This podcast comes from a presentation Chip German and I did at the ELI 2009 Annual Meeting earlier this year. Here’s the session abstract:

What if course portals, typically little more than gateways to course activities and materials, became instead course catalysts: open, dynamic representations of “engagement streams” that demonstrate and encourage deep learning? The session will begin with case studies in enabling and designing such course portals, from both administrative and faculty perspectives. Participants will then form groups to imagine and design their own catalytic course portals. Finally, the presenters will discuss action steps that can lead to effective innovation at participants’ home institutions. Presentation resources, including a record of the participants’ design work, will be posted to an online collaborative space for continued discussion after the session.

I haven’t made that last part materialize yet, for all sorts of reasons (none of them very good ones). This post is at least a step in that direction, I hope. The images from the group work are just below, arranged by group. No doubt the work will be hard to understand out of context, but perhaps there’s enough in the audio and in the photos that something useful could emerge. I know I was very impressed by the speed, thoughtfulness, and sheer copiousness of the each group’s work. The idea of visualizing student engagement in such a way that the visualization itself would catalyze further engagement seems to have energized some powerful “imagineering” in the room, whatever the deficiencies of the way I imagined or described the exercise. (One conferee described my bit as “abstract and hurricane-ish,” which seems fair to me, alas.)

At any rate, here’s what the four groups came up with–in ten minutes, mind you! If the formatting breaks in your browser, let me know and I’ll try to fix it. Clicking on the images will take you to Flickr, where you can comment on them and annotate them.

The real bonus round here is what Chip has to say about the role of the CIO in empowering faculty, students, staff, librarians, and instructional technologists/designers to get to these kinds of experiments and catalysis. Chip and I had both read Fred Brooks’ classic The Mythical Man-Month in preparation for our session. In my view, Chip’s words represent a profound and all-too-rare understanding of Brooks’ ideas regarding conceptual integrity and design–as well as a profound and all-too-rare understanding of the potential for real learning within an agile, responsive cyberinfrastructure. Most of all, Chip’s understanding of higher-ed administration encompasses both the strategic and the tactical/operational, but always in that order, and with a true scholar’s gift for learning the lessons of history while charting a path to the future–a future that in many cases, of course, is already here and only looks like “the future” to those who are enmired in the past..

All of which is to say that Chip German gets it. Those of us who have had the pleasure of working with Chip have known that for a long time, of course, but it’s a privilege to demonstrate and share that knowledge by showcasing his own remarks here.

Post-script: For what it’s worth, my own favorite bit of “imagineering” came from USC’s Susan Metros, who suggested a course portal that would demonstrate the many levels and connections within student engagement streams by means of a 3D “infosphere” that one could fly through, reflect on, and build within. Her explanation of the concept was fascinating. Alas, the audio didn’t come out well for the group work, so you’ll just have to trust me when I say that Susan’s idea takes the idea of “visualizing learning” to a whole ‘nother level.

Oh, and one more very important thing: during my spiel you’ll hear me refer to a guy who has made the whole UMW Blogs thing hum like a top–and whose intelligence, drive, and sheer heart have been a constant inspiration. I refer of course to the guy the Chronicle of Higher Education persists in calling “James”–the mighty Reverend himself, Jim Groom.

For those who’ve asked: yes, I do continue to record my presentations, even though I haven’t posted any audio for a long time. I’m hoping to rectify that (if “rectify” is the right word) over the next few weeks. Fair warning!

Here’s part of the audio of a presentation I did recently at the University Continuing Education Association’s 2009 conference (which I blogged a little bit here. My first presentation at UCEA, appropriately enough, was on podcasting, back in 2006. This year the pre-conference workshop was on “Convergence-Disruption-Transformation: Digital Alchemy and the New Online Pedagogy.” Elizabeth Meyer, Director of Online Learning at the University of California San Diego, put the panel together. I’m grateful to Elizabeth for the opportunity.

As you’ll hear, I immediately disrupted my own talk (auto-disruption?), so inspired was I by Jon’s lead-off presentation. I get around to the talk I’d planned about a third of the way through. The “Janet” I speak of at the beginning of the podcast was a conferee I’d just met and spoken with during the break before my presentation.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (20.4MB)

Phil Long has just written a very thoughtful and challenging post at EdTechTrends. As I typed manically through my comment and watched it grow, I thought that instead of breaking the Blogger comment box I’d record a few thoughts here and further the distributed conversation.

Dear Phil,

Wow. I must read this book right away (Innovation, the Missing Dimension).

The more I talk about Web 2.0, the more I’m convinced that the heuristic points to habits of mind and heart with two primary characteristics: they seek, welcome, create network effects, and they trust in–shoot, they expect–emergent phenomena. “Play” is another name for these habits, but “play” sounds trivial–unless one reads Vygotsky (where he argues play is the gateway to facility with abstractions) or Huizinga (whose Homo Ludens rocks my world). The quotation you cite from Rosalind Williams is an extremely useful corollary. The focus on creativity is just right, in my view. People may resist the idea of playfulness, but it’s hard to naysay the idea of creativity.

Yet there are those who believe that creativity can be had without the mess of “odd connections, wanderings, and daydreaming” and without the investments of “time and space to graze.” There are those who will not tolerate the ambiguities and uncertainties out of which real innovation emerges. This kind of misguided “due diligence” has also shaped forced-march large-section courses that are little more than bucket brigades in which assessment becomes a crude pour-your-bucket-back-into-mine exercise in self-certification. This isn’t education and it isn’t working, but the human capacity for denial never fails to astonish me (in myself as well, I hasten to add). Oliver Sacks tells a dismal story in Awakenings of showing his colleagues films of Parkinson’s patients restored to mobility by L-Dopa, only to have those colleagues storm out of the conference room denying that any such thing had happened. When I first read that story, I was incredulous. Now, not so much.

I have long thought that we should assemble case studies of the education of innovators. Which teachers really helped? How did they help? What teachers furthered the thought of an Einstein, a Boulanger, a Curie, a Lennon? What was the secret sauce? I think we’d find some fascinating commonalities. And I think that what works for the high achievers will work for the less gifted as well. Find a version of “teach to the top” that isn’t merely “teach to the most capable” but “teach to the top of what each student is capable of.” A top that by definition cannot be clearly visible to either learner or teacher. A real learning summit–the place where learning and innovation join–is always just beyond the farthest resolvable detail. A spiral pedagogy to match Bruner’s spiral curriculum?

I remember the article I read many years ago in the Columbia U. alumni magazine in which alumni reminisced about Mark Van Doren and other famous CU profs. What they recalled most vividly were the digressions…. 

Your post is a vivid reminder for me of why social media and online affordances are such powerful learning opportunities: structured well, they maximize serendipity (it’s built-in to the Web) and make the odd connections, wanderings, and daydreaming visible, persistent, and available for reflection and further serendipity. We can’t all have MIT’s endowment or prestige, but we all have access to the amazing affordances of the ‘Net. All it takes is imagination, innovation, a willingness to go beyond what’s given (again, quoting Bruner, on the nature of true learning). Faith in the power of “shared inquiry and transformative conversations,” to quote from the emerging mission statement of the Academy for Teaching and Learning.

Walker Percy’s “The Loss of the Creature” has been crucial for me in this regard, as a student and as a teacher. Every single English Composition class I’ve taught since 1990 has begun with this essay. Now my “intro to college teaching” workshops do as well.  I’ve long drawn on Percy’s vision of education for inspiration, guidance, disruption (it doesn’t resolve very neatly). At least one of my former students, now a colleague, is carrying on the tradition as well. So I’ll give Percy the last word here, gladly:  a benediction, a valediction, a charge to the innovation banquet committee.

In truth, the biography of scientists and poets is usually the story of the discovery of the indirect approach, the circumvention of the educator’s presentation-the young man who was sent to the Technikum and on his way fell into the habit of loitering in book stores and reading poetry; or the young man dutifully attending law school who on the way became curious about the comings and goings of ants. One remembers the scene in The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter where the girl hides in the bushes to hear the Capehart in the big house play Beethoven. Perhaps she was the lucky one after all. Think of the unhappy souls inside, who see the record, worry about scratches, and most of all worry about whether they are getting it, whether they are bona fide music lovers. What is the best way to hear Beethoven: sitting in a proper silence around the Capehart or eavesdropping from an azalea bush?

However it may come about, we notice two traits of the second situation: (1) an openness of the thing before one-instead of being an exercise to be learned according to an approved mode, it is a garden of delights which beckons to one; (2) a sovereignty of the knower-instead of being a consumer of a prepared experience, I am a sovereign wayfarer, a wanderer in the neighborhood of being who stumbles into the garden.

So much to blog about–SXSWi, talks from Boston to Tucson, many Baylor events–but before I get to all that, a moment to reflect on open educational opportunities and real audiences:

My “From Memex to YouTube” class is in full Final Projects mode, heading toward presentations in just a few weeks. Projects range from music and identity to social bookmarking (and organizing the infinite) to animating the Mother of All Demos. Lots of talent at work here. I’m eager to see what the seminar will create and share, and I’ll let you know when the live stream will happen (probably via Ustream again unless someone has a better suggestion).

This morning I’m especially jazzed to see that the “Tell a story in 5 frames” Flickr project is underway. I had an epiphany last week when discussing project ideas with the class: if you’re not sure what you really want to do for a final project, just read your blog posts to date. There’s probably a pattern of interest there. Look at the traces of your own engagement! Enjoy the strengths and predilections of your mind at play in the fields of study. Turns out that the photo project was right there all along, hiding in plain sight. And the results are coming in. The student (I keep saying “the student” in a doubtless misguided effort to preserve privacy) just posted the first “five frames” set to Flickr, and already two comments have come in praising the work.

Of course, I want the student to work hard and keep improving, but I’d be lying if I said the first outing was less than impressive. 🙂 Not to dote, or anything…. You understand.

Take a look, see what you think, and comment if you are so moved. More New Media Studies goodness on the way.

Just back from a quick and intense trip to Boston, where I was on a panel with Jon Udell and Sarah Stein for a preconference workshop at UCEA 2009. I always enjoy my time with the UCEA folks. They’re open and inquisitive. They’re also entrepreneurial, a space that most university continuing education folks live in by necessity (and turn that into a virtue).

Jon spoke on computational thinking (with the specific example of calendar curation), I spoke on disruption (from millicomputing to the mother-of-all-funk-chords), and Sarah spoke on teaching and technology with a particular focus on the NCSU Virtual Computing Lab. It was a pleasure and an honor to share the podium with Jon and Sarah. Both entered my life in 2005 and both have been wonderful colleagues and friends since that time. I see them all too rarely. It was hard to say goodbye. (I’m never any good at that, anyway.)

On my way back down I-35 from the Dallas/Fort Worth airport, my mind full of the conversations and shared struggles I’d experienced at the conference, I listened to an emerging technology podcast featuring Tim O’Reilly. I was surprised and stirred by the passion in Tim’s voice, and by the complex joys and cautions he urged upon us. Then, about three minutes before the end of the podcast, I was startled to hear a poem.

The poem, and Tim’s presentation of it, resonated with me very strongly, as it obviously did with the audience at his conference. I thought of my colleagues at UCEA, and my colleagues on the panel, and my colleagues in the Twittersphere who responded so generously and insightfully to the tweets we generated during the panel.

I hope it resonates with you as well.

The Man Watching

by Rainer Maria Rilke

I can tell by the way the trees beat, after
so many dull days, on my worried windowpanes
that a storm is coming,
and I hear the far-off fields say things
I can’t bear without a friend,
I can’t love without a sister

The storm, the shifter of shapes, drives on
across the woods and across time,
and the world looks as if it had no age:
the landscape like a line in the psalm book,
is seriousness and weight and eternity.

What we choose to fight is so tiny!
What fights us is so great!
If only we would let ourselves be dominated
as things do by some immense storm,
we would become strong too, and not need names.

When we win it’s with small things,
and the triumph itself makes us small.
What is extraordinary and eternal
does not want to be bent by us.
I mean the Angel who appeared
to the wrestlers of the Old Testament:
when the wrestler’s sinews
grew long like metal strings,
he felt them under his fingers
like chords of deep music.

Whoever was beaten by this Angel
(who often simply declined the fight)
went away proud and strengthened
and great from that harsh hand,
that kneaded him as if to change his shape.
Winning does not tempt that man.
This is how he grows: by being defeated, decisively,
by constantly greater beings.

The King is gone but he’s not forgotten:
This is the story of Johnny Rotten.

I.

I’m not sure I’ll get any of this down the way I want to, but I need to try. If you hate long and rambling and essayistic blog posts, stop reading now. We’ll return to our regular program tomorrow.

II.

During the all-night Paradise Lost readathons, we’d always share a good laugh when we got to the part where Milton writes  “all hell broke loose.”

No doubt the folks actually in the epic battle were not so detached.

Lately it seemed to me that the Edupunk discussion had also broken loose in some troubling ways, and that healthy disagreement (and overwhelming agreement) had become polarized and politicized in all sorts of reductive ways.  I was afraid this might happen. I had a sinking feeling from the beginning, really, because I lived through the gobbing and contemptuous dismissals in many of the early punk days and dreaded a repeat of that moment.  When punk hit, it became impossible to profess love for The Allman Brothers Live at Filmore East or Heart Like a Wheel or Tommy or Blue or Waiting for Columbus or even Mott without risking sneers or worse. Cries of “muso!” blended with angry denunciations of “corporate rock” (usually meaning anything on the radio–which believe it or not, still had some good stuff on it in 1976) or “dinosaur rock” (this usually referred to Led Zeppelin, who even at their most bloated could lift the roof off those arenas) or “circus rock”  (which usually meant progressive rock from Yes, Rush, Genesis, etc.). I’m sure there were more such dismissals that I’ve simply blocked from my memory.

I sheepishly confess at this point that I joined with the punks and the mainstream rock fans in their emetic rejection of disco, a story I’d stick with until a few years ago when I finally watched Saturday Night Fever on the recommendation of a dear friend and suddenly, as they say, “got it.” It didn’t hurt that I’d also got it through my thick skull that the same guy who’d written Awopbopaloobop had also written the essay in New York that had inspired the movie. (Later, in a double-back-flip gainer of irony, I learned he’d made most of it up.) Now, to my astonishment, I hear those Bee Gees songs with new-found respect and enjoyment, though I still can’t quite go for the movie of “Sgt. Pepper’s.” Even midlife revelations can’t erase all my standards.

For the most part, though, I regretted both punk and disco, which I saw as mirror images of each other, two extremes that made such totalizing claims that there was no way to love rock-and-roll, especially the kind that reached for any kind of epic scale or complexity in its urgent deliveries. My rejection was reductive, too, and I won’t boast of it, but it was a response to rejection, not affirmation. Such a vicious cycle.

The bottom line for me is that any ideology, any movement, any slogan or fashion that crowds other worthy things off the stage is just not worth it. Peter Guralnick once wrote that he rejected all ideologies as groupthink. Ideology was the enemy. It sure crowded discussions of aesthetics, let alone the very idea of worthiness, off the syllabus in the days of high theory.  Talk about purgings and cleansings. I remember those days vividly, too. The withering cries of “formalist!” and so forth.

I love it when Guralnick tries to articulate his thoughts on ideology. (I can only imagine the arguments he must have with Greil Marcus.) Here’s a great excerpt from Sweet Soul Music.

From the time that I myself first went to Memphis in the fall of 1980, the picture that I got of the Stax Record Company, and then of the recording scene in Muscle Shoals, as well as the emergence of Otis Redding from the provincial reaches of Macon, Georgia, showed not so much the white man in the woodpile, or even the white businessman capitalizing on social placement and cultural advantage to plunder the resources of a captive people, as the white partner contributing as significantly as his more prominent–more visible certainly–black associate. I don’t mean to make too much of this, because partnership is a self-evident concept, it is the whole point of integration, after all; I was simply not prepared to see it happening here. Perhaps because a working union of this sort is so rare, perhaps because of my own cultural and political preconditioning, it took me a while to come to grips with the nonideological complexion of reality.

A working union of this sort is so rare. Indeed. More please.

III.

Last spring my friend, colleague, and collaborator Jim Groom said a specter was haunting education: the specter of punk. And Edupunk was born. The original post is amazing, troubling, white-hot and entirely compelling, especially when the comment trail kicks in. But the punk metaphor/meme/ideology still troubled me.

My worries persisted until I’d had a chance to talk with Jim, first at a regional EDUCAUSE conference, and then over the summer as we prepared for our UMW Blogs presentation at the big EDUCAUSE convention (a presentation Jim had applied for and graciously invited me to contribute to). As always happens when Jim and I talk, we hashed through mutual concerns and found our way despite enduring disagreements to some greater realization of the core commitments we shared. When we really get a chance to work together  (work is play for mortal stakes, or should be, wrote Frost), it’s magic for me.

I felt that magic as we debated Edupunk in the video interview hosted by Gerry Bayne of EDUCAUSE. I can’t speak for Jim, but from where I sat it looked like we were both exhausted and exhilarated when it was all over. I know I felt it was one of the great conversations I’d had, both because of the way Jim had pushed me to articulate my own position and also because of the way I’d had to dig deep into what I truly felt. What I said, or tried to say, finally went beyond the occasion of a debate. Sentimental as it may sound, I was trying to speak something at the center of my soul. I have little notion of whether I succeeded. What I do know is the way I felt when I was trying. I thought I could see it in Jim’s eyes too: this feeling that we were not fighting, and probably not even debating. Instead, we were sweating our way through close encounters with issues of longstanding and very urgent concern for both of us. What I left with was a feeling that we had disagreed about a few fundamentals–I don’t want to downplay that–but agreed about many, many more, including and especially the need for action and the opportunities for it. I felt we had tried to do something very difficult, and who knows whether we’d succeeded, but the attempt itself was of an intensity that surprised us both and united us in the effort. Our hearts were truly in the right place: together, caring passionately about the same things, knowing that mere school won’t get to real school without that kind of intensity and shared vision.

That’s the feeling I want to remember. That’s the feeling that spurs me to action. A working union of this sort is so rare.

At times over the last few days it’s been hard to hold on to that feeling. Some of the quick polarization and politicization I’d feared initially had come to pass in the responses on Jim’s blog to the videos. Then the Chronicle’s Wired Blog picked up on the story, and the write-up was pretty reductive, perpetuating a false polarity.  I greatly appreciate that Jim spoke up quickly to set the record straight. But whatever the responses, the videos are there, and when I watch them, I remember the feeling of digging deep, deeper than I wanted to, deeper than I thought was safe, inspired by my friend and colleague and collaborator Jim Groom to get to that rare working union no matter what.

That’s the feeling I want to remember. The one I will remember.

As for my stance on Blackboard and its ilk, on corporate and industrial approaches to education, and on the nightmare of our nimble, personal, protean computers being used as surface-learning drill-and-kill affordances, I think the record is clear and the evidence abundant for those who care to look.

IV.

A strong mutual friend commented on Jim’s first Edupunk video post and said he wished I’d reread Lester Bang’s essay on The Clash. So I did. I’d forgotten how wonderful and wonderfully ambivalent it was. It helped me recall not the contempt and dismissiveness of the nay-sayers and line-drawers but the spirit, drive, and moral urgency of those days. The Clash were special. They didn’t like the gobbing (Mick Jones calls it “disgusting”), and they didn’t forsake their roots or pretend they’d made music history irrelevant. Although Bangs makes his predictable pronouncement that rock had died in 1968 (I’m still not entirely sure why he hated James Taylor so much) and does the dissing he needs to do (I get that Led Zeppelin tours were monstrous, but hadn’t he heard Physical Graffiti?), the essay is clearly the record of a journey of discovery for him, and the Clash are clearly teaching him something about his own horizons, about the rewards and punishments of impossible yet essential idealism. It’s beyond exciting to experience that with Bangs, especially through the medium of his bash-it-out lyricism. By Part Three, where Bangs confronts the scale of his dreams and the compound fractures of their bitter disappointment, the scatological and profane romp turns a corner, and we get passages like this one:

At its best New Wave/punk represents a fundamental and age-old Utopian dream: that if you give people the license to be as outrageous as they want in absolutely any fashion they can dream up, they’ll be creative about it, and do something good besides. Realize their own potentials and finally start doing what they really want to do. Which also presupposes that peple don’t want somebody else telling them what to do. That most people are capable of a certain spontaneity, given the option.

My own belief is that “outrageous as they want” and “absolutely any fashion they can dream up” will typically turn malignant in one way or another. I agree with Milton that a cry for freedom on these terms usually means a cry for license. Bangs’ use of that very word indicates to me that he senses that undertow as well. The words “as they want” and “absolutely” are giveaways. In my EDUCAUSE conversation with Jim, I tried to explain a vision of leadership as a kind of stewardship we invest in those we trust to  empower our best selves, something our competing interests and dreams and fashions would otherwise render impossible. But I do understand Jim’s point that bad leadership might be worse than no leaders at all. I simply don’t think “no leaders at all” is ever an option, given that we will always have to delegate some kinds of authority to each other to live in community.

Back to Bangs:

As it is, the punks constitute a form of passive resistance to a slick social order, but the question remains as to just what alternatives they are going to come up with. Singing along to “Anarchy” and “White Riot” constitutes no more than a show of solidarity, and there are plenty of people who think this is all no more than a bunch of stupid kids on a faddist’s binge. They’re wrong, because at the very least all of this amounts to a gesture of faith in mass and individual unrealized possibilities, which counts for a lot when there are plenty of voices who would tell you that all human behavior can be reduced to a formula.

Of course this brings me up short–and how. That gesture of faith is at the core of teaching and learning, which means it’s what I yearn for and try, as best I can, to support, encourage, enact every single day. (That’s not to say I always succeed, but I do in fact intend to die trying.) And those voices those voices those voices. I hear them over and over. They chase themselves through those wakeful moments each night when I wonder how we could possibly have gotten ourselves into the fix we have when it comes to thinking deeply and responsibly about the holy transformational mission of real school. I listen for the other voices: Palmer, Kozol, Turkle, Murray, Goldberg, Bruner, Percy, O’ Connor, Buber, Dewey, Piaget, Papert, Kay, Engelbart, all the teachers who’ve inspired and challenged and shaped and prodded and lifted me. I listen for their voices to counter those voices Bangs describes, the voices of the high-stakes test agents, the voices of those who advocate academic transformation but practice scaled-up, outsourced, and uniformed delivery of “content” to all the heads of all those students whose precious inner outliers get boxed and forgotten in the meantime. Until the students, finally, forget to look themselves.

Yet even here Bangs’ honesty keeps him from editing out the rest of the story. 

But if anything more than fashion and what usually amount to poses is going to finally come of all this, then everybody listening is going to have to pick up the possibilities with both hands and fulfill ’em themselves. Either that or end up with a new set of surrogate mommies and daddies, just like hippies did, because in spite of whatever they set in motion that’s exactly what, say, Charles Manson and John Sinclair were.

There’s more to the essay, but at this point you should go read it yourself (just don’t let your Kindle 2 read it aloud at work, as the language is quite spicy). Suffice it to say that re-reading Bangs helped me frame the entire Edupunk debate anew for myself, not because he resolved it, but because he so clearly articulated what success at its best and failure at its worst would mean for this version of the dream of a just society. I truly get that this was the Clash’s dream, though I’m still not sure it was a punk dream, and neither is Bangs. Then again, he’s not sure it wasn’t, either. Fair enough.

V.

But I truly believe that the full extent of what Lester Bangs learned on that tour with the Clash didn’t emerge until a little later. The Clash essay comes out at the end of 1977. In 1979 Bangs published what I believe is his masterpiece, an essay for the volume Stranded: Rock and Roll for a Desert Island. I want to end this post with a quotation from that essay, an essay that brings Van Morrison’s Astral Weeks (Bangs’ desert island disc) into close contact with the Velvet Underground’s White Light/White Heat, a proto-punk album if there ever was one:

Astral Weeks would be the subject of this piece–i.e., the rock record with the most significance in my life so far–no matter how I’d been feeling when it came out. But in the condition I was in, it assumed at the time the quality of a beacon, a light on the far shores of the murk; what’s more, it was proof that there was something left to express artistically besides nihilism and destruction. (My other big record of the day was White Light/White Heat.) It sounded like the man who made Astral Weeks was in terrible pain, pain most of Van Morrison’s previous works had only suggested; but like the later albums by the Velvet Underground, there was a redemptive element in the  blackness, ultimate compassion for the suffering of others, and a swath of pure beauty and mystical awe that cut right through the heart of the work.

Bangs’ vision loses none of its urgency along the way. He doesn’t back down one bit from the call to action. If anything, that call is even more intense when he writes about Van Morrison than when he writes about the Clash. But the important point is that the urgency is inclusive. Both-and. With pure beauty and mystical awe at the center of each pain-born song. The conversation is intense and unifying, forged out of hot iron at the center of the souls of a Belfast singer/songwriter, a New York rock critic, and a band of gypsys on a caravan through late 1970’s England.

That’s the conversation I want to be in. That’s the caravan I want to be on. I think leaders can help with caravans. Jim thinks the caravan does that itself. It’s possible to argue we’re both right, since no effective leader ever got far without remembering that a leader doesn’t make a caravan, without understanding that we all travel the long miles together as companions, a word that means “those who break bread together.” For me, the leader recalls the caravan to its companionship when the going gets hard and the way uncertain. And that’s one reason a leader has to be a diplomat too.

I do not think diplomacy always means “going slow.” It sure doesn’t mean backing down one inch when minds and hearts are at stake. It means breaking bread together, even and especially through the disagreements, as long as we possibly can. Thus I’m greatly disturbed by those who say that such dialogue is deadening.

So.

VI.

What? Let’s eat. Let’s travel. Let’s dance. Let’s turn it up, not rip it up, unless “it” is the barriers that get in the way and prompt nothing but entrenchment, Maginot Lines, and groupthink. The time is now. We have a moment. If you’ll sway to “Eyes of the World” with me, I promise I’ll pogo when you turn up “God Save The Queen.” And we’ll meet at “London Calling,” and yell for “Jackie Wilson Said” as an encore. People get ready. I want to work with you on those rare unions, the ones no one can sell us, the ones we know we can and must help to write into being. Real school is where we learn to do that writing.

And when we look on our rare and working unions, I hope we’ll see a swath of pure beauty and mystical awe cutting right through the heart of the work.

I’ve got a special volunteer teaching assignment tonight, an Honors Program event called “Colloquium” in which students enroll in a series of evening seminars, five all told, each led by a different professor, and each of them centered on a particular book or set of readings. This one’s my first (the second of the term for the students), so of course I decided on something a bit over-ambitious and assigned a long, rambling, urgent, personal, repetitive, provocative book called The Black Swan. It’s exhilarating stuff but who knows what the students will make of it. I’m not sure what I make of it all.

Actually, I think I’ve just described the makings of a potentially great discussion. But I digress….

I’m going through the book a second time in preparation for the seminar. As any teacher can tell you, reading a book with an eye to teaching it is a much deeper and more fraught experience than simply reading it. I guess the simplest way to say it is that I find I have to have at least three voices in my head as I go along: the author’s, my own, and the student voice I anticipate moment to moment as I think about how the discussion might–and sometimes I hope will–go. That’s an impressive number of voices in my head, one channel past stereo. Cognitive surround sound. Immersive, yes, and busy.

Then I’ll hit a statement like this one and suddenly the entire metaframe begins to glow: Taleb’s writing, my reading, my imagined colloquy, even the way I anticipate the room will look and feel:

Assuming there is something desirable in being an average man, he must have an unspecified specialty in which he would be more gifted than other people–he cannot be average in everything.A pianist would be better on average at playing the piano, but worse than the norm at, say, horseback riding. A draftsman would have better drafting skills, and so on. The notion of  a man deemed average is different from that of a man who is average in everything he does…. Quetelet completely missed that point. (242)

Taleb’s words resonate for me through many chords and along many soundboards. I think of David Berliner’s tremendous call-to-arms here at Baylor just a couple of weeks ago as he presented the research he and Susan Nichols have done on the damage caused by the current fashion for high-stakes testing, work recently published in Collateral Damage: How High-Stakes Testing Corrupts America’s Schools. Among the many tragic and nonsensical outcomes of this drill-and-kill approach  (many predicted with great accuracy for over thirty years by “Campbell’s Law,” one of the most astounding things I learned at Berliner’s talk) is a monomaniacal focus on the “bubble,” that is, the students who are just below passing and are brought up to just over passing by these tests. These success stories are touted by many advocates of these programs, none of whom seem to know about “Campbell’s Law,” and none of whom seem to have thought hard about what definition of “success” is content with getting students from just-under-mediocre to just-above-mediocre, if in fact the tests and the passing have even that much meaning. And then I think of the truly mournful set of comments on Cole Camplese’s justifiably outraged post about Pennsylvania’s “adequate progress” awards. 

I can’t stop dreaming of the day we educators turn the paradigm around. What if we had an education focused on the above-average in everyone, the place of the inner outlier? What if education, inescapably difficult and dispiriting in the parts that don’t come naturally, had as its clear and beckoning aim the hard work of setting up empowering contexts for each person’s excellence to attain its true force and maturity? We say words to this effect at the inspirational moments, at the great matriculation and graduation gatherings. What of the in-betweens? What of the walk we walk–or not?

Instead, we continue to generate models of “assessment” that consume themselves in a feast of invalidity. We generate models of education that boast of adequacy. We go for bell curves and standard deviations, not outliers and positive deviation. We push out the underperforming, ignore the top achievers, and do no justice to the inner outliers in every student, no matter what his or her general aptitude.

And we say we’ve done something worth doing.

Baylor University welcomed to its campus yesterday the CogDog himself, Alan Levine,  for conversation, tours, and an afternoon presentation titled “NMC 101, An Introduction to the New Media Consortium.” Baylor joined the New Media Consortium last fall, and yesterday Alan gave us a great overview of what the NMC offers. We learned how Baylor can not only participate in the work but be a vital contributor to it as well. Folks in the audience included deans, department chairs, faculty from Environmental Studies, English, Business, Social Work, Film & Digital Media, and other departments I’ve no doubt overlooked, There were grad students, as well as staff from IT and the Baylor Libraries, including many of my colleagues from the Electronic Library (which co-sponsored the event along with the Academy for Teaching and Learning). It was a great mix of people and a good turn-out for a Friday afternoon.

Alan’s presentation was comprehensive and engaging as always. We even got into Second Life for a bit, and talked with some folks who’d answered Alan’s call for help with a live demo. By the time the event ended, there was food for thought for many mental meals to come. There was also a sense in the room that our horizons had been expanded, with excellent opportunities awaiting for individual work and for fruitful collaboration.

 But was there ever a bonus round …

That bonus round was just having Alan here on the campus. We toured current digitization projects in the Baylor libraries. We toured computer labs, a neuroscience lab, and other sites where creativity and information technologies were melding in interesting and productive ways. (I learned a ton myself, seeing it all afresh through Alan’s eyes.) And during every moment, I could see Alan catalyzing conversation, putting people at their ease, showing genuine interest and a playful sense of expectancy in each encounter. I know it’ll embarrass Alan for me to say this, but I’ve got to do it: he’s got a tremendous gift (I’d call it both playful and soulful) for bringing out the best and happiest qualities in people. I listened carefully to the way Alan asked questions, to the way he made people feel good about their work and excited by the possibilities ahead. I could feel both energy and openness increase in every room.

I’m certainly feeling that way myself, and I’m also feeling very grateful to Alan for spending some time with us. 

When I think of the amazing people I’ve met over the last six years, I’m humbled. These are the people who’re heeding Doug Engelbart’s call to change the world. This is the caravan I want to be part of.