Tomorrow’s release of Brian Wilson’s SMiLE is for me the most important day in popular music since the release of Tommy.

SMiLE is not a rock ‘n roll album per se. “Heroes and Villains” and “Good Vibrations” rock, yes, but this is not a rock album. At the same time, the album doesn’t shun rock. It does something more radical than either shunning or embracing it. SMiLE simply accepts rock as a given and a good, just as it accepts America as one gigantic, inspiring, flawed, wicked, marvelous concept/experience.

And SMiLE goes still farther. It explores the essential connections between comedy and epic and tragedy, between the lyric and the dramatic, between the heroic individual and the heroic community, between the introspective lover and the introspective historian.

This is an extraordinary work.

I’ve heard most of it, in its 66-67 incarnation, through bootlegs and the precious half-hour officially released in the Good Vibrations box set some years back. That music is fragmented, trippy, dreamy, lost in its own sweet poignance yet clear-sighted in its vision of its many subjects. The music on the new CD, which has been completely re-recorded and which I heard courtesy of a friend (thanks, SH), doesn’t have the hash-and-youth sweetness of the original. In its place, the new SMiLE has a certain edge, a welcome ferocity at times, a sense that something urgent must be communicated even as the self communes with itself, all wrapped up in the most beautiful music I can imagine. (Nothing beats “Wonderful” and “Surf’s Up” and “Our Prayer” in my book, and “Wind Chimes” is a very close fourth.)

I don’t know if SMiLE will heal America, as protagonist Ray Shackelford thought it might in the magnificent Lewis Shiner novel-ode entitled Glimpses. But I can tell you that in its singular glory, this album is one of the most splendidly and gorgeously defiant gestures I believe I have ever heard. Thank you, Brian. For everything.

“What I do I am, for that I came,” writes the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins. Behold an immortal diamond, resurrected, complete: Brian Wilson.

I love you, Brian.

Great metablog yesterday from Martha Burtis (metablog=a blog on blogging). Martha works through plenty of questions/concerns about blogging and its relevance to a) teaching and learning and b) anything at all. I want to take some of those issues up myself in future metablogs here (you have been warned), but for now I want to comment briefly on the first issue Martha raises, the conflict between narcissism and perfectionism. I’ll quote Martha:

The narcissist in me likes the idea of being able to make my every whim and musing available for the whole world to see. But the perfectionist in me feels funny about making those whims and musings available in anything less than brilliant prose. Consequently, hitting the “Save!” button in my blog admin panel is often more an act of ambivalence than empowerment.

My strong belief is that narcissism should always trump perfectionism, which is of course very tricky indeed when perfectionism is one manifestation of narcissism and vice versa. I have certainly found these connected manifestations to be, um, ah, cough, present in my own life. (I cannot speak for Martha!) The outcome is that I get to beat myself up, no matter what. Not Good–but not uncommon, especially in education, where one’s vulnerabilities are magnified in almost every genuine teaching and learning encounter. At any rate, in self-defense if nothing else, I say, “Let Narcissism win.” A blog a day keeps the paralysis away?

Perhaps blogging offers a space–a genre?–in which some thoughtfulness is expected or at least acceptable, but also in which everyone understands that the tradeoff involves more spontaneity and less deathless prose, more quick and hopefully pithy observations and less sustained argument. The idea for me, then, as a teacher and a writer, is that the blog is a bridge between chat and a fully polished essay, a bridge that might encourage me, and perhaps others, to keep crossing that bridge despite the N and P obsessions, and thus to become a better (more powerful, flexible, and evocative) language user.

I’d also want to insist that each genre has its own excellence, and that blogging as a genre has rewards that other writing genres do not.

Thanks for that blog, Martha.

Forget the sheep and the goats. This distinction is much more critical, at least for the here-and-now.

The Sept. 6, 2004 New Yorker had a fascinating article on mustard and ketchup. In addition to the Four Basic Tastes I already knew about (sweet, salty, bitter, and sour), I learned there’s a fifth taste, umami, which author Malcolm Gladwell describes as “the proteiny, full-bodied taste of chicken soup, or cured meat, or fish stock, or aged cheese, or mother’s milk, or soy sauce, or mushrooms, or seaweed, or cooked tomato.” Umami comes from glutamates, which is why MSG livens up foods. You can read more about the origins of umami here, and you can read about the Society for Research on Umami Taste (SRUT) here. And from the World Wide Words website, we learn of the higher consciousness implicit in the concept of umami:

Both the word and the concept are Japanese, and in Japan are of some antiquity. Umami is hard to translate, to judge by the number of English words that have been suggested as equivalents, such as savoury, essence, pungent, deliciousness, and meaty. It’s sometimes associated with a feeling of perfect quality in a taste, or of some special emotional circumstance in which a taste is experienced. It is also said to involve all the senses, not just that of taste. There’s more than a suggestion of a spiritual or mystical quality about the word.

But the real kicker in the article, for me anyway, was the comparison between mustard and ketchup. Mustard is not a high umami food, apparently, and the best marketing success comes from tailoring a variety of mustards to a variety of food preferences. Ketchup, on the other hand, perhaps because it has achieved not only high umami but high “amplitude” (Gladwell again: “the word sensory experts use to describe flavors that are well blended and balanced, that ‘bloom’ in the mouth”), is a food that does not succeed in tailored or multiple versions. Heinz Ketchup has apparently achieved a Platonic state that’s just not shared with many other foods. Shoot, even spaghetti sauce thrives in multiple versions–but not ketchup.

These facts are interesting but not earthshaking, until one sees the moral Gladwell draws.

Happiness, in one sense, is a function of how closely our world conforms to the infinite variety of human preference. But that makes it easy to forget that sometimes happiness can be found in having what we’ve always had and everyone else is having.

In those two little sentences there are worlds of implications, for lawmakers, for teachers, for parents, for information technology folk, for everyone.

My thanks to Malcolm Gladwell for finding the universe in a seed of mustard and a squeeze-bottle of ketchup.

A chance airport encounter with a magazine called Computer Power User (CPU for short, wink wink) has led to a more serious involvement–i.e., I’ve subscribed. One nice thing about subscribing is that I have access to all the content over the web as well as in print, which makes it easy to get to the vast quantities of useful news, offbeat opinions, and links to utilities, firmware updates, and other great downloads. This is the way all magazines should operate. I don’t always have the print issue with me when I want to get back to the content I remember reading. In fact, that’s the principal use I make of the web feature. I rarely read the content there first; instead, I go back to it to retrieve stuff I’ve already read.

In the “offbeat opinion” department, the magazine features several quirky columnists from the last three decades of computing history, and the writing is unusually literate and thoughtful. In the October 2004 issue, for example, there’s a fun column on “organic computing” by Alex St. John, identified by the magazine as “one of the founding creators of Microsoft’s DirectX technology.” The subject is not making computers from carbon, but rather the human brain and body considered in terms of computers. The last paragraph is a zinger:

To summarize, you are made of proteins; proteins are little programs that are the computational byproducts of RNA transcription. RNA functions like a system bus, and DNA is RAM that stores everything about YOU as 6-bit sequences of nucleotides. Most organic life is made out of 21 amino acids because 21 is the number of building blocks that can be efficiently encoded in organic RAM with error correction. You are a giant, walking, talking Lego construction assembled by proteins from trillions of little amino acid building blocks and sea water whose sole purpose is to compute new copies of yourself before the inevitable accumulation of calculation errors causes you to crash permanently.

Fascinating metaphorical flight there, though I suspect that “copy file” isn’t quite as rewarding or fun for the silicon machines as it is for us. So there!

My son and I listened to Pearl Jam’s Ten as I took him to school this morning, and I realized I had forgotten how much I like that album. I also realized that I never bought a Nirvana album, though I think “Smells Like Teen Spirit” is right up there with “My Generation” in the Discontent Derby. It’s interesting that so much of our lives is now preserved and, occasionally, revivified by digital storage and retrieval. I sometimes feel as if I’m surrounded by time capsules, some of them half-buried, some of them in unmarked graves that patiently wait for the day they’ll give me a shovelful of shock.

They say if you live long enough you’ll see the return of everything.

So it is that I’ve been trying to explain to my two kids, who have never known anything but cable and satellite TV feeds, that with our new (budget!) HDTV there are actually over-the-air signals we can simply pluck from the airwaves with a good antenna. (The Zenith Silver Sensor in this case–highly recommended.)

My son looked at me with a very puzzled expression.

“Do you mean we can get all these channels for free?”
“Sure.”
“So if we lived even closer to a big city we could just take down the satellite dish and watch all this stuff without paying for it?”
“Yep. We wouldn’t get Nick and Cartoon Network and all the cable channels, but we’d get all the networks on the local channels.”
“But how can we do that without paying for it?”
“That’s what the commercials are for. And that’s how we used to watch TV all the time.”
“Cool! But this stuff just comes in from the air?”
“Just like the radio.”
“Cool!”

So it’s back to the future, my friends.

I spent the afternoon with a group of professionals from across the Commonwealth (and one visitor from Colorado) discussing distance education, e-learning, online learning–all those forms of education that try to reach more students more widely, often with the goal of lowering costs. The fact is that e-hybridity in which face-to-face and online learning mix and mingle is pretty much the order of the day in any course that uses any kind of computer-mediated contact, even if that’s only email. It’s that hybridity that interests me most. I want every modality, every window onto the learner’s cognition, every opportunity for “a ha” or “you too?” or “what on earth?” that I can lay my hands on.

But the subject tonight is the haunting postscript my colleague Gene left me with: will the traditional residential college experience, with all its social and intellectual richness, all its developmental depth and serendipity (and hazards, yes), be reserved in the future for the fortunate ones, the ones who can pay the (increasing) tab and who live close enough to be served by the prestigious nurseries these academic retreats provide? Will some of us have transformative encounters while the rest of us try to get our inspiration from the cold light of a cathode ray tube or LCD array?

Okay, the last question was a tad melodramatic, but the point is not: it’s hard to imagine teleconferencing (old style) or web-delivered content (new style) ever becoming an alma mater. My mother embraced me; she didn’t phone it in, or have a local minister mediate her love to me (one recent author suggested local parsons could proctor distance-learning online exams, a risible suggestion from which my fancy takes flight). She was there, I could feel her arms around me, and that closeness lasted a lifetime.

Is there closeness here, dear reader? Even the closeness of print?

And yet, I think about one of the most transformative residential experiences of my life–probably the most transformative, truth to tell. That was the 1974 Governor’s School at Mary Baldwin College, four weeks in which I met 150 other precocious kids from around the state, took classes with them, laughed and played and loved with them. I made several friends there who are still among my dearest intimates. I met my wife there, though we didn’t date at the school, or even “hook up,” as they say these days. No, we began dating at a reunion some three years later. In fact, that group of 151 reunited thirteen times in three years–never all 151, but between forty and sixty most times. Each reunion was another residential festival, but the energy always traced its source back to that transformative and very intense four weeks back in ’74.

Perhaps the residential education of the future will be grouped in briefer, more intense terms. Something like summer school, but better. I honestly don’t know whether semesters do more good than harm; so much exhaustion sets in by the end that the last couple of weeks are a grueling harvest. Regardless, I am sure that the transformative and developmental riches of a residential education ought to be available to anyone who qualifies, but I am less certain what kind or duration of residence best fosters that transformation and development.

Something intense, something taut; a smaller rubber band stretched tighter; options worth considering, perhaps.

I’m a little too tired right now to be of much use in the blogosphere. The wrap-up of my NLII report will have to wait until tomorrow. For now, a few highlights from this morning’s sessions:

We had a terrific presentation from a highly-regarded architecture firm on designing learning spaces, followed by an even better presentation from the former chair of the aero/astro dept. at MIT and the shepherd for the curricular and learning space redesign we saw on Wednesday evening. Key principles: define needs before you design space, have a champion and surround the champion with grounded dreamers and try to keep track of all the stakeholders that emerge along the way, think of the entire campus as a learning space and each individual space as part of the overall system of spaces, and wherever possible link curricular redesign with space redesign (and vice-versa). Other lessons: transform your campus’s learning spaces … one room at a time. (Good advice for the cash-strapped.) Expect lots of resistance. Remember that technology is today’s electricity: it’s simply a given.

And … assess.

Then we had breakout sessions in which we chose groups based on what kind of spaces we were interested in thinking about. My choice was instructional computing labs. I was with folks from MIT, Arizona, U ofWashingon, Stanford, and Michigan/Ann Arbor. I felt like the Little Engine That Could, or that Hoped He Could, or that Would Try To Look Like He Was Confident He Could Given The Resources. More on that session tomorrow. My favorite design principle: the design should include ways to capture both informal and formal student work and interaction, and make that work accessible to everyone, easily, at any point on the real or virtual campus.

Great bon mot from the report-back session: We need to design learning spaces to be “technology sockets.”

Big take-aways that I knew before but was cheered to hear again and again: learning is social, contextual, project-based; expertise is difficult to acquire and experts need to “scaffold” knowledge and learning for beginners; and perhaps my favorite (I’m paraphrasing): we don’t know enough about how students learn at a university, so we have to include as many modalities of learning as possible in our designs for learning spaces. (That was Jose from Thursday afternoon’s session.)

More on the morrow.

This was the first official day of the focus session. I’d call it a full day.

8:00 welcome and introductions, followed by a brief presentation to define “learning space” for the discussions and presentations to follow. Like all definitions, it was useful both to focus the discussion and to give us something to kick against when we wanted to move toward complexity and nuance in our thinking. Then an 80-minute small group discussion on what is important in learning spaces and what space characteristics enable learning, in which I learned several inspiring things, most prominently that environmental psychologists have a name for the quality of an environment that arouses expectations without satisfying them in any predictable way: they call it “mystery,” and I’d argue (and did, after Scott taught us that term) that all good learning spaces have to have some of that quality of mystery. We also talked about multiple focal points of attention, the perennial problem of the instructor station (where does it go? how much “command presence” must it/should it have? etc.) and even more philosophically about how students might customize their learning space to reflect a sense of joint ownership and authorship. The latter is an example of how my recent experiences in cyberspace have inspired me to think about analogous items in physical space.

After Betty, Jeannie, Arthur, Scott, and I had batted around these questions for the time alloted, there was a break, and then we were back for a brief presentation on “what is a design principle?” This question was especially intriguing as it focused not on design specifics but on what kind of “behaviors” (not the word I’d choose, but I digress) we want to encourage/enable within the space. This distinction is like the one that informs the effort I and my staff are always making with faculty when we ask them to tell us what they want to happen, not to specify the tool. I’ve been in enough design work to see that it’s a real challenge to stay focused on what activities and outcomes one desires when all the talk turns to podiums and projectors and “smart” classrooms.

But wait: there’ s more. A 90-minute presentation followed, with case studies from MIT and the University of Arizona on lessons learned in major learning space projects. The recent MIT “Stata Center” project was one example. The very long-a’borning Instructional Innovation Facility at Arizona was another. In both cases, especially for Arizona, some sense of crisis led to an urgent re-examination of teaching, learning, and curriculum–and innovation was the result. Although I’m sure it’s not always the case, in these instances the “Field Of Dreams” principle seemed to operate: if you build it, they will come. The corollary is that they will try everything they can to halt construction until it’s too late (but even then they’ll try), for it’s nearly impossible to imagine what the innovation will be like until the facility is actually built. Visionary leadership (and the readiness to have your head handed to you on a platter, and without a nice dance to precede it, either) is a vital part of the undertaking, although such leadership alone isn’t anything like enough to make the project work. My discussion group envisioned a learning space “sandbox” that would be reconfigurable to try out different approaches to design and function, and I learned about the late, lamented “Building 20” at MIT that was torn down so the Stata Center could be built. A bit ironic, that….

I’ll save for later the summary of the marvelous synthesis Dan Gilbert (I think it was) gave us regarding his experience of UVA and MIT, although I confess that it was a little hard to hear that comparison going in MIT’s favor. The Stata Center is quite innovative, no doubt about it, but there’s more even today to admire about UVA’s architecture than Gilbert would admit. Perhaps his enthusiasm for MIT led him to overstate his case.

Lunch (at last). Then back to work. An hour on Future Learning Spaces. Seventy-five minutes on Technology Convergence and the Future of Learning Spaces. A short break. Then a fine ninety minutes from Jose Mestre (Physics, MIT) on Using Learning Spaces to Encourage Deeper Learning, based on the latest edition of How People Learn. Much food for thought there, and some things to challenge . I’ll summarize Jose’s presentation later as well.

By the time we got out, I was full of ideas and energy, actually a little TOO much energy for the reception that followed, so I beat feet up Mass. Ave to check out the used vinyl/CD shops. Made quite the major haul at Looney Tunes, including a Dutch pressing of Focus 3, an original double-eye Columbia pressing of Chicago II, an Lp of madrigals by Thomas Weelkes (Ian Partidge on tenor–sublime!), an Lp of madrigals by poor mad(?) Gesualdo, and a used CD of BBC sessions by XTC. At the Harvard Book Store I found a remaindered copy of Gjertrud Schnackenberg’s Supernatural Love: Collected Poems. A steak sub at Cinderellas, some ice cream from Toscanini’s, and so to bed, dear reader. Tomorrow, more lessons learned, and more questions raised. But tomorrow is another day.

I figured the Dylan theme was worth the stretch for one more blog.

I’m writing this from the Hotel@MIT in Cambridge, Massachussetts, conference hotel for the National Learning Infrastructure Initiative Fall Focus Session on “Learning Spaces.” First things first: I love my hotel room. Spacious, tech-themed in a very tasteful way right down to the bedspread covered in equations, a comfy chair AND an ergonomic desk chair that sits at a very elegant desk (I covet this desk lamp) where a tea/coffee maker is just to one side. Lucky for me the conference promises to be a good one; otherwise, with the complimentary broadband I’d probably never leave the room.

See? I’m not hard to please. Well, it lacks a full multimedia kit, true. I feel my passion ebbing.

This afternoon the group had a two-hour walking tour of learning spaces at MIT. Sidebar: a classroom is a learning space, often not a very good one, but the idea of “learning space” encompasses the design and use of any place where teaching and learning occur. Think of a learning space as a focused world that encourages and facilitates reflection and creation. At any rate, the tour was enjoyable and informative, but a couple of the spaces were eye-openers, especially a physics classroom that looked like a super-neat sports bar (sans bar) with a slew of circular tables at which students would do their work and, when appropriate, attend to the teacher. Screens and projected images ringed the room, and each screen was flanked by numbered white boards. Actually, in some respects the room looked like a crude but effective model of the inside of a mind. So maybe that’s one way to conceptualize learning spaces: they should model aspects of mind, or be constructed around (or to resemble) metaphors of mental activity. Administrative and organizational efficiencies are not negligible, but they shouldn’t drive the design (even though that’s what usually happens, as we all know).

Let the revels begin. Tomorrow and half the day on Friday I’ll be surrounded by bright and creative people who like to think about thinking and about education and about educational engineering. Life could be a lot worse. Great food tonight, too, at Legal Seafood (memo to self: remember to look into banner ad possibilities for blog) in the fine company of Kathy and Bob and Gene. The Best Idea of the Evening Award goes to Kathy for the notion of a mid-life sabbatical for everyone. Take a breather, take stock, and go back prepared to “make good choices,” as the mom says to the young woman in Freaky Friday. Actually, that gratuitous movie reference is mine; the great idea is all Kathy’s.