Perhaps “nettled” is too strong, though I did detect a surprising and not unwelcome amount of challenge in the questions today.

“Introduction to Literary Studies.” Two sections, one at nine and one at eleven. During my travels to the ELI Annual Meeting, I scheduled films for the classes to watch during the two class meetings I’d miss. The early class watched Fast, Cheap & Out of Control, half each day. The later class watched Alain Renais’ Providence, though I found out this morning that they hadn’t quite finished it (they were about twelve minutes or so from the end).

Last Friday, I asked them to watch the movies with Plato, Aristotle, and Longinus in mind, and told them we’d spend some time talking about Longinus in particular upon my return.

Today, both classes wanted to know just what these movies had to do with our classes, and their questions were not just about curiosity. There was a bit of “hey!” in there as well. To be fair, they may have had their high-school busywork detectors up too high. I’ve seen enough of what my own children endure with substitutes and make-work assignments to understand the potential for cynicism. Yet I was truly surprised that they wouldn’t have trusted me more than that, or (more to the point) exercised their minds more fully to think about what connections might be there. Of course, the willingness to exercise the mind in the presence of a teacher derives from trust, so perhaps it all boils down to one’s willingness to suspend disbelief, if only for awhile.  (It did help that I was prepared for the challenges, having read the contributions to the class discussion forum.)

Though it made me a little sad that many of the students apparently started from the assumption that I had assigned them work that had no bearing on the course of study, it also helped to energize the discussion, as the many strong, searching, even urgent connections soon revealed themselves as we began to talk our way through the films and the philosophers. It took about ten minutes for the tone to turn positive, and by the time it did, we were working very ably toward detailed analyses and depth of understanding. In one class, I actually saw a couple of students punch each other in triumph when certain points emerged, as if to say, “see, that’s exactly what I thought!” That shared drama of discovery pleased my teacher’s heart.

So all’s well that ends well. Still, I think about how much time was wasted on skepticism, when acceptance of the enigmas, the challenges, even the oddities might have started the discussion much farther along–and without my having “prepped” the viewing to the point that the experience would be dessicated and contained within my own perspective.

An interesting day and some intense discussions. It would be churlish to complain.

Back in the office today after the ELI 2008 Annual Meeting, I met my first class at 9:30 this morning: Introduction to New Media Studies. Today was our first day on Doug Engelbart. In one moment, two-thirds of the way through the class, the synchronicities became unexpectedly piercing.

A student in the front row marvelled with disbelief at the intensity and complexity of mind Engelbart appears to imagine we should cultivate. The student insisted, with growing energy, that ordinary people couldn’t meet that standard, that it would be unbearably difficult to live in the integrated domain Engelbart eloquently describes. Could Engelbart really be serious in thinking we could and should be that alert, responsive, and focused? I replied that I’d never been in contact with anyone as serious about his vision as Engelbart was and is. I went on to say that Engelbart believed everyone should be striving toward just the capability and collective intelligence he outlined in his “Augmenting Human Intellect,” and he also believed that if we didn’t, we were surely doomed as a civilization. Completely possessed by Engelbart’s vision, I went on for another minute or so to evoke what I could of the depth and urgency of Engelbart and his mission. By now completely wound up, I stopped for breath. I was probably shaking a little.

At which point the young man paused for his own breath. His eyes widened. “But,” he burst out, “but if we’re supposed to live and think that way, our schools are set up all wrong!”

I was speechless.

When I recovered, I pointed him to Illich’s Deschooling Society, which he immediately Googled on his open laptop. The link’s appeared on the class del.icio.us aggregation sidebar, so either he or someone else in the class has bookmarked and tagged it.

I hope Doug Engelbart would be pleased.

A visual pun (or puzzle for shining morning faces)–and one of the few things I have time to post tonight. The joke is inside but may strike a chord for those of us at the final general session at ELI 2008. I have a good deal to say, and consider, regarding that session. But that anon.

For now, a quick note to say I’m back home, the flights were fine (American Airlines on my good list–let’s hope it’s a trend), and the meeting was a real corker this year. You could hardly get to the coffee and danish for all the talent, conversation, and creativity. I felt buoyed up by the energy of folks I knew, folks I was just meeting, and folks like Henry Jenkins, George Siemens, and Michael Wesch whose work I had followed for a long time but whom I met at the conference for the first time. I got to facilitate a discussion of Innovations in Faculty Development with a dynamic roomful of Learning Circle attendees. I got to eat delicious food with longtime colleagues and help out with the final assembly of the Citizen Journalist movie summing up the conference. I got to share two star students with a great set of committed educators. Bountiful opportunities in every direction–and with a broad and diverse range of people.

Something like real school, that is.

I have much more to say, but it will have to wait. In the meantime, I am deeply grateful to be part of this community. And I can hardly wait for next year.

Photo from this site, where the “about” tab says “The photographer doesn’t matter here–the photo does.”

I woke up this morning with one of my favorite pieces of music in my head. I take that as a sign that my brain is very happy. And why not? The ELI Annual Meeting is in full swing.

And swing it does. There’s a remarkable zest in the rhythm here, and enough finger-snapping beats to make Count Basie himself smile with delight. Henry Jenkins’ keynote got us off to a fine start. Plenty to think about, some things to take issue with, some things to embrace, and over it all, a feeling of gratitude that he’s doing his work and helping the academy understand the intellectual feast that lies before it, whether or not the setting is what we’re used to. (I was very fortunate to have the chance to talk to Henry some at dinner last night. He shared a wonderful old-time-radio resource with me–otrcat–and when the talk turned to film and Rod Serling and McLuhan and Guitar Hero it was tremendous fun to go exploring with this man. The phrase “thought leader” gets used a lot. It certainly applies here.) Later in the afternoon I went to a presentation on haptic technologies by two Purdue computer scientists at the Center for Data Perceptualization. We all had a chance to play with haptic devices at our tables. It was an eerie experience, almost synaesthetic, to be manipulating a piece of plastic struts-and-buttons machinery and feeling something akin to the weight and heft of a bowling ball, or (even more spookily) feeling the attractions and repulsions of atomic particles within an energy field. The potential for tapping new modes of understanding and expression is enormous. What might a haptic short story “feel” like? I’m reminded yet again of the “live it” in Simak’s “Immigrant.”

Next stop yesterday afternoon was the presentation I did with students Serena Epstein and David Moore from the University of Mary Washington. Serena and David had taken my Intro. to New Media Studies class last summer and done terrific work for their final projects. I knew they would have fascinating, provocative things to say and share, and they did not disappoint. In fact, it was a pleasure riding on their coattails. The audience was most appreciative. Best of all, or most dangerous of all, I found myself getting pretty caught up in the enthusiasm in the room, so much so that my wild notion of a first-year gen-ed experience based on New Media Studies started to seem less wild and much more do-able. I got the strong feeling that the idea really could fly. (Look out.)

But that’s probably what I treasure most about ELI: the strong and unshakable belief that runs through the entire organization and emerges magnificently in these annual meetings, the belief that we can and must put our heads and hearts together and figure out how to address these core questions. How should we teach? How should we do our scholarship so that research and teaching are truly symbiotic? How do we keep our chins up and our spirits high as we work within the often-frustrating processes and politics in our home institutions? Those are the tough questions, and ELI engages them directly, fearlessly, strategically–and with a tremendous sense of community and goodwill.

As I look around the room and see dear and enthusiastic friends and colleagues, along with all the new faces who reflect the energy and excitement of their first visit to ELI, I feel deeply re-united.

I feel like I can get me some dreaming done.

A dear colleague passed away suddenly last week. We are immeasurably poorer.

Pat was one of the first colleagues outside the department I got to know on my arrival in 1994. Our shared interest in music, particularly medieval and Renaissance music (one of Pat’s specialties), was one of our first strong connections. Oddly and regrettably, it’s a connection we never explored in the depth we’d have liked. One of the great ironies of working in a university is how little time or occasion there is for sharing the life of the mind. That said, there was another connection that did bring us together again and again, a connection I wouldn’t have guessed right away. Pat was devoted to exploring the uses of information technologies in teaching and learning, and that shared passion  was the subject of many conversations and a fair amount of collaboration as well.

Here’s at least part of what I want to say about Pat. Using IT in her work didn’t always come naturally to her, but  she never lost heart, never ever let fear or uncertainty deter her from continuing to push ahead with no small measure of delight as she thought about how computers could make her a more effective teacher. In this way she was an extremely rare colleague. Her insecurities (I’m sure she must have had them) and the many false starts and cold trails all of us working with these tools endure never made her bitter or brittle or cynical or defensive. She took it all in stride, and continued to innovate. In fact, she was scheduled to be her department’s Teaching, Learning, and Technology Fellow for 2008-2009. It didn’t matter that she was nearing retirement, or that computers were recalcitrant things, or that the investments of time and energy seemed only to increase as the equipment got more sophisticated. Pat wanted to learn, and she loved to teach.

Farewell, Pat. Your example humbles and inspires us all. Thank you.

There’s a thread here I’d like to pursue, or at least snarl with elan.

Today in my “Introduction to Literary Studies” class we were discussing Aristotle: the Poetics mostly, with a fillip of the Rhetoric. Our text, the redoubtable Norton Anthology of Literary Theory and Criticism, had an especially observant introduction to the Aristotle selections, one that contrasted the way Plato “explores paths of thinking” with the way Aristotle focuses on “categorization [and] definition” by means of “propositional statements.” The contrast made me think of the document/data continuum (I almost said dichotomy) that Eric Miller was speaking about yesterday.

I think there’s a strong streak of Aristotelian propositional method in the idea of a data-driven web. Read the Poetics and wonder at Aristotle’s indefatigable defining, analyzing, parsing, specifying. The man never tires, never even hesitates in the face of the enormous task he sets for himself. And even the most breathtaking propositions–his firm assertion about the end [purpose] of life, for example–are just more confident statements in the long march of sureties. Of course he’s right to insist on the need for clarity, specification, definition. Yet even Aristotle has to pause at metaphor, declare it essential, a gift, the peculiar possession of the poet and madman. Even Aristotle stops for genius.

Perhaps I’m simply besotted with the genius of the web of documents, the genius that has given us this astonishing communication medium, this palette, canvas, and never-ending subject. As I told my students today, I certainly wish for an Aristotelian as my surgeon. No time or place for allegory when you’re trying to find and stitch together those delicate, fungible parts.

Yet when I describe my symptoms, and try to communicate what it’s like to be the subject inside this body, with these pains and these hopes and these anxieties, I hope for a Platonist, someone just a little more mad, creative, and patient with the human drive to narrate, to inhabit. Someone who will try not just to classify, but to understand, to be illuminated.

Aristotle is the king of disambiguation. He’s consistent (for the most part), tirelessly logical, clear-headed as the first chill breath of autumn. Plato is all over the place: contemptuous, mystical, enigmatic, condescending, allegorical, itchy for revelation, mad with yearning, consumed by love (in The Symposium, anyway).

I suppose my highest hope is a synthesis of the two. But if I can have only one, give me Plato.

Courtesy of the University of Mary Washington Computer Science Department, I and an SRO crowd of students, faculty, and staff got to hear a fascinating talk today by Dr. Eric Miller (CSAIL, MIT). There’s no questioning the depth, intelligence, or intensity of his commitment to a data web; he made the best and most inclusive case for the semantic web I’ve yet heard. Inclusive, because his vision is not just about normalizing descriptive vocabularies or getting everyone firmly in the RDF camp. As I understand it, his vision is more about taking the data already implicit on the web and making it explicit, reusable, mashup-able. It’s a persuasive vision, one strongly reminiscent of Vannevar Bush’s and Douglas Engelbart’s desire to find a way to get ahead of our own information-generation and make good, timely use of the knowledge we have already discovered, knowledge that often languishes unread and unremarked because there’s no machine-readable associative trail to lead us there or to answer our queries comprehensively.

That said, and coming from a non-CS point of view, I do continue to have questions about the idea of the “semantic web,” particularly as it seems to me to downplay the semantic energies of the document in favor of the clearer and more specifiable semantic energies of data. My training in the humanities locates meaning in documents, at least in the sense that documents are the things that make the case for meaning, and invite a response to meaning. Data, by contrast, is measurement and observation. Crucial activities, to be sure–I want my physician’s decisions to be data-driven, make no mistake about it. And unlike many contemporary humanists, I do believe in fact, in empirical reality, and in our abilities to be in touch with it (though those abilities are problematic). And yet, I do believe that our documents, particularly our discursive and creative documents, are the things that make the data meaningful. Once I’m cured and hale and hearty, no set of data can ascribe meaning to that condition.

There’s a lot more to my questions, and a lot more to the argument, on both sides. I asked Dr. Miller to specify the distinction between “document” and “data,” and he replied “in the eye of the beholder.” He was being witty, of course, and later on we talked a bit and he admitted that the matter became “philosophical” when one looked into it closely. He invited me to email him with my question, and promised to respond with some links to resources discussing this distinction and its difficulties. He also insisted that his vision of the semantic web was not trying to isolate one vocabulary, but provide a framework for specifying identity, equivalence, and similarity in digital, physical, and conceptual resources. (He also said that the idea should never have been called “the semantic web.”)

The good news is that he very much supports the idea of document/data symbiosis as the web moves forward. The even better news was his advice to us all: don’t try to figure out what all this will be used for, he insisted, because doing so cripples innovation. Trying to specify all the outcomes and uses would have prevented the Web’s emerging at all, much less its fantastic proliferation. There’s a lesson there for the way we think about education as well.

Postscript: I was pleased that several of my Introduction to New Media Studies students were in the room for Dr. Miller’s talk. Their blogging is well underway and has already begun some wonderful exploration. You’ll find the aggregation blog (in its first iteration) at intronewmediastudies08.umwblogs.org. We’ll be building out this site during the term, but at least I’ve got a one-stop for the class’s blogging activity to date. Stop by and enjoy–and if you leave a comment, be sure to leave it on the student’s original post. You can get there by clicking on the author’s name at the bottom of the post.

Have I said yet how glad I am that Gene Roche (“Techfoot”) is blogging again? I really should pony up some tuition dollars–reading his stuff is like being in a great seminar….

Gene’s latest post comments on a very thoughtful and timely article by a former colleague. I’ll direct you to Gene’s post for all the details. Here I simply offer a little comment responding to Gene and to commenter QueenAnne’s point about longitudinal assessment. It’s an obvious point, but one worth making: look what our institutional silos have done to distort the very idea of mission, let alone assessment.

Student experience: that’s the purview of Student Affairs, right? The people who schedule the mixers and dances and res-hall activities? The people who get the pool tables and climbing walls together for student recreation? Yet how many rich, unexplored opportunities are here for creative informal learning encounters, among students and faculty and staff. Instead, we seem to have independent, centrally funded catering operations–credit catering, activity catering, etc. Where’s the academic mission situated within a view of the whole person? A part of me still thinks, stubbornly, that the traditional 18-22 undergraduate experience is best carried out in a true academical village, just as Mr. Jefferson imagined it. And as long as we’re on my stubbornness, I continue to think that information technologies can help knit and strengthen academical villages in the larger sense–but here too, silos often intrude, including the silos that separate students’ gregarious lives online from the way we imagine and foster online learning and interaction at the “enterprise” level.

And what about alumni affairs? We say that part of the core mission of liberal arts undergraduate education is to prepare our students for lifelong learning, as well as give them the tools they need to fulfill their own emerging potentials throughout their career(s). Yet assessment rarely includes any effort to encourage our students to take the measure of their lives after graduation, and reflect on the difference–good or bad–that their time at college has made to their lives. It’s often struck me that there’s a weird, wide divide between some of the work alumni associations do most naturally and the work we say we want to do in outcomes assessment, but fight shy of.

No solutions, here, but some persisting questions.  I wish I heard such questions asked more often and more pervasively throughout the institution. Thanks to Gene and Dan Chambliss for keeping them alive and urgent.

but only just. Thanks to all for the get-well wishes. They’ve worked, though I’m still pretty weak. Odd how flu makes for such lethargy.

I’m trying to tie up a few (thousand) loose ends as I get ready for the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative 2008 Annual Meeting. This meeting is the one that feels like “home base” for me. It’s where I came in, back in 2004. Lots has happened since, and I’ve at last been to the New Media Consortium Annual Meeting and found out that all the wonderful things folks said about that meeting were also true. Chalk it up to pure slavering greed on my part: I treasure and need them both.

My thought for the evening as I try once again to think through my half-baked ideas about metaphor in the metaverse: perhaps what I’m trying to articulate is something like what Stanley Kubrick tries to do when he portrays abstractions in action. Or like what Hitchcock meant when he talked about “pure cinema.” I think that if we manage to avoid killing the planet or each other, or both, we may soon be able to tap into and explore an entirely new world of discourse and analysis, one that takes what we already know about cinematic grammar, semiotics, semantics, just plain expressiveness, and puts it into practice on a hitherto unimagined, unexperienced scale. What would happen if we educated our students to be sophisticated moviemakers, just as we now educate them to be sophisticated writers? What if those capacities were used not just in the service of narrative film, but as a means of conversation, analysis, etc.? The semantic metaverse–that gives our meaningful world back to us? Worth a thought, even if it’s half-baked.

Pretty little critter, but appearances are deceiving in the case of the influenza virus, as I can testify after two days on my back with it. “Gardner Writes” will be back as soon as my lovely visitor has been shown the door.