the spam as well….

Hillary Blakeley, a Ph.D. candidate in neuroscience and the Academy for Teaching and Learning‘s first Graduate Fellow, has launched an interesting series of posts over at Blogging on the Brain. She’s working through the book pictured above, selecting thinkers she’d like to respond to, and blogging about them from her own experience as a student, a teacher, and a brain scientist. Think of it as a summer reading project we can all participate in, with Hillary framing the issues to spark the conversation. By the end of the project, which may well continue through the fall, Hillary’s posts will also be a valuable resource for the ATL and for anyone interested in teaching and learning.

Feel free to comment, or to link to Hillary’s posts in true distributed-conversation style, or to do both. If you’d like to get a copy of the book to read along, so much the better. There’s even a Kindle edition available if that’s your platform of choice.