Or, second verse, very much but not exactly like the first. Call it “theme and variations.”

Longtime readers of my blog know how important Jon Udell has been for my thinking and leadership over the last two years. Two years: it’s hard for me to believe I’ve been reading him no longer than that. (In fact, it’s not quite yet two years; the anniversary comes in late February, 2007.) The intensity and scale of what I’ve learned from Jon make me feel as if he’s been my teacher and colleague for much, much longer. Once again I note that when teacher and student meet at the right time and in the right context, the two-way connection doesn’t take long to ramp up to pretty high bandwidth. Perhaps part of the art of learning, for both teacher and student, is to broaden the scope of “right time” and “right context” so those connections occur more frequently–and more effectively.

Now Jon is moving from InfoWorld to Microsoft. I have many, many thoughts on this transition, and on Jon’s continuing role as a free-lance infotech professor. (Question: who will be the first university to give this man an honorary degree?) As I get back into my sadly neglected blogging groove, I want to explore some of Jon’s public statements about teaching and learning, about the academy in which I ply my trades and the businesses in which he plies his. Jon’s devoting his second life (or perhaps he’s on numbers five or six?) to educating millions of netizens about the rich augmentation resources that surround them, resources of which most netizens are completely unaware. Jon’s discovering and creating a whole new set of rich materials for all of us to build with. It’s sandbox time. Fortunately, I already have a golden pail and shovel.

I’ve called Jon an “artist of the possible.” He is indeed a master of that art, and a true doctor of philosophy: a teacher of the love of knowledge. As such, he is on the leading edge not only of practice, but of articulation, itself a kind of practice. Oook and I like to quote Jon whenever possible. Here’s my Udellism of the day, quoted from Jon’s last blog at InfoWorld, a post in which Jon writes a brief apologia pro vita sua, and in doing so, beautifully expresses what I believe to be the calling of all educators:

To me it’s all part of a pattern. I use commonly-available technologies in unexpected ways to tell stories that make connections, distill experience, and transmit knowledge.

The “it” in Jon’s first sentence refers to his own vocations. If Jon doesn’t mind, I’ll claim that pronoun for mine as well. I too hear a pattern in my callings.

In January, I travel back to my post as a Professor of English at the University of Mary Washington, where I look forward to a season of teaching and learning and writing, and to many joyful reunions. That said, there are many difficult partings at hand here in Richmond. There are also many conversations I hope will continue and grow. I’ve learned a great deal here and I’m grateful for the opportunity to have done so.

It will be good to take stock as I move back. Time to trace the patterns of those callings once again.

Though in general I agree with e.e. cummings and Terry Dolson on the priority of feeling over syntax, there are exceptions. Case in point: yesterday’s Washington Post article discussing medical firsts, in which a timeline featured this doozie:

2001: First implantable replacement heart. Robert Tools is given the first artificial heart that functions without a permanent attachment to a power source in Kentucky. He lives 151 days.

From Gary Taylor’s indispensable website:

As a way of beginning, one might compare the art of photography to the act of pointing. All of us, even the best-mannered of us, occasionally point, and it must be true that some of us point to more interesting facts, events, circumstances, and configurations than others. It is not difficult to imagine a person – a mute Virgil of the corporeal world – who might elevate the act of pointing to a creative plane, a person who would lead us through the fields and streets and indicate a sequence of phenomena and aspects that would be beautiful, humorous, morally instructive, cleverly ordered, mysterious, or astonishing, once brought to our attention, but that had been unseen before, or seen dumbly, without comprehension. This talented practitioner of the new discipline (the discipline a cross, perhaps, between theater and criticism) would perform with a special sense of grace, sense of timing, narrative sweep, and wit, thus endowing the act not merely with intelligence, but with that quality of formal rigor that identifies a work of art, so that we would be uncertain, when remembering the adventure of the tour, how much of our pleasure and sense of enlargement had come from the things pointed to and how much from a pattern created by the pointer.

John Szarkowski,
from Atget and the Art of Photography
an essay in “The Work of Atget Vol. 1: Old France”
Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1981

So much to savor here. This early morning, I savor in particular the idea that the “quality of formal rigor that identifies a work of art” comes from

a special sense of grace,
sense of timing,
narrative sweep,
and wit.

By Al Ravenna – Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, New York World-Telegram and the Sun Newspaper Photograph Collection.This image is available from the United States Library of Congress’s Prints and Photographs division under the digital ID cph.3c31540. Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1267378

A recent article in the New Yorker tells the story of Virginia Apgar, the physician who gave her name to the quick, simple assessment of babies’ condition at one and five minutes after birth. Apgar understood that doctors and nurses needed such an assessment to guide their approach to early intervention and treatment. She also understood that without such an assessment, current practice was unlikely to change, as there was no baseline from which to work.

Atul Gawande describes Apgar’s system this way:

The Apgar score, as it became known universally, allowed nurses to rate the condition of babies at birth on a scale from zero to ten. An infant got two points if it was pink all over, two for crying, two for taking good, vigorous breaths, two for moving all four limbs, and two if its heart rate was over a hundred. Ten points meant a child born in perfect condition. Four points or less meant a blue, limp baby.

The score was published in 1953, and it transformed child delivery. It turned an intangible and impressionistic clinical concept–“the condition of a newly born baby”–into a number that people could collect and compare. Using it required observation and documentation of the true condition of every baby. Moreover, even if only because doctors are competitive, it drove them to want to produce better scores–and therefore better outcomes–for the newborns they delivered….

The Apgar score changed everything. It was practical and easy to calculate, and it gave clinicians at the bedside immediate information on how they were doing.

The article got me to wondering: what if we could generate an “Apgar” for each class meeting? Here’s my idea. At the beginning of the class, students would assign themselves a score based on questions like these:

1. Did you read the material for today’s class meeting carefully? No=0, Yes, once=1, Yes, more than once=2
2. Did you come to class today with questions or with items you’re eager to discuss? No=0, Yes, one=1, Yes, more than one=2
3. Since we last met, did you talk at length to a classmate or classmates about either the last class meeting or today’s meeting? No=0, Yes, one person=1, Yes, more than one person=2
4. Since our last meeting, did you read any unassigned material related to this course of study? No=0, Yes, one item=1, Yes, more than one item=2
5. Since our last class meeting, how much time have you spent reflecting on this course of study and recent class meetings? None to 29 minutes=0, 30 minutes to an hour=1, over an hour=2

Ideally, students would transmit their scores electronically, and the teacher would be able to do a quick class average at the beginning of the meeting. The teacher should also assign him or herself a score, with “colleague” substituting for “classmate,” for example, or perhaps with a different set of questions altogether. The teacher’s score shouldn’t be averaged in with the students’, but it should be shared with them somehow.

It would be interesting to chart the class’s scores over a semester, and to compare one section’s scores with another’s. It would also be interesting to see if the class began to compete with itself to try to keep those “Apgar”s high. There’s also a merciful aspect here for the teacher, who could see pretty quickly that a particular day didn’t go well for reasons beyond his or her own failings. It would also allow the teacher to move quickly to a plan “b” if the score indicated either that students were not ready for a challenging, self-motivated day … or if they were, beyond the teacher’s expectations. (It does happen.)

Seems to me one could do this exercise with clickers, or with a Google spreadsheet the whole class could log into. With the latter method, it would be a good reason for students to bring their laptops to class.

Betsy at “It’s All Connected” shared this sonnet with me in a comment on the Keats podcast below. The poem spoke to me, and I wanted to try to read it aloud. I’d like to hear Betsy do it, and I’d like to hear my beloved English professor Elizabeth Phillips read it too (she very much enjoys Millay), but in the meantime here’s my attempt.

English geek mode on: I found it hard to catch the tone, which is somewhere between ecstasy, hunger, and agony. The emotion is very intense and it’s difficult to avoid melodrama in the reading. Millay herself saves the poem from melodrama in that breathtaking final couplet, where the four monosyllables sound like flat resignation mingled with anger and sorrow.

It’s a terrific poem and one of the few sonnets I know with two stanzas of seven lines each. The break usually comes at line nine (8-6) or twelve (4-4-4-2). The unusual break makes the poem all the more poignant.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (798.3KB)

Computerworld story here. Andy blogs about RC2 here.

I’ve been a satisfied Firefox user since Andy delivered his impressive oration two years ago on “10 Reasons to Use Firefox.” Thunderbird is my email client of choice for my home ISP email account. It’s interesting and satisfying to see how Mozilla has kept on plugging away, patiently leading us into this open-source, collaborative world. The Mozilla wiki gives us all, even non-coders like me, a chance to give back. I’m grateful.

For the past few days I’ve spied Jack Frost on the grass around my house. The tang of fall is in the air, and in honor of the season, I read “To Autumn,” by John Keats.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (1.7MB)

To quote Pete Townshend, “can’t pretend that growing older never hurts.” But hey, he made it to his 60’s and he’s still rocking, “My Generation” notwithstanding. 🙂

From xkcd, a site I picked up from Robin Sloan at Snarkmarket.

My boss very casually (or was it slyly?) sent me a link to something truly mind-blowing this afternoon. I hope she enjoyed the sound of my world being transformed. 🙂

Lyric poetry is very dear to me, as is writing generally, as is music. Imagine an idea that unites parts of each joy into a truly new whole. A simple idea, expressed elegantly, analyzed in depth and with great articulation in the supporting materials, but in its presentation to the user so simple that almost anyone could get a handle on it, from elementary school students to a grizzled Ph.D. like me.

Go take a look for yourself. I feel like a glider in an updraft just thinking about it.

There’s a prize of one million dollars for solving the Poincaré Conjecture. The yellow brick road to that payoff leads past many of the usual and important milestones in academia: conferences, papers, peer-reviewed journals. As a recent article in The New Yorker makes clear, it’s also important to circulate early versions of a proof strategically, to be sure the flaws are caught before you stake your claim to a discovery.

Russian mathematician Grigory Perelman went through many of the usual processes, according to the article. There was a Berkeley fellowship, contact with many distinguished mathematicians, job invitations from all over, and the like (if there is a “like” when one gets to those heights). But at age twenty-nine, Perelman chose to move back to Russia, to a low-paying university post and physical isolation from the very thinkers he had sought out.

Home. Alone. But not quite alone. Here’s the sentence that even in 2006 retains its power to astonish–and I hope it retains that power for a long time, though the article makes relatively little of it.

The Internet made it possible for Perelman to work alone while continuing to tap a common pool of knowledge.

Individuality and community, enacted at one of the higher reaches of human intellectual accomplishment. But it gets better:

On November 11th, Perelman had posted a thirty-nine-page paper entitled “The Entropy Formula for the Ricci Flow and Its Geometric Applications,” on arXiv.org, a Web site used by mathematicians to post preprints–articles awaiting publication in refereed journals. He then e-mailed an abstract of his paper to a dozen mathematicians in the United States … none of whom had heard from him for years.

Within seven months, Perelman completed the trilogy of Internet postings that seem to have proved the Poincaré Conjecture.

Questions of temperament aside, Perelman’s choices illustrate some of the enormous potential consequences of the Information Age and its media. Scholarship and the communities that form around it will be slow to change, and that’s not all bad. Education is conservative as well as liberal in senses that have nothing to do with partisan politics. Yet I look at the Perelman story and I’m struck by two things. One is that we are at the very outset of these changes, and many of us alive today will live to see dramatic and far-reaching shifts in higher education involving not only learning but also the community of scholars. That’s pretty obvious. The second striking thing, however, is that the New Yorker piece spends almost no time considering this revolution. I speculate that that’s either because that fundamental paradigm shift hasn’t registered on the authors … or because they’re already taking it for granted.

I’ll close with a small troubling thought. It is entirely possible for us in the scholarly community and in higher education generally to take something for granted before it’s actually registered on us. If that happens, we will be blown before the wind instead of steering by it.

How should we keep that from happening?