Though I had to duck out for an hour in the middle, doggone it, I did learn a ton from my fellow presenters at the workshop. In particular, I was struck by how thoroughly UCF understands what it takes to influence a culture–and how carefully they’ve worked to prepare attractive events, activities, and materials without sacrificing a bit of depth. In fact, they’re mining intellectual depths in many admirable ways. Information fluency without deep roots in the campus’s intellectual culture makes little sense to me–and it’s inspiring to see what UCF is pursuing in this regard. What IF indeed.

Cyprien and Steve

Originally uploaded by Gardo.

I’m at the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative Annual Meeting, here in rainy and chill Atlanta. As you can see, the conversations begin immediately, and given my insatiable appetite for conversation, I’m guessing the “buffet” will be unusually rewarding this year,

I’m also going to try hard to blog as much as possible, just to get those ligaments loose once more.

Tomorrow I’m the closer for a session on information fluency, led by my friend Chuck Dziuban of the University of Central Florida. Chuck’s very gracious to invite to me to speak, especially given that I will be going off on a metaphorical (not to say metaphysical) tangent that’s likely to be rather different from what precedes my bit. On the other hand, who knows? At our warmup meeting tonight, I met a co-presenter who’s a philosopher specializing in Thomas Hobbes. What’s not to love about a conference with professors, IT specialists, librarians, and administrators mixing it up into the wee hours as we try to figure out where higher ed might (and should) go from here?

I’m teaching my Milton seminar this spring for the first time in a couple of years, and I want to try podcasting some of Milton’s poetry and prose as (I hope) aids to comprehension.

As always, I find that recording the words forces a certain kind of attention that I might not otherwise find. This time, for example, I noticed a fantastic internal rhyme in the “Proem” (the first four stanzas of the poem, written in a different stanza form than the subsequent “Hymn) between “clay” and “say,” one that stretches across two stanzas in a very powerful echo. I also noticed that Nature’s wooing is confined to “speeches fair,” not her usual wantonness. The exception is very interesting when one considers the license the poet grants his own “speeches fair” in the race to lay a gift at the newborn child’s feet. I caught the rhyme during the reading, but I didn’t catch the latter emphasis in time to make anything of it. Some day I’ll do this poem over and achieve a better recitation–but in the spirit of blogging, better to publish a good thing than to withhold it and wait for perfection. Perhaps my efforts here will encourage someone else to do their own reading. I’d like to compare.

So here, without commentary (it’s long enough), is Milton’s “Ode on the Morning of Christ’s Nativity.“

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (12.8MB)

Browsing idly at Borders yesterday, I spied this book: George Steiner’s Lessons of the Masters. I’m embarrassed to say I had not known of it before, even though Steiner is one of those thinkers and writers I try to follow as closely as I can. His Real Presences continues to inspire me and was a great comfort in the worst days of dogmatically theory-driven literary studies.

I’ve just begun reading this book but already find it electric, bracing and deeply instructive. I am confident there’s much here that must have been greeted with some alarm or even dismay by the reviewers (I haven’t looked any of them up yet, but the cover alone will likely induce anger or worse in some readers), and certainly there’s much to argue over here, but as always the depth of Steiner’s insights, drawn from the astonishing breadth of his knowledge (and what he simply attends to), touches me to the quick.

Here are magical moments I want to set down now, while the glow of my first reading still lingers:

The fortunate among us will have met with true Masters, be they Socrates or Emerson, Nadia Boulanger or Max Perutz. Often, they remain anonymous: isolated school masters and mistresses who wake a child’s or an adolescent’s gift, who set obsession on its way. By lending a book, by staying after class willing to be sought out. In Judaism, the liturgy includes a special blessing for families at least one of whose offspring becomes a scholar….

The Socratic teacher is, famously, a midwife to the pregnant spirit, an alarm clock rousing us from amnesia, from what Heidegger would call “a forgetting of Being”…. What prevails is the motif of a creative sleeplessness. The Zen Master beats his disciples to keep them awake. Great teaching is insomnia, or ought to have been in the Garden at Gethsemane. Sleepwalkers are the natural enemies of the teacher. In Meno, Anytus, alert to the subversive, unsettling tactics of Socratic pedagogy, admonishes: “Be circumspect.” But no committed Master can be. Where there is acute discomfort–Socratic questioning can numb like “a stingray” says Meno 84–there is also love…

The pulse of teaching is persuasion. The teacher solicits attention, agreement, and, optimally, collaborative dissent. He or she invites trust: “to exchange love for love and trust for trust” as Marx put it, idealistically, in his 1844 manuscripts. Persuasion is both positive–“share this skill with me, follow me into this art and practise, read this text”–and negative–“do not believe this, do not expend effort and time on that.” The dynamics are the same: to build a community out of communication, a coherence of shared feelings, passions, refusals…. The Master, the pedagogue addresses the intellect, the imagination, the nervous system, the very inward of his listeners…. A charismatic Master, an inspired “prof” take in hand, in a radically “totalitarian,” psychosomatic grasp, the living spirit of their students or disciples. The dangers and privileges are unbounded….

A “master class,” a tutorial, a seminar, but even a lecture can generate an atmosphere saturated with tensions of the heart….

Fascinatingly, the interactive, correctible, interruptable media of word processors, of electronic textualities on the internet and the web, may amount to a return, to what Vico would call a ricorso, to orality. Screened texts are, in some sense, provisional and open-ended. These conditions may restore factors of authentic teaching as practised by Socrates and dramatized by Plato. At the same time, however, electronic literacy, with its limitless capacity for information storage and retrieval, with its data banks, militates against memory. And the face on the screen is never that live countenance which Plato or Levinas judge indispensable in any fruitful encounter between Master and disciple.

I just read the latest from Jon Udell, entitled “Conceptual Barriers.” I must have grokked it through the noosphere before reading it, as Jon’s central emphasis in this post has very powerful connections to the sort of thing I’m wrestling with in the post below. Indeed, of Jon’s many wonderful posts, I’d say this is one of his most important. He correctly intuits that the conceptual barriers are the hardest to overcome, and that the technical barriers are so far distant from the conceptual barriers that once the conceptual barriers are overcome, a rush of social progress might well follow.

That’s an Engelbart-size goal and one I want to support in any way I can.

Now, about those conceptual barriers, two quick thoughts. One is that school ought to be the place where we help our students think conceptually, think about conceptual thinking, and grow skilled in the bootstrapping process of improving ways of overcoming conceptual barriers (this would be level “c” in an Engelbartian schema). Notice the words “conceptual barriers,” words Jon has chosen very wisely. We in education like to talk about critical thinking, but often what we mean by “critical thinking” has more to do with overcoming or becoming sensitive to biases of one sort or another. Of course this is an extremely important element of education, but the larger issue has to do with imaginative and conceptual limits, for those limits mark the difference between what Illich would describe as “schooling” rather than true education. My second thought is that if Illich is correct, and conceptual operations have a certain gamelike quality, then one powerful way of overcoming conceptual barriers is to encourage playfulness of one sort or another.

One of Cyprien’s presentations at Faculty Academy 2006 touched on this aspect of Flickr. As I think about it, sandboxes for community playfulness, or simply a playful nature to certain aspects of the interface, characterize much of what I think of as Web 2.0. Not just interaction, but also playfulness of one sort or another, perhaps something as simple as Amazon‘s “statistically improbable phrases” (SIPS, now apparently defunct) or their “surprise me” feature on some “search inside” pages, or the little decorations that Google uses for its logo. Or Martha‘s Halloween theme for the DTLT community site she built a couple of years ago. Something gratuitous, i.e., gracious. Something gamelike and deeply playful.

How playful is the CMS your school is using right now?

Play is a perpetual motion machine that generates and uses energy simultaneously and about equally, at least until we get to what Emily Dickinson calls “The manner of the children, who weary of the day, / Themselves the noisy playthings they cannot put away.”

I realize I’m not getting at these Illich moments in a very organized manner, but it is interesting here at the outset to play a little game: what parts of this book do I remember, two weeks after finishing it? Or to put it more vividly, which ideas have lodged themselves in my head like a good melody or a powerful set of chords?

I’m doing some work now on my own chord-cluster, trying to orchestrate Engelbart’s idea of the “integrated domain” with ideas about metaphor, gaming, and conceptual thought. Thus one of the most arresting chord-sets for me in Illich’s Deschooling Society comes in a chapter called “Learning Webs,” a chapter that has obviously been extremely influential in the conversation about teaching and learning technologies (Bryan Alexander, for example, has spoken very powerfully about Illich’s influence on his own work).

The passage I have in mind begins as follows:

The man-made environment has become as inscrutable as nature is for the primitive. At the same time, educational materials have been monopolized by school. Simple educational objects have been expensively packaged by the knowledge industry. They have become specialized tools for professional educators, and their cost has been inflated by forcing them to stimulate either environments or teachers.

The connection with the entire “CMS” or “LMS” or “IMS” industry is obvious. Giving students a wiki-like personal learning environment, on the other hand, with both straightforward and oblique prompts for its uses, as well as a forum for them to share their own discoveries and innovations in the use of such an environment, might break up the CMS monopoly and the monopolies that CMS’s serve. After all, even the most repellent of course management systems does not emerge from a vacuum. It serves (or services) a particular institutional structure and set of emphases.

Martha drives this point all the way home:

If CMSs are off-base by valuing the course as a unit of measurement aren’t they really just guilty of reflecting what’s valued by the institutions? When are schools going to start to value people over courses?

Yet schools no doubt believe they are already doing so, and that courses serve people in a uniquely effective (scalable, sustainable) way. There’s a little truth to this, perhaps, and perhaps also a good measure of self-deception and arrogance. I think Illich would encourage us to examine “prior art” for school generally, not just for contested patent decisions involving Blackboard. What do schools as they are currently constructed feel they have invented or have proprietary rights to? The modern and fairly recent model of the German research university is not the last word in education by any means, just as K-12 schooling as currently implemented does not necessarily represent the most advanced models of education imaginable.

The example of supermarket tomatoes comes to mind: this item can be provided in mass quantities with greater ease than ever before. In other words, they scale very well. But they have very little flavor.

Of course, schools don’t emerge from a vacuum either, which is one of the failings of Illich’s book in my view: we have built the schools we want, obviously. These institutions emerge from our decisions as a society, as a people. That said, school should be the place where self-correction (for we are emphatically not the prisoners of our own separate consciousnesses) must thrive and flourish, and a real school will take continual care to nourish humane and caring disruptions and innovations, especially within its own boundaries.

The teacher is jealous of the textbook he defines as his professional implement. The student may come to hate the lab because he associates it with schoolwork. The administrator rationalizes his protective attitude toward the library as a defense of costly public equipment against those who would play with it rather than learn. In this atmosphere the student too often uses the map, the lab, the encyclopedia, or the microscope only at the rare moments when the curriculum tells him to do so. Even the great classics become part of “sophomore year” instead of marking a new turn in a person’s life. School removes things from everyday use by labeling them educational tools.

These are strong words. Jealousy, hatred, rationalization. Illich delights in extreme language for its provocations, but there’s more to it than that, I think. Illich believes we face a crisis, one in which education becomes divorced from personhood. School removes things not just from everyday use, but from personal use. I would further argue that we can know the truly personal because of a special component of intimacy that is always present to a greater or lesser degree. To invoke Bryan Alexander again, one of the things I remember most vividly from the first talk I heard him give on mobile learning was the idea that part of the charming power of mobile computing devices lay in the intimate relationship between them and their users. I think that size is only part of that intimacy. I think that another, vital part of that intimacy has to do with the way we can know and be known by those devices. Of course those devices don’t really “know” us, but they are built to reflect us and in that respect know us as we know ourselves.

An example: I do not have to tell my students to construct a playlist on their iPods or compile a list of buddys on their IM clients. By contrast, I am continually frustrated and a little mystified by their apparent unwillingness to write in the margins of their books. I know they want to sell the books back, and there are no doubt other reasons for their reluctance to mark up their books, but I do believe that some part of their reluctance has to do with their feeling estranged from the heart and arteries of their own educations. (For more along these lines, Walker Percy’s “The Loss of the Creature” is indispensable, as is the question David Bartholomae and Anthony Petrosky proposed as an assignment for students: what is the difference between a common tourist and a complex tourist?”)

So here’s a follow-up question: to what extent are the citizens (staff, faculty, students, administrators) of formal educational communities estranged, not-intimate, with the very tools they make available, or use themselves?

If we are to deschool, both tendencies must be reversed. The general physical environment must be made accessible, and those physical learning resources which have been reduced to teaching instruments must become generally available for self-directed learning. Using things only as part of a curriculum can have an even worse effect than just removing them from the general environment. It can corrupt the attitudes of pupils.

To which I would add: it can corrupt the attitudes of the institutions themselves.

Now here is the part that resonated most powerfully for me. It has to do with play and thought.

Games are a case in point. I do not mean the “games” of the physical education department (such as football and basketball), which the schools use to raise income and prestige and in which they have made a substantial capital investment. As the athletes themselves are well aware, these enterprises, which take the form of warlike tournaments, have undermined the playfulness of sports and are used to reinforce the competitive nature of schools. Rather I have in mind the educational games which can provide a unique way to penetrate formal systems. Set theory, linguistics, propositional logic, geometry, physics, and even chemistry reveal themselves with little effort to certain persons who play these games. A friend of mine went to a Mexican market with a game called “‘Wff ‘n Proof,” which consists of some dice on which twelve logical symbols are imprinted. He showed children which two or three combinations constituted a well-formed sentence, and inductively within the first hour some onlookers also grasped the principle. Within a few hours of playfully conducting formal logical proofs, some children are capable of introducing others to the fundamental proofs of propositional logic. The others just walk away.

In fact, for some children such games are a special form of liberating education, since they heighten their awareness of the fact that formal systems are built on changeable axioms and that conceptual operations have a gamelike nature [emphasis mine]. They are also simple, cheap, and–to a large extent–can be organized by the players themselves.

I remember Wff ‘n Proof very fondly. What I lacked in my own experience of that game was someone to play with. Among its other missions, real school must surely be a place where the “gamers” who are mastering conceptual operations can find each other and play more skillfully under the tutelage of those who have been engaged in advanced conceptual operations for some time and with conspicuous success.

EDIT: I just realized that this is my 400th post. When I hit 500, I’m throwing a party for my best buds in the blogosphere. Watch for the wiki we’ll use to organize the potluck.

I’ve been thinking even more than usual these days about leadership, particularly the Frye mantra that one can “lead from anywhere.” I’m embarking on a new season of leadership as I take up my new old position at the University of Mary Washington. Returning to full-time teaching, I look forward to the new lessons I’ll learn, from my colleagues at UMW and elsewhere, and especially from my students. Many bracing opportunities await. (I love the way “bracing” suggests both a support and something that makes you grab on–a primal word!)

As I was working through Ivan Illich’s Deschooling Society the first time, a passage on leadership caught my eye:

The role of the educational initiator or leader, the master or “true” leader, is somewhat more elusive than that of the professional administrator or the pedagogue. This is so because leadership is itself hard to define. In practice, an individual is a leader if people follow his initiative and become apprentices in his progressive discoveries. Frequently, this involves a prophetic vision of entirely new standards … in which present “wrong” will turn out to be “right”….

Leadership also does not depend on being right. As Thomas Kuhn points out, in a period of constantly changing paradigms most of the very distinguished leaders are bound to be proven wrong by the test of hindsight. Intellectual leadership does depend on superior intellectual discipline and imagination and the willingness to associate with others in their exercise.

I think that last sentence is the key. It certainly describes the intellectual leadership I want to foster among my students. “Superior intellectual discipline and imagination and the willingness to associate with others in their exercise”: a direct and deceptively simple definition, that. A goal worth striving for.

More blogging, particularly about my own work in the classroom and about books I’m reading. I’ll be back in the classroom in mid-January, but I have some catching up to do with work I did in 2006, including the last Donne seminar podcasts and a special number on my use of blogs for final papers in my film studies class last summer. (Yes, I’m a little behind.) For books, here’s what I have started, and what I plan to blog on soon:

Hughes, Robert. What I Didn’t Know. Memoir by an extraordinary writer and art critic, the man who through his book and television series The Shock of the New taught me how to understand modern art and modernism generally. My thanks to my fellow blogger at justmusing.net for a lovely birthday present.

Illich, Ivan. Deschooling Society. This one tore the top of my head off, as Emily Dickinson might say. I don’t agree with everything he says, but he gets directly to the heart of what real school ought to be, and why most schooling falls so short of the mark. I’m eager to work through this book again, and I’ll be using it as part of my keynote address at the University of Maryland’s Innovations in Teaching and Learning Conference in February. NB: You can find this book online here.

Licklider, J. C. R. Libraries of the Future. An astonishing book that I’m still trying to digest.

Palmer, Parker. The Courage to Teach. A perfect going-away gift from my direct reports at the University of Richmond: Terry Dolson, Mark Nichols, and Kevin Creamer. This is probably the best book I’ve read on teaching since Jerome Bruner’s The Culture of Education, and that’s saying something.

—. Let Your Life Speak. A brave and inspiring book, and another perfect going-away gift from my DRs at UR. They’re a great team. I’m very grateful for their support and talents, and I look forward to hearing wonderful things from them and all the folks at the University of Richmond Center for Teaching, Learning and Technology in 2007.

Happy New Year, everyone.

Queen Elizabeth II meets Web 2.0. A nice symmetry, and a great treat for Boxing Day.

The Queen’s 2006 Christmas message is available as a podcast. I find this turn of events uncanny. I am also struck (deliberately vague word) by the British Monarchy website, which I had not visited before. I’ll be exploring. (Note to other explorers: don’t miss the Royal Diary.)

To get the Royal Podcast, I subscribed via iTunes (one-click simplicity, for which I thank Her Majesty’s Web Chamberlains). Looking in iTunes for the Christmas message, I found that the Chamberlains had thoughtfully provided another podcast: the Queen’s 80th birthday speech.

Calling it “The Royal Podcast,” as the web site does, brings a smile: the term sounds a little like “The Holy Hand Grenade” (of Antioch, if I recall correctly). But I don’t mean to be churlish. I welcome Her Majesty (a pretty nice girl, though she doesn’t have a lot to say) to my portable media device, and hope she will find herself at home there with IT Conversations, poetry, Phil Keaggy, and the Firesign Theatre.

I love this picture. An unseasonably warm day for Richmond in December, and we’re walking our way back from the department potluck.

So a quick Christmas Eve shout-out to two of my favorite elves (and to one I put up with, not without affection, i.e. me): Eric Palmer (left) and Terry Dolson (right). Working with them has been a tremendous gift.

Note that there’s an elf not pictured: Mark Nichols. Someone had to take the photo. Mark was the elf with the smart phone. Like me, Mark appreciates a good gadget, and though the North Pole workshop hasn’t got VoIP yet, he’s living proof that they’re fully in the cellular age.

Don’t forget to track Santa’s sleight tonight through NORAD, everyone!