Much, much more to say (and respond to) on the Collaboration in the Humanities thread, but I need to note the current Wikipedia controversy over an inaccurate biography. Many fascinating and urgent issues raised by these events, with the best talk about them occurring on Wikipedia itself, especially in the discussion pages.

In case the article I linked to above is deleted by the Wikipedia admins, here’s another description of the controversy. This account trumpets the value and accuracy of traditional media in ways that seem a bit self-serving to me, especially since traditional media don’t always get it right, either. It’s also worth noting that the vigorous and thoughtful discussion of the issue on Wikipedia doesn’t get a mention. No surprises there–this is an economic competition, after all, and I’m sure MSNBC wants us to get all our information from them.

I was going to leave all this as a comment on Techfoot’s latest blog entry, but the comment got so long that I figured it’d be better to house it here. For best results, please do read Gene’s entry first, then come back to this long and winding post.

Perhaps given the terms of the discussion at Gene’s meetings, “collaborative” and “communal” are not really the same. I keep thinking we need to put the products of individual reflection and creation in a conversation that, as it augments each individual contribution (conversation is an augmentative process, though I confess that meetings often seem like conclusive proof that that’s not true), becomes a truly collaborative environment that stimulates more individual creation and reflection.

The Mythical Man-Month talks a good deal about conceptual integrity as a sine qua non, and perhaps the humanities will always get after that goal differently from the sciences, since so much of our work in the humanities does consist of fact-finding (or evidence-finding) mingled with deeply considered and informed reflection that strongly represents an individual mind’s perspectives and sensibilities. The capacity to articulate strongly individuated and informed reflection is, I think, one of the primary goals of education in the humanities. But even so, we need to do much, much more to foster deep, serendipitous, multi-voiced connections among those individual creations.

The blogosphere is one model of individual voices collaborating, not on each piece of writing, but within an environment that fosters the kinds of connections I’m describing. The blogosphere is inherently collaborative–we are laboring together–but my blog is my blog and my voice carries my utterances even as my utterances are shaped through my agency and filtered through my sensibilities but created out of the other utterances that surround and inform me. “Utterance” is a term from Bakhtin’s linguistic philosophy. For a fine brief overview of Bakhtin’s thought, see this Wikipedia article. (Thought: perhaps the Wikipedia’s greatest value as a reference work is as a detailed glossary for the blogosphere.) For me, Bakhtin’s thought offers an essential way out of the connection vs. content debate–but more on that below.

I think our classrooms can also foster silence and speech, individual reflection and intellectual community, personal agency and authority as well as strong examples of the way culture potentially augments every human voice, allowing it to carry far beyond its immediate sphere of utterance.

I guess for me the bottom line is that the design of “real school” can and should foster both individual agency and cultural ferment. In my mind’s eye I see the spaces in which this happens. The classroom starts to look more like the campus, and the campus starts to feel more like a giant classroom. The classroom can very naturally support both massed attention to single compelling prompts and scattered, even serendipitous meetings, group work, project-based “pods,” etc. And the campus is not a set of purpose-built buildings so much as it is a giant learning commons that supports discovery and creation in multiple ways, some of them quite surprising.

It’s much easier not to do this, of course. We would never make our own living rooms, or studies, or rec rooms, or bedrooms into large closets with bare walls and anchored seats. But classrooms, like hospital rooms and prison cells, tend to be designed around principles of replication, interchangeability, and ease of maintenance. Those are not bad goals in and of themselves, and they do contribute to economies of scale, but I think they also interfere with the notion of compelling experiences shaped out of communal or collaborative intellectual experience.

Heresy time: I’m not against the sage on the stage, as long as she or he is genuinely sagacious and the stage is genuinely interesting, provocative, compelling, or enchanted. A great sage on a great stage can become an internalized “guide at the side,” and the reverse is also true. But now I’m onto another dichotomy–perhaps not unrelated. The key, it seems to me, is to have a city of learning with all sorts of spaces. Perhaps that’s the ecology John Seely Brown is describing. Perhaps it’s something like a giant movie set that supports reconfiguration as well as a rich infrastructure. (Seems to me wireless makes that circle more square-able.)

(It’s material for another post, really, but I’ve been meaning to blog for some time about the connection vs. content debate that’s been going on at George Siemen’s “Connectivism” blog. It’s a real dilemma, and perhaps it’s a real dichotomy (I remain skeptical here), but it’s also an instance of how difficult it is to keep one nail from driving out another.)

Great little nugget from Karen Hyman’s “Customer Service and the ‘Rule of 1965′”:

Choosing New Services: five easy questions
Do you have the skills? No.
Do you have the time? No.
Do you have the resources? No.
Is it difficult to manage? Yes.
Can it be abused? Yes.
None of the above is a reason not to do something, because the answers are always the same for any significant change.

From the October, 1999 American Libraries, but timeless and … ah … widely applicable in contexts other than libraries. A quick Google search reveals that Karen Hyman is still knocking ’em dead. I wish she blogged. She’d be a great asset to the blogosphere.

Catching up on my oook-learning, I found this little doorway into a secret garden where the inside is much larger than the outside.

Hugh Blackmer’s Nova Scotia Faces collection is a marvelous primer in close observation and the delicately timed articulation of commentary. If one wants to teach close reading and distinguish that art from the deadening habit of paraphrase, Hugh’s work here would be a great place to go.

He says he’s in no hurry with this project, but as one of the World’s Most Impatient Men I hope he won’t dawdle too long in his splendid New England otium.

I don’t mean to be greedy or gluttonous. No, that’s wrong: they’re exactly what I mean to be. More please!

I was all set to blog about “Semasiology,” a truly mind-expanding IT Conversations podcast from OSCON 2005, when I noted (via my Bloglines reader) that Hugh Blackmer of the always rewarding “oook blog” had beat me to it. So now my pleasure is doubled, as I get to point you to the podcast and to Hugh’s great blog. In addition to his characteristically smart and thoughtful commentary, Hugh has also provided some key snippets from the podcast to pique your interest.

Sometimes, things work out.

And what is semasiology? In the podcast, it’s defined as the study of the way words change their meaning over time. In this case, the specific word is actually the infinitive “to read.” I confess I like this definition from Princeton’s Word Net even better: “cognitive semantics: the branch of semantics that studies the cognitive aspects of meaning.”

Enjoy.

EDIT: Almost forgot to mention that the speaker sounds like a cross between Star Trek: The Next Generation‘s “Q” and Tom Lehrer. Most entertaining.

Well, they’re sort of meta-podcasts.

Perhaps not.

I do know a very clean cheese shop that’s wonderfully uncontaminated by cheese…. Don’t get me started on the ex-parrots.

Harvard’s Extension School is podcasting lectures on “Understanding Computers and the Internet.” For more details, see this Harvard Crimson story. The podcast comes in both audio and video flavors. It’s the first Harvard course to be podcasted. It’s also available to everyone on the Internet, not just those students who have the key to a special locked-down iTunes store.

Student response, according to the article, has been very positive, for a number of reasons. And the teachers are starting to get fan mail from all over the world. (What’s not to like about that?)

Why all the excitement about “canned lectures”? Perhaps the excitement is about lectures. Is that excitement misplaced? Perhaps not.

So-called canned lectures may well seem less canned when the context for listening shifts: you don’t have to sit still, for one thing, and interesting words well chosen can make an interesting soundtrack as the scenery goes by. There’s also a shift when the listening device becomes more intimate. I remember my first transistor radio. I could play it under my pillow late at night, press it to my ear on the school bus, listen with an earphone on my elementary school’s “safety patrol” while waiting for the next group of kids to need help crossing the street. It felt like carrying a secret world around, one I could dip into and experience in many different settings, a parallel universe whose boundaries became a lot more fluid and permeable with my little radio.

But is it interactive?

Certainly can be. All good listening is interactive. All good listeners are co-creators. That’s not to say that the students should simply listen. No, eventually many or perhaps most of them should make their own podcasts. But there’s an art to listening well, just as there’s an art to reading well or viewing well, and that art is no mean craft. These arts probably aren’t complete unless they lead to speaking, writing, or designing oneself, but the practices are reciprocal, not mutually exclusive.

We need a theory of co-creation that maintains the vital distinction between writer and reader while articulating the common source of energy, inspiration, and attention that fuels them both, and the essential reciprocity that defines their relationship.

I’m coming to think that it’s all multitasking, whether divergent (attending to disparate and apparently unrelated events that are somehow synthesized in cognition) or convergent (attending to multiple modes of awareness, realization, reification, and attention within one tightly defined event–say, listening to a piano recital, or reading a poem). But that’s for another post.

Harvard story via Podcasting News.

Great blog entry from Steve Greenlaw over at Pedablogy about a collaboration involving him, his Economics colleague, and his Instructional Technology Specialist, Jerry “Running With Scissors” Slezak. It’s a wonderful example of how teaching and learning technologies can make potential synergy into kinetic synergy. Take some nifty tools, simple and direct methods, and conceptual sophistication that focuses on teaching needs and goals first and technology second, and the outcomes are, well, mighty encouraging. Add to that the opportunity the blog affords for not only sharing the experience but also (and crucially) reflecting upon it, and as John Lennon once sang, “I feel fine.” I bet the students are pretty happy too.

Kudos to all.

My first set of attempts at recording and commenting on “The Relique” was spoiled by a technical problem: I thought I was using one microphone, but in fact was using the built-in microphone on my tablet PC. I redid the recording to get a better-sounding podcast. So why podcast the spoiled attempt? Because I think the reading is usefully different and perhaps better, and because the commentary is fuller and more exploratory. By the time of the re-take, I had more of an idea of how I was going to say what I wanted to say. That led to a more concise and perhaps better commentary, but the first take is much fuller and more searching, even in its rambles.

Comparing the two takes is interesting. Comparing two takes of a student performance would also be interesting. Anything that enhances mindfulness while preserving discovery and delightful, serendipitous surprise is a good strategy for education, in my view. And thus I am bold enough to tax the listener’s patience with an inferior recording of the very same poem.

BY JOHN DONNE

From Poetryfoundation.org

Podcast: Play in new window | Download ()

As so often happens, I began this reading with great admiration for the poem and ended more than a little awestruck by it.

Some thoughts on that awe. A successful or at least meaningful performance demands commitment, in time; a committed process or a process of commitment, in other words. And from that commitment, vital meanings emerge. So meaning both precedes and follows from commitment. Commitment is exclusive, true: this, not that emphasis; this, not that timing; this, not that commentary. That exclusivity forces decisions, and decisions help to make or discover meaning (or both). (“Reason also is choice,” writes Milton.) At the same time, commitment can lead to a heightened awareness not so much of multiple meanings as of multiple nodes of meaning within the overall semantic shape or experience of the whole, and the way the modes connect to each other. Commitment demands connections, unless the commitment is completely random and blundering. Perhaps even then.

I’m aware I’m describing another version of the hermeneutic circle here: you can’t understand the whole unless you understand the parts, but you can’t understand the parts unless you understand the whole. Here’s the distinction, though, at least to my mind today: apprehension precedes comprehension, and commitment is the connection between them. There’s not a bottomless pit of ambiguity, nor is there a fierce conviction of one single interpretation, as a result of this commitment. Rather, there is a readiness, and an occasion of answerability, a time when I am called upon (by myself, in this case, but also by the presence of my teachers and mentors whom I have internalized) to give an account of the ongoing work of this poem.

That its work is ongoing I have no doubt.

Postscript: A Donne a Day 25 will be another take of the poem and commentary. Unfortunately, the quality of the recording is not as good: I thought I was using my Snowball USB mike, but in fact I was using the built-in mike on the tablet PC. You’ll hear lots of room tone, and not as clear or intelligible a recording of my voice. Still, the contrast, and the value of the initial take, are potentially interesting enough to warrant the duplication.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (5.1MB)

Strange headline–I’m irresistibly reminded of Blue Oyster Cult, even if I can’t get the proper diacritical mark there–but an interesting article in the Chronicle nonetheless. Rebecca Goetz writes a thoughtful, even temperate essay on her own experience as a grad-school blogger, offering evidence of its personal and professional value in her studies, and challenging the current backlash-assumption that blogging is dangerous to one’s career. She cites the earlier, pseudonymous “Ivan Tribble” essays in the Chronicle, and shares the “metablogging” questions and answers that emerged for her as she considered “Tribble”‘s arguments.

I’m not naive enough to think that masking and the ultra-careful control of information don’t play a large role in academic success, but I am stubborn enough to think it shouldn’t be that way. Higher education in particular has the responsibility to demonstrate to the world that there’s a better way. Irony doesn’t begin to describe the current situation, though, in which we urge our students to find their voices and spend most of our time manipulating our own. Perhaps this is the sour result of Foucault’s argument that all discourse is merely the circulation of power. I don’t believe that’s true, myself, but if it is, who could be blamed for turning to concealed weapons? And what could be more disruptive than the blogosphere?

Unless the blogosphere itself is nothing more than the latest instance of discourse as the circulation of power, as some (not all) students of social network analysis believe. I don’t believe that myself, not because I don’t believe the blogosphere cannot become a Foucaultian power exchange, or that power circulation doesn’t characterize some of the blogosphere already, but because I don’t believe such a thing is inevitable.

Rebecca says it’s a great time to be an academic blogger. I agree. And that greatness is our shared responsibility.