Over the summer I corresponded frequently with a colleague at another school who was intrigued by my use of a phpBB discussion forum platform for my online classes. I’ve come to rely on the discussion forums as the primary community builders and hubs for these classes. (I still use blogs and Hypothesis and often Wikipedia as well, but that’s for another post.)

Along the way I thought aloud about my conceptual frameworks for these learning spaces. My frameworks seem in some respects radically different from the frameworks I see in other discussions about online learning. Perhaps they’re not so different as I think, but then again, I’ve been to enough conferences and heard enough talk about uber-LMS next-gen “learning engineered” approaches that I suspect my frameworks are indeed atypical.

At any rate, some thoughts on discussion forums as learning environments:

For me, the biggest question is one of environment and what the cog-psych people call “appraisal“–i.e., the message the environment and affordances send to the user about what sort of thing happens in that environment. That has to do with look and feel, with what’s out there on the Web that resembles the environment, what you can do with the particular affordances the environment provides. In short, what has the environment’s designer (or the platform’s installer, or the course’s instructor) imagined this experience might be like, or should be like?

So in these respects, the choice of what goes where on a platform is less about technical considerations that it is about social, affective, and cognitive considerations. Less like building a house, and more like hosting a great dinner party.

So, do you want your students to be in an environment in which other class discussions can be viewed if they choose–or where they see that these discussions are present, even if they never look at them? For me, that answer would be yes, as the space (in a theatrical sense almost) communicates that Here Fellow Learners Are Building Communities, Working Hard, And Having Fun While Doing So.

I wouldn’t myself put a faculty forum I’ve used for other business in there, because I don’t want the site to be “Dr. C.’s phpBB installation where he takes care of all his business.” Even if the students can’t look at the discussion itself (assuming they’d even want to of course), they see that the forum is there, and for me that subtly communicates that this is not a student learning site but a site that serves my needs first.

These are subtleties in some respects, but they’re all tied to my longstanding dissatisfaction with Blackboard’s transactional design for everything, including their “blogs” and “discussion forums.” I’ve peeked at Canvas, which is now being rolled out at VCU, and while it’s much sleeker and friendlier and web-savvy, it kind of amounts to the same thing.

And getting back to my original point, using something that’s NOT a designed-for-school platform helps the students’ appraisal shift a bit. Think of it as something like the beloved class meetings where you get to go outside. Same lesson, same students, same teacher, but not an environment that says SCHOOL quite so firmly. Another way to think of the forum is as a class-related “third place” or “third space.”  (Yes, the distractions can be a challenge, but so are ants at a picnic. The joy is worth the pain.)

At this point, my colleague asked if students would use a “just chatting” space if they had three spaces available on the forum, with another for guided online discussions and a third for questions and answers (student questions and teacher answers, presumably). I responded with the following thoughts.

In my experience, students typically want things in school to be transactional most of the time. That’s not always bad, but it’s mostly bad, because “transactional” rules out the real vulnerability and communal efforts and conspicuous commitment required for authentic learning communities. So if you create two spaces that are pretty much transactional, with one that’s a social space, they’ll likely say “spaces one and two matter for my utilitarian purposes of getting through this class and earning a good grade, and the rest is just fluff, and I’ve got a million other things to do, and I don’t even know these people, so forget it.”

A common teacher remedy would be to require the students to socialize, which is even more disastrous. (The beatings will continue until morale improves.)

My strong recommendation is to combine those three spaces. They’re all valuable, and they’re related. It will be the students’ responsibility to pay attention and to use the forum to find the information they want (a very easy thing to do, with a search box). You can nudge them along the way by making FAQs, making some threads into “stickies” or “announcements,” etc.

I do require that student posts be “interesting, substantive, and relevant.” My experience has been that there’s enough good socializing in the “interesting, substantive, and relevant” posts to make the forum lively. I’ve also made some recent tweaks, such as creating an “introductions” thread as I did for my summer class. Students need not provide any info they’re uncomfortable providing. They don’t have to use photos of themselves–any polite (i.e., NOT “nsfw”) avatar will do. Having that thread was a great way to start the class.

In my class sessions, I also repeat over and over what I consider to be the value of the forum. I regularly mention posts I’ve found particularly interesting and insightful. And very often, my approach to the next class will be shaped and inspired by the threads and enthusiasms I see on the forum.

I hope the above makes some sense even without the context of the original conversation. I’m happy to elaborate on any part of what I’ve written, either in the comments or in another post.

In subsequent posts, I want to reflect on my own Great Online Pivot last March, and what I learned as a result. I also want to explore some of what I did over the summer–including teaching a fully online asynchronous class–to prepare myself for my online teaching this fall. As a look ahead, here’s an example of one thing I learned to do, something I’d always wanted to try: I made course trailers. I’ll share one now.

Note: I wrote and posted this work to Facebook on Father’s Day 2020. Although I have many reservations about Facebook these days, and I suspect that “many” may well become “too many” before too long, it is a place of gathering and I depend on it for encouragement and solidarity. Responses come quickly. The news is often timely. The ties that bind are visible and sometimes surprising. Still.

But my first and best online home is still this blog, which I have sadly neglected for all sorts of reasons neither you nor I have the patience for me to recite.

The response to this memoir on Facebook made me think I would do well to reproduce it in an open space. I also know that every post to this good old home keeps the blog from going dark forever.

So another candle in the window, for my father.

I think of my father today, and remember the one place where he was always confident, happy, and full of wonder: his garden. He grew up on a subsistence farm, and worked for the Forest Service before he came to Roanoke for a new life of difficult and often menial physical labor. He complained about many things, and often, but in my hearing he never once complained about the work he had to do to make a living, whether it was grinding centerseals at the N&W shops, or cleaning schools as a day custodian, or, as he once did for a short while, handling what I’m sure were toxic substances in a local biochemical plant.

It always seemed to me that the work he was born to do was farming. I recall hearing him and my mother talking about selling our house, buying some land in Vinton (near Roanoke), and setting up a farm. But someone else would have had to manage it all–my dad was emphatically not a manager–and the idea didn’t last long, though I still remember the conversations.

Later in life, my dad always had a pretty large garden, large enough to hire a horse-driven plow to till the earth at planting time. We ate delicious vegetables from that garden. I thought all vegetables tasted that way until I had to rely on a grocery store, long before groceries had begun to care about better-tasting vegetables. Even today, though, with the right kind of grocery store tomatoes tasting very good indeed, it’s not at all like what my father helped to bring out of the ground.

Neither I nor my brother had any interest in farming, and to this day I’ve never had a garden of my own. But I remember my father in his garden, and I have him on lo-res videocassette explaining his garden to me. I’ve included a still image from that video below.

I’ve also included what to my knowledge is the only letter my father ever wrote me, a postcard he sent to me during the Governor’s School in 1974. He would sometimes jot a note on the bottom of a letter from my mother, but this was unique in being from him only. I was away from home for a month, longer than I’d ever been away, and for our close-knit family it seemed a very long time indeed.

You can see from the handwriting that my father struggled with a tremor pretty much all his adult life. It may have been the result of a bad concussion he suffered as a teen when he stepped out of a moving car, fell and hit his head, and lost consciousness for a few days. Whatever the cause, it was something he dealt with and typically sought to hide as he moved through his life.

My father was a complicated man and sometimes difficult, but he loved his family and he had a strong and fruitful way with the land and its bounty. I’m not sure he ever quite understood the life I ended up pursuing. He did say he hoped to live to see me finish my Ph.D. so he could call me Doctor. I finished in May, 1992, and he died just a few months later.

For those few months he did indeed call me Doctor. And he knew, though I’m not sure either of us recognized its significance, that I had written a dissertation primarily concerned with Paradise Lost and, in particular, a garden planted by God.

Happy Father’s Day, Dad.

Gardner Writes appeared fifteen years ago today.

Well:

I’ve told the story in many other places of how I began blogging, inspired by Gene Roche and Bryan Alexander and Mary Donnelly and Brian Lamb and Barbara Ganley and Jon Udell and no doubt some folks I have overlooked in that list (my apologies). There are also stories to tell of how and why my blogging has waxed and waned over the years. Some of those stories are about work, some about stress, some about worry, some about insecurity, some about anger, some about exhaustion. Many of the stories combine all those factors.

Every time I blog, now, I find myself avoiding those stories. And since blogging for me has always been about telling my stories–the stories of my learning, my dreams, my hopes, my work–I find myself avoiding blogging, too.

But none of that will be forever, Deo volente. I don’t yet feel able or willing to tell those stories yet, but I will one day. And I hope the very fact I wanted to contribute another thread, today, to the ragged but still thrilling tapestry of the Web indicates I’m still committed to the project. And I always have the splendidly encouraging example of my friend and colleague and fellow blogger Alan Levine before me. (Now there’s a light that’s never goes out.)

I still think about leadership, and positive change, in higher education and in teaching and learning generally. I still think computers are a fascinating invention, and that networked computing as a platform for communication and collaboration can be extraordinarily effective in our efforts to go up Bateson’s levels of learning together. I’m still enthusiastic about the idea of connected learning. It’s been a thrill and a revelation to work with Wiki Education in my courses and to see the difference it’s made in my students’ work and in their lives as learners. Hypothes.is has become an essential part of the learning ecosystem in every class I craft; I can’t imagine teaching without it. Each of these affordances and ideas is also a movement, a culture, a set of ideals and commitments that for me continue to represent the spirit of Web 2.0 I found all around me in 2004, when I started blogging.

I still require blogging in my classes. I still think that telling the story of one’s learning in a public blog post offers decisive opportunities for the metacognition that’s essential to deeper learning. Some of my greatest joys as a teacher still come from reading the stories of my students’ learning, particularly those blog posts in which they link to, credit, and encourage each other. To watch a class become a community of learners is a deep delight. It’s just about the most hopeful thing there is, in my experience.

I’m working on a book on Doug Engelbart and helping to convene a conversation around his research report cum manifesto Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework. I still meet astonishing people whose lives and work humble and inspire me. I’m still traveling around to speak with folks at various conferences and events, and to learn from them. I’m still an English professor, still in love with film and music and poetry. I’m still a Miltonist, with three new essays out in the last fourteen months. There have been some losses over the last several years, some of them very painful. Yet, and still, there remains much good work to attempt.

And Gardner Writes is still here, and I still believe in blogging.

Andrew Sullivan describes some great reasons to continue the work of blogging, reasons that I still find compelling and true:

Blogging is a different animal. It requires letting go; it demands writing something that you may soon revise or regret or be proud of. It’s more like a performance in a broadcast than a writer in a book or newspaper or magazine (which is why, of course, it can also be so exhausting). I have therefore made mistakes along the way that I may not have made in other, more considered forms of writing; I have hurt the feelings of some people I deeply care about; I have said some things I should never have said, as well as things that gain extra force because they were true in the very moment that they happened. All this is part of life – and blogging comes as close to simply living, with all its errors and joys, misunderstandings and emotions, as writing ever will.

Those words appeared over four years ago, in a post that appears, ironically, to have been Sullivan’s penultimate blog post. But the words are still there, as of this writing, just as promised. The link still connects. So there’s that.

And here is this, a little anniversary celebration for the space that opened up a part of me that badly needed the air and sunlight and companionship all those years ago. My thanks to all of you who have been a part of these fifteen years. It’s been harder for me lately to get to the “letting go” that Sullivan aptly describes as a sine qua non. It’s not a complete letting go, of course. I still believe in personal, not private. But a sequence of losses can make one grab onto whatever’s left very, very tightly. Too tightly. My own irony is that I have not held on to the freedom that this blog brought to me, and still brings to me. I have not held on to the letting go, at least not consistently, and not here. It feels like I’ve nearly forgotten about that note, pure and easy, playing so free like a breath rippling by.

Nearly, but not completely. I still hear some music in the distance.

Time to find that merry gypsy and rejoin the caravan.