Fredo Viola

Fredo Viola

I love the Internet, but only because beings from my species (go team!) are always leaving items of wonder and interest lying about.

A link from a nifty entry in Andy’s text blog led me to the amazing and very beautiful “Sad Song” video, which led me to the amazing and very beautiful website crafted by the “Sad Song” artist and musician Fredo Viola. See the video, marvel at the information on the making of the video, browse the site, admire Fredo’s list of faves: “Shostakovich, Britten, Bartok, Harry Nilsson, Stravinsky, Schnittke, BOC, Belle & Sebastian and Bach!”

Extraordinary. Thanks, Andy. Thanks, Fredo.

Learn One, Do One, Teach One

Here’s the idea. Comments are not only welcome but coveted.

The sequence of learn one, do one, teach one is well known. The process seeks to shorten the path between study, practice, and understanding, if understanding is demonstrated at least in part by the ability to master an explanation and customize it (and a demonstration) to address new learners in an unpredictable learning situation. The process also propagates learning very rapidly, as each teacher helps to build many more teachers.

I’m thinking that learn one, do one, teach one describes not only three steps in a process, or even three modes of learning, but one high-level activity in which each mode or step must be present at every other step. The activity is characterized by attention and articulation (these concepts may also be distinct but not separate). The steps are distinguished by the relative proportion of attention and articulation vectors: what things am I attending to, and in what mixture? what is the nature of my articulation, and what is my audience?

Learning involves a proportionally more intense vector of other-directed attention, but at the same time the learner’s attention must be self-directed enough to engage in an ongoing re-articulation that responds to the teacher. The learner must “follow along,” and that involves at least in part a kind of auto-hypnosis that makes the lesson appear to be created by the attending self.

Doing involves a proportionally more intense vector of self-directed attention, along with an ongoing self-directed articulation that serves as a feedback loop monitoring progress toward the goal. At the same time, the doer’s attention must be other-directed enough to make that feedback loop truly critical and useful. That is, the doer must be ruthless in his or her self-critique, making the I into an other.

Teaching involves a proportionally more intense vector of other-directed attention in which the work is narrated. This narration also bootstraps the process into metacognitive areas in which students witness the teacher engaging his or her own zone of proximal development (acting as one’s own coach) and thus can learn how to access their own ZPDs themselves. This phase involves the most dynamic cognitive apprenticeship, on the part of teacher and learner.

All of that said, each of the steps must include some measure of the other to be effective. The learner must engage in a kind of self-education and re-articulation for the experience to be active and useful instead of passive and illusory. The doer, however much flow and automaticity he or she enjoys in the work, must have a feedback loop in there somewhere, and that loop is made out of attention vectors that are not obviously part of the doing. The teacher must have elements of self-directed learning and doing that are active during the other-directed articulation and narration.

If I haven’t vexed him beyond his patience, Bakhtin is hovering here somewhere.

Wade Roush on Continuous Computing

Technology Review‘s Wade Roush has been publishing a fascinating set of blogs over the last few days: “10,000 Brainiacs: Let’s Write a Social Computing Story, Socially!” As you’ll see from some of the comments I’ve left, I’m still not convinced that transparent computing is the only paradigm we should consider or work toward. (Doug Engelbart’s vision won’t let go of me.) But the writing is spirited, the imagination fully engaged, and the conclusions at the end of part 4 are beautifully articulated, especially for someone like me who’s been wearing glasses since age 6.

And this is what’s truly new about continuous computing. As advanced as our PCs and our other information gadgets have grown, we have never really loved them. They’re like toasters and VCRs: We’ve used them all these years only because they have made us more productive. But now that’s changing. When computing devices are always with us and always helping us be the social beings we are, time spent “on the computer” no longer feels like time taken away from real life. And it isn’t: cell phones, laptops, and the Web are, in fact, becoming the best tools we have for staying connected to the people and ideas and activities that are important to us. The underlying hardware and software may never become invisible, but it will become less obtrusive, allowing us to focus our attention on the actual information being conveyed. Eventually, living in a world of continuous computing will be like wearing eyeglasses. The rims are always visible, but the wearer forgets he has them on–even though they’re the only things making the world clear.

Thanks, Wade, for your voice and your efforts here.

A Donne A Day 8: "The Canonization"

Today’s Donne is particularly interesting, as it combines great dramatic urgency with considerable complexity. Its diction is rough, tender, hyperbolic, minutely observant. Its sentiments are both inflated and moving. “For God’s sake hold your tongue, and let me love”–a very strange beginning for a love poem, more a line for the stage than the outset of a lyric poem.

My post-poem ramble does little to unpack the philosophical argument at the center of the poem, one that includes the implausible assertion (more like wishful thinking) that male post-coital depression has been overcome in the fiery intensity of this love. I do try to get at one of the more confusing parts of the poem, the final stanza in which the voice shifts from the poet to the voices he imagines will petition him and his lover after their deaths to intercede with God to allow their love to become a paradigm for all succeeding lovers. The scandalous, even blasphemous assertions in the poem are blunted by our secular sensibilities, but they were notorious among Donnes’ coterie in his own time. This poem, like most of Donne’s work, was not printed for widespread reading until after his death. During his life, they circulated in manuscript.

Here’s “The Canonization.”

IT Conversations and a Business Week Podcasting Feature

IT ConversationsBusiness Week just published an interesting and useful cluster of articles on podcasting. I was particularly intrigued by the slide show of their top podcasts. I listen to a few of these regularly, and one of them has proved so consistently useful (an understatement) that several weeks ago I answered a call for volunteer post-production audio engineers: Doug Kaye’s amazing ITConversations. It’s been great collaborating with Doug and Team ITC. I’ve been privileged to work on some fascinating audio, including my most treasured assignment: editing, mixing, and mastering a presentation by Doug Engelbart from last fall’s Accelerating Change conference. When I cast my vote on the Business Week site for my favorite podcast out of their top picks, I of course voted for ITConversations. When I saw the results, I was surprised and pleased to see that Doug’s podcast came in first, followed by Adam Curry’s Daily Source Code. No doubt the geek vote drove the results, but still: a nice surprise.

Udell Understands Blogs

And how. I’ve admired his phrase “active resume” for a long time (which these days means about two months). Now I read his blog of May 24, and I understand his understanding even more deeply. Blogs are about “narrating your work.” That phrase isn’t Udell’s, but the analysis of what that means in terms of professional life is Udell all the way.

The writing we’ve always urged our freshmen to learn, writing that articulates a knowing self in a community of human experience both past and present, can now explicitly become what it always implied. And at the heart of it all is storytelling, an account of our works and days. That’s not self-indulgence. It’s oxygen.