Another school year looms, I mean beckons, and I regard it with my usual mingled dread, fascination, awe, and excitement. (That list is in no particular order.) I look forward to being pushed harder by native-born citizens of cyberspace, by which I mean incoming students. These folks were around eight years of age when the World Wide Web appeared, so they’ve spent some of their childhood and all of their adolescence in an increasingly robust and ubiquitous online environment. That heritage represents a huge challenge for higher education. I don’t think we should adopt all the aspects of the culture students live in–there’s a strong countercultural obligation in higher education, I believe–but at the same time, college shouldn’t be the place where information technologies don’t really matter. We need to create a robust network of our own that connects the work of teaching and learning to the world beyond the classroom. Or to put it another way, we should encourage students to view the world as a learning space that asks for reflection, persuasive argument, and committed interaction. I think information technologies have a crucial role to play in that encouragement.

Seems that an estimated three million Americans blog and that publishing people are now scouring blogs to spot new talent.

Hey Mr. DeMille, we’re all ready for our close-ups … though “Gardner Writes” is an escapade-free zone.

Why all the titles with “secret” in them? Maybe I’m still recovering from my anniversary trip to the International Spy Museum?

In any event, I was talking to the birthday boy at a birthday party yesterday and discovered we both were big fans of a British rock group called XTC. The band got started as part of the punk/new wave movement in the late 70’s, flourished during the 80’s despite a moratorium on touring caused by the front man’s stage fright, and continued through the 90’s and into the 00’s with a small handful of great albums, some record label litigation, personnel upheavals, the usual art rock-n-roll story.

What’s interesting to me about XTC is that it’s rare to find someone who sort of likes them. People have either never heard of them or are quite passionate about them. I suppose there is a middle ground there, but I don’t see many people living there when it comes to XTC.

So why not call XTC a “cult” band? One certainly could, but the other tell-tale cult signs aren’t really there. Folks don’t wear XTC t-shirts (though I see they’re now available, so the handshake may become a cult after all). They don’t write fan fiction about XTC. They don’t try to emulate the band members. (I’m not sure they could emulate the lead singer-songwriter, Andy Partridge.) That is, fans of XTC don’t really behave differently because of their devotion to the band. They just love the music. And when you meet someone who says they love XTC, you can bet they love the music i-n d-e-t-a-i-l.

Hence the idea of the secret handshake, the “oh, you too?” response when someone else says they love the Swindon Beatles.

Time to crank up the stereo again.

Strange things are happening every day, as Sister Rosetta Tharpe once sang.

The essays by Vannevar Bush and Douglas Engelbart I wrote about below have been teasing my mind with more connections over the past couple of days. Since I’ve been thinking about Bush I’ve been haunted by a sense of deja vu. I just knew I’d heard the name somewhere before. Then, while reading a tenure file, I saw the name … and realized that I’d heard it from my junior colleague “mentee,” Dr. Tim O’Donnell, speech professor and director of debate at the University of Mary Washington. He’d written his dissertation on Bush and the rhetoric of science.

So I call Tim up, all in a lather about this connection, and the next day Tim brings me a box full of books (including his diss) and articles. One of the books is G. Pascal Zachary’s biography of V. Bush. In the biography I read this:

Among those smitten by the memex in the summer of 1945 was a 20-year-old American radar technician, waiting for his ship home from the Phillipines.
One muggy day, Douglas Engelbart walked into a Red Cross library on the edge of the jungle on Leyte Island and found Bush’s article in the Atlantic. Infected with memex fever, Engelbart returned to the U.S., finished his bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering and set off “along a vector you had described,” he later wrote Bush. Within a few years, he was harboring his own notions about how to turn intimidating digital computers into intimate amplifiers of the human mind.

Now let’s think about that last phrase for a moment: “intimate amplifiers of the human mind.” I think that’s a pretty fair description of school, as well as of personal computers and their networks. That’s why I say that Bush and Engelbart are not just IT visionaries. They’re extraordinary members of the Secret Society for Real School.

As is Jerome Bruner, a philosopher of education whose The Culture of Education has been a major influence on my own thinking and practice. Of course I need to return to that book now, go to the index, and look to see if either Vannevar Bush or Douglas Engelbart is in there. I’ll make sure I’m sitting down before I look.

The Internet Cracker Barrel, that is.

Okay, maybe it isn’t spam, but what exactly do we call the jokes that get forwarded around the Internet by friends who believe, often rightly, that thirty of their friends and acquaintances would also get a big chuckle (or a ROTFLMAO) out of the email they just received? And who exactly writes that stuff in the first place?

Not that I mind reading it. Even true spam has its own entertainment value, at least the first two or three times you get one of those emails with a cryptic evade-the-spam-checker subject heading that turns out to be just another Viagra solicitation. And I confess I still get a snort out of the “I’m the heir to the throne of Genovia but I need you to help me with the 20 million dollars I can’t find a safe place for in my kingdom” emails, especially because most of them are so full of good wishes and kind words; they’ve got more “God Bless”es than Red Skelton. But the cracker barrel spam, as opposed to true spam, isn’t about money. It’s about finding a room full of people who’ll all laugh together at the same joke. Sometimes I feel honored to be thought of as being in that room, and sometimes I wish the cracker-barrel spammers thought of me as in a neighboring bungalow instead, but often there’s good fun to be had even if the joke itself is either a) lame or b) one you’ve seen three or four times in a week.

For me, the real interest is in looking at the list of folks who got the email I got. That’s even more fun than tracing the path from the first CB spammer to the one who forwarded it to me. Tonight, for example, my 81-year-old father-in-law, who loves email (and what’s not to love?) and has a spiffy-diffy Dell computer with good horsepower under the hood, sent me some CB spam called “The OTHER Rules” that spell out the rules men want the women in their lives to know. That my dad-in-law sent that along was interesting enough, but I could see he’d also sent it to my brother, which means that at our next family gathering I can look at my brother and my father-in-law and merely say, with a significant tilt of the head, “Rule Number One,” and we’ll all fall about laughing hysterically. Well, my brother and I will. My father-in-law doesn’t do hysterics. Someone’s got to stay sensible at those mad gatherings.

And folks worry that computers depersonalize our lives.

Feeling my bona fides as a film studies person slipping away because I’d seen only one movie in the theatres this summer, I decided tonight to catch Collateral, the new Michael Mann movie. Attendance was delectably sparse in the THX house where I saw it, though the hardy few around us still managed to be distractions: the folks in back frequently talked to each other, the patron to the left got so excited at one point that she began slapping her thighs–loudly and with real vim–in time to the music (couldn’t fault her too much for that, I guess), and the patron in front decided to use an emery board on her nails during one of the film’s many quietly intense moments. Yes, an emery board. Rubbarubbarubba. That was a new one for me, and I thought I’d experienced most every form of patron rudeness short of a fistfight.

This, dear reader, is why watching a movie on DVD is often more involving than watching it on the big screen.

Not even my antic fellow citizens, however, could leave a mark on the moviegoing thrills tonight. And the most thrilling moments were not the crashes or the gunshots or even the suspenseful waiting for the hammer to fall. The deepest thrills tonight were aesthetic, ethical, metaphysical. Aesthetic, because Michael Mann has an extraordinary eye for beautiful, arresting images that are never merely pretty. His frames are dynamic, yet painterly; carefully considered, yet loose enough to be full of the energy of discovery–his, and ours. (This time Mann uses digital filmmaking as a way to make the night come alive: see this article for more details.) Ethical, because the entire movie revolves around the question of how and why one ought to act in a universe where the idea of meaning itself is just another riff in the cosmic jam session, no more or less: brownian motion on the bandstand at the Universe Club. Metaphysical, because the questions behind this question are posed with great glee and even a kind of tenderness that makes them all the more terrifying. Who notices our actions? What difference can they make? If our actions are insignificant–literally, pointing to nothing–how can our choices have any weight or value?

Interestingly, the action of the movie does two things: it keeps those questions alive and urgent, and it steadfastly refuses to give us any satisfaction as to their answers. It doesn’t even allow us the comfy distance of the agnostic materialist. Even agnosia, finally, is made to feel like a cheap escape. We know too much already.

So we’re left with a movie whose nihilism is nearly pure but in which we still find ourselves rooting for a hero. We’re not made to feel like chumps for doing so, either. But we are denied any final satisfaction for doing so. There’s a kind of intellectual rigor here that combines with a pained awareness of shared suffering to implicate both head and heart. Yet for all that, the movie never pats us on the head or throws its arm around our shoulder. Instead, the movie’s questions ride in the back seat all the way home, talking to us, involving us, and not letting us go, even after the long night is over.

A fine and unusual movie, in my judgment, despite being saddled with a few pat moments in the storytelling. You owe it to yourself to see a mainstream movie with Tom Cruise that is anything but ordinary. Highly recommended.

Click on a link to discover the ties that bind. In many respects, the Internet simply shows us a model of the myriad contacts and contexts we already inhabit as social creatures. Of course it also augments those contacts and contexts, and when a difference in degree becomes large enough it may become a difference in kind. Still, when I surf the web I don’t feel as if I’m interacting with machines. I feel as if I’m meeting minds, and hearts, and perhaps even souls. Not always, but often enough to keep me hooked.

Three quick examples from an uneven but rewarding day:

1. This essay from Slate is about intelligence in the deepest sense: it explores the way we know when we know together. That collaboration honors and answers identity; it does not fragment or dilute it. We are never more ourselves than when we’re with others. When we explore links, we map experience–and in this case, we map identities as well. The essay’s most riveting moment for me concerns an attempt to retrieve passwords that went with their holders to the grave. I can’t say more without spoiling the experience for you, but there are great mysteries here, and an oddly effective consolation, too.

2. The opening essay in Lisa Ames’ blog “Learning to Sail” links books, mouse-clicks, sailboats, and families. Blogging is like sailing, but it may also be like sailing with, or to, family. A brief, poignant story that works on many levels.

3. “Sonata for the Unaware” is an uncanny synthesis of purpose and coincidence, so uncanny that both purpose and coincidence are called into question. And you can dance to it, but slowly and gracefully.

Poetry, people; poetry.

Today the Instructional Technology Specialists at my school began a fascinating discussion on blogs and their uses in the academy. What are they for? What do they enable? Are they about vanity or community? Display or communication? Some or all of the above?

My literary training emerged very quickly, and I began to muse aloud about what the experience of blogging is like, for readers and for writers. Is it like a conversation? Is it like reading online journals with the chance to write (comment) in the margins? Is it like writing or reading magazines or newspapers? Is it like putting a message in a bottle, then throwing that bottle into a sea of message-filled bottles?

In short, I was looking for an analogy, hoping for a metaphor or at least a simile that would satisfy my wish for the intuitive “yeah” that one gets when the description fits the thing. My blog is like a red, red rose–or not.

Tonight I watched “Darmok,” one of my favorite episodes from Star Trek: The Next Generation. Without giving too much away (stop reading here if you want to avoid a mild spoiler), I can say that the rich images in the foreign language spoken by the aliens depended on imagination, of course, but they depended even more on a rich set of shared narratives. Out of those compelling stories emerge archetypal moments that have only to be named for communication to take place at a very deep level. Something like an in-joke, but very serious, and everyone is “in.”

So now I’ll frame my question differently. What kind of narrative does blogging evoke? What’s the story the reader inhabits as she reads? What narrative do I enact or evoke as I write? What large narrative offers us some understanding of the new online world?

And what richly imagined moments in this online world will become the archetypal images we will share to help ourselves grasp the next part of the story?

You’d think all the information flooding our lives would kill our sense of wonder. No doubt it does for some people, though to know for sure we’d also need to know how robust their sense of wonder was in the first place. Some things are harder to kill than others.

Today, I had a forcible reminder of just how the Internet feeds my wonder instead of killing it off. I’d decided my listen-on-the-way-to-work CD this morning would be an old favorite from the 80’s, Big Plans For Everybody by Let’s Active, a power-pop band from Winston-Salem, North Carolina whose albums sold hardly at all but whose influence stretched as far as Robert Plant, who was a huge fan. So there I am, listening raptly (but still practicing good defensive driving) to what would have been side one of the LP, then picking up where I left off for the journey home this afternoon. I do love this album. I have very fond memories of seeing Mitch and the band live just after the album came out. And I found myself wondering where he was now, and what he was doing, and whether his life had helped him reflect on just how important his work had been despite fame’s proving elusive for him.

And of course I thought to myself, “I’ll have to Google Let’s Active when I get home, just to see what I can find.”

And I found this great interview in which Mitch reflects on his own experience, and thereby helps me reflect on my experience, too.

Did my score satisfy me? Yes and no. Yes, in that I found exactly what I wanted. No, in that finding what I wanted awakened even more wonder in me as I thought about wanting to get to know the earlier albums better, and about the band Mitch now leads, and about trying harder to learn the lyrics and music to “Badger,” my favorite Let’s Active song.

In short, my appetite for wonder in this instance, being fed so handsomely, is stronger that it was to begin with. Something marvelously recursive is at work in this world, though whether it will last is anyone’s guess. And of course all this may be a nostalgic stroll through the World Wide Attic for me.

Still, I wonder. Is there no quickening or enduring clarity to be gained from this network of souls whose language we see with such strength and persistence on these “pages”?

I won’t get it right this time, either, but why not try again.

I’ve written and spoken several times on a topic I call “real school,” by which I mean the kind of immersive, transformative education that our various forms of institutional schooling rarely achieve. Real school is where cognitive stressors, intellectual community, serendipity, and hard mental labor (to name but four elements) combine with a sense of uncanny intuitive apprehension that both holds the experience together and propels it relentlessly to the next extension of reach and grasp. Your mind races at the same time that it finds a preternatural focus. Your skin prickles, but you also feel a deep sense of calm, or of elation. The experience must include the rigorous acquisition of skills and knowledge, but at the same time there is a cognitive-affective component that begins in wonder and ends in love, mingling wisdom and delight the way Frost said poetry does.

Most of us have experienced these transformative classes at one point or another, and perhaps marveled that this experience is so rare. Most schooling either ignores these possibilities, derides them, or dismisses them for one reason or another as impractical, chimerical, or limited to the lucky few who have great teachers in a small class at a singular moment in their lives.

Wanting magic is no defect of character. Insisting that education can be a sphere of wonder that enables a community of extravagantly fruitful intersubjectivity is not antisocial, though it is no doubt disruptive to an industrial model of education.

And now I find some soul mates in the land of information technology, and I begin to suspect there is a convergence here that is making me ready for more real school myself.

First is Vannevar Bush, whose essay on the Memex makes the hairs on the back of my neck stand straight up. He has obviously been reading my mail, or I’ve been reading his. He wrote this essay in 1945. I wonder at the loneliness he must have felt, that far up on the mount of contemplative vision.

Next is Douglas Engelbart, whose 1962 (!) essay on the possibilities of augmenting human intelligence through networked communities neatly anticipates almost everything we’re talking about today when we discuss “knowledge management” and “knowledge networks.” More than this, however, Engelbart grasps the relationship between the intuitive and the analytical, expressing that relationship in prose that takes my breath away. Listen to this:

We do not speak of isolated clever tricks that help in particular situations. We refer to a way of life in an integrated domain where hunches, cut-and-try, intangibles, and the human “feel for a situation” usefully co-exist with powerful concepts, streamlined terminology and notation, sophisticated methods, and high-powered electronic aids.

Amen, brother, say English majors and computer nerds everywhere.

The computer and, even more crucially, the advent of ubiquitous high-speed networks and the World Wide Web have brought us to the time when the exponential possibilities Bush and Englebart intuited could begin to be realized–and realized in school, where communities shaped by human social networks can now be emulated and augmented by networked computing environments that allow us to reflect as never before on our own experience of education. We can engage the traces of our own engagement, together, approaching the sublime “think-together” capabilities of the telepaths in John Wyndham’s The Chrysalids (US title: Rebirth).

I can sense this moment, this movement, every time I teach a class that suddenly blooms into community. Real school, where we mull together, and turn a muddle into a meal. But that’s another post….