This isn’t a great movie–in fact, it’s pretty formulaic and manipulative in spots. But I still like it. It’s a treat to see Denzel Washington act in his role, and several of the supporting players also do a fine job.

But the real reason I finally bought this film (Blu-ray version, on sale at Amazon) was that the story it tells is part of my personal history. From 1970-1975 I was in the Pride of Salem, the championship marching band at Andrew Lewis High School in Salem, Virginia. When the T. C. Williams’ Titans won the State AAA Football championship in 1971, they defeated Andrew Lewis for that title. The game was played at Victory Stadium in Roanoke on a bitterly cold day in December. I was there that day, playing in the band down on the sidelines.  Our prize quarterback, Eddie Joyce, Jr., was running a fever with what we were told was strep throat. He had done a superb job all season, including a thrilling comeback victory over E. C. Glass High School, but this day was not his: he never could find his rhythm, and his tremendous arm had very little precision, in part because the defense started blitzing and our offensive line just couldn’t hold them.

The game was never close. T. C. Williams won 27-7 [EDIT: it was actually 27-0, as the ALHS touchdown, the first of the game, was disallowed–see comments below] after putting in their second string to avoid running the score up. I had never seen such large, fast, strong players. Over and over our quarterback was sacked, our receivers were smothered, and their offense ran over us. We gave it our best shot. We were completely outgunned. I think their second string could have beaten us that day. So it goes.

Now, many years later, I don’t mind so much that we were drubbed by the number two team in the nation, though it was very painful to witness. What I do mind is that Remember The Titans changed the name of my high school to “Marshall” and wrote it out of the drama. I don’t mind that they changed the game from an afternoon game to a night game, or even that they made it sound like a close game with a last-minute trick play pulling out the miracle win. But I sure wish they’d left the name unchanged. The “Marshall” coach they cast is a lookalike for Eddie Joyce, the head coach for us that year. The “Marshall” quarterback was number 12, as was ours. So why change the name? I can’t find a definitive answer to that question. I wish they’d left us in there.

That’s my Friday night story, and I’m sticking to it.

Day two of this semester’s Introduction to New Media Studies class, and the meeting went in some directions I hadn’t quite anticipated.

We didn’t discuss the readings for the day in a very systematic fashion. In no small part this was the result of the readings themselves, particularly Borges’ “The Garden of the Forking Paths.” This is the second time I’ve used this text (The New Media Reader) and thus the second time I’ve begun the term with the Janet Murray introduction, the Lev Manovich introduction, and the Borges’ story. This time, though, I found myself more vulnerable to the Borges that I was the first time through. That’s not unusual for me. The first time I work hard to achieve enough mastery to make a decent guide for the class’s work. The second time I’m more relaxed as I read the material. The result is usually more engagement, not less. Today I found that when a couple of vocal students brought the story up in the context of our discussion of techno-utopian and techno-dystopian possibilities, I fell immediately under the Borgesian spell, so much so that I found myself trying to explore the ideas in the two introductions not in terms of, but within, the very strange, beautiful, dissociative world of the Borges story. Oddly, that approach seemed illuminating–perhaps only to me–as it made the connections between computing and consciousness sudden, explicit, and intense. But of course the experience also felt labyrinthine, recursive, elusive, refractory: not the kinds of adjectives that typically make for clear instruction or any kind of closure.

At a couple of points I felt my own mind becoming quite webby (sounds strange, I know) and my awareness of emergent possibilities felt heightened as a result. But the time was over all too soon, and I could feel some stamina ebbing away as the students tried to hang on to an experience that had few handles. And as always, I wonder about the silent ones. Several students were passionately involved in the discussion, committed to the “swarming feeling” Borges’ protagonist describes as multiple layers of time and possible outcomes co-inhere within a narrative moment of awareness. Many more sat there silently. Some of them seemed engaged. Some seemed confused. Some seemed engaged and confused–those are the ones I’m usually the most hopeful about. And I felt that to honor the multiplicity present in the texts before us, I had to experience some aspects of that confusion myself, while at the same time being careful not to let every single rendezvous point disappear into the meta-fog.

For a few moments after class was over, I worried that the entire session had been too much of a mess for learning to have occurred. Oddly, I found I could remember most of the things that had happened in the class session, and found also that many of what seemed to me to be the most important points in the two introductions had in fact come up for discussion as we worked through the webs of connections. What I don’t know yet is how many of the students were able to detect, note, mark, learn, inwardly digest those important points without the more explicit scaffolding I usually supply (without lapsing into merely “going over the material”–I shudder even to write the phrase).

Sometimes I feel the drama of such an explosive and unstructured discussion becomes an important design element in the course experience, or at least a microcosm of the real, raw work of cognition that genuine learning entails–the real, raw work that is often hidden or evaded by usual schooling practices.

Other times I feel quite differently. I wish more students had chimed in. I know the things I could have done to elicit more participation, but today that felt like too much intervention–in fact, a bit stilted, and not at all true to the Borgesian spirit. Next time, I imagine I’ll be ready to move in another direction.

There’s a tension here that I can see I’ve been exploring in several recent blog posts. Today, Borges brought that exploration and that tension into sharper focus for me–and I hope that focus somehow made itself useful to my students as I guided them or at least tumbled before them. Very hard to say. What I do know is that the editors of this textbook are canny alchemists for placing that short story next to those introductions, and immediately before our next reading, Vannevar Bush’s “As We May Think.”

The connections here are truly overwhelming–but such oxygenation!

Prepping for the Rock/Soul/Progressive class tomorrow, and these words in James Miller’s Flowers in the Dustbin once again got my attention:

Meanwhile, most of my friends (discounting those who have continued to make their living by writing about, or recording, popular music) long ago stopped listening to rock. As they settle into middle age, their old albums gathering dust, their current musical tastes are now attuned to quite different styles of music, from country-western to classical, from show tunes to patriotic women’s choruses from Bulgaria–almost anything, in fact, but the once beloved soundtrack of their adolescence and early adulthood.

Okay, Dr. Miller, here’s my confession. I’ve never understood the behavior you say your friends exhibit. I feel as intensely about this music now, in my middle age (I don’t remember “settling” into this phase, but sure, I’ve arrived here), as I did when I was an adolescent, or even as a child. I was grabbing a quick bite at a local fast-food joint today when “Ticket to Ride” and “In the Midnight Hour” came on back to back on the store’s music system. I did not flashback to my childhood, relive a primal scene, or even feel the delicious memory of my first kiss. No nostalgia need apply. (Some music does make me powerfully nostalgic, but that’s not why I love it. Sometimes it’s a reason why I avoid it.) No, I thought about the musicians, in a space, making those sounds, sounds I can inhabit and sounds that inhabit me, a set of sounds whose structure in the passion and urgency and agency of their delivery connects me to a wild surmise about the possibilities of meaning, joy, and deep embodied insight in our mortal lives.

Then again, I was moved in exactly the same way by Bach and Hank Williams and Rodgers/Hart, too. From the first.

Why would one stop listening to anything one has loved? Unless one didn’t truly love it, but simply got rushed along in the herd, it makes no sense to me. And it makes me skeptical about James Miller’s argument that “unlike every other great genre of American pop, rock is all about being young, or (if you are poor Mick Jagger) pretending to be young.”

Maybe I didn’t get the memo telling all those poor intense saps that all the passion they felt in adolescence would one day gather dust, just like their old rock records. Me, I’ve got my old rock records filed right next to my new ones, by format, in alphabetical order, and I play them all regularly. Methinks Miller doth protest too much.

I’ve met all four of my classes once now. This semester it’s two sections of Introduction to Literary Studies (gateway course for the major–theory and criticism and genre and close reading and a partridge…), one section of Introduction to New Media Studies, and one section of Rock/Soul/Progressive. Each beginning was different. Some of the classes obviously came with their game heads on. They were ready to go, or got to that stage after a very short while (and mercifully little stand-up comedy from me). One was very sluggish until the very end, when things suddenly caught fire. In every case, there was at least one fascinating moment. I try very hard to elicit those moments, and once they’re there, try very hard to give them just the right mix of attention and restraint to get them to grow. Perhaps that’s why class always feels like an intense conversation to me–but the kind of intense conversation in which one has to stare and look away at the same time.

I continue to marvel at how these fragile moments can very quickly become seismic (to mix my metaphors well). Or to put it another way, at one point I’ll feel as if I’m trying to carry a very full cup of coffee up a flight of stairs without spilling it, and immediately thereafter feel as if I’m a kite thrown aloft by a roughly playful gust. Pedagogical agency is such a varied experience. Small wonder some people find it too dizzying to enjoy.

I’m reading around in Ian MacDonald’s Revolution in the Head: The Eeatles’ Records and the Sixties, and it’s just as good as they say. I’d picked it up in a bookstore several years and landed on a song where MacDonald’s analysis completely rubbed me up wrong, so I put it back on the shelf. Yet ever after I keep reading how wonderful it is, and I realize I haven’t really given it a chance. This time, having just read Jonathan Gould’s great analysis/evocation/celebration/enactment of “Strawberry Fields Forever” and “Penny Lane” in Can’t Buy Me Love, I went straight to those songs (the greatest 45 r.p.m. release of all time, hands down) in the MacDonald book to see how Ian would measure up. His work on these masterpieces was every bit as good as Gould’s. And both of them understand the greatness of “Penny Lane,” which is a harder greatness to assess than the more obvious genius of “Strawberry Fields Forever.” That understanding means a lot to me, because I think “Penny Lane” is every bit the equal of “Strawberry Fields Forever,” with just as much depth and personal resonance and poetry and musical interest–and mind-expansion.

So I bought Revolution in the Head and brought it home. I’ve got Beatles Gear going too, and that’s a truly astonishing book in its own right–but that’s for another blog.

Tonight, I’m struck by Ian MacDonald’s description of Art School in the UK during the years preceding the 1960’s. And I’m thinking I need to find a book on the educational thought that produced these schools. If anyone knows of such a book–really, a survey of the Art School / Art College movement in the UK would be fine–please let me know. Anything that could nourish and help shape Lennon, McCartney (by association), and Townshend has my vote as a successful educational experiment. Listen to this:

The key to the English art shcool experience is that it was founded on talent rather than on official qualifications. In such an environment, one might interact wiht a wide spectrum of people, regardless of class or education, and draw from a multitude of activities often taking place in the same hall, separated only by screens. In addition to this, the quarterly dances–supplemented by more frequent one-nighters as the art schools became incorporated into the UK gig-circuit during the Sixties–provided opportunities for students to hear the top British R&B and jazz-blues groups, as well as visiting bluesmen from America. Already a crucible for creative fusion, art school as a result became the secret ingredient in the most imaginative English pop/rock.

Where do I sign?

The footnote tells a sad, familiar tale of how high-investment, high-yield education inevitable gives way to more regular, cost-effective mediocrity. To our shame, the mediocrity bears the name of the continent I live on:

After the affluent Sixties, English art schools began to follow other parts of the educational establishment by tightening supervision and examination and moving towards the North American model…. Many involved in the Punk/New Wave and early Eighties pop scene began as art students, but the number of art school ‘crossovers’ has declined markedly since then.

Let’s recap then: crucible for creative fusion and secret ingredient in the most imaginative English pop/rock vs. tightened supervision and examination, and tightened supervision and examination–the “North American model”–wins.

I guess no one guaranteed that all academic transformations would be for the better. Thank goodness the Beatles came along when we could afford John’s education. Sigh.

This is my 500th blog post.

To mark the occasion, I’m podcasting an interview I did with filmmaker Errol Morris back in March, 1997. The audio, alas, isn’t very good. I hadn’t planned to put the audio out at all, actually; the tape recorder was there as a backup to my notes, just as it was for the Ken Burns interview I did several years later (and with similarly iffy audio). I’ve cleaned the sound up as much as I could in the time I’ve had to devote to it. I think it’s at least listenable, and that the content of what Errol has to say is worth trying to listen through the bad sound.

Errol as at what was then called Mary Washington College as the 1997 Distinguished Visitor in Residence. He was with us for about a day and a half, during which time he screened a video copy of the workprint for his new film Fast, Cheap & Out of Control. He also spoke in five classes, attended several meals, and allowed himself to be interviewed nearly every moment he was here by a dedicated band of students from my film classes. I hope one day to put some of that material online as well.

For now, here’s the interview I did with Errol. I have far too much to say about this remarkable man and his work to even get started in this post. I’ll leave it at this: from Gates of Heaven to The Fog of War and beyond, his films have been as important to me as a film enthusiast and scholar as Welles’, Kubrick’s, or Hitchcock’s. I think Errol Morris will go down as one of the finest, most influential filmmakers who’s ever lived. He’s also a generous human being and an unforgettable conversationalist. I hear he can be difficult, too–but I’ve never seen that side of him. Even if I did, I’m sure he’d remain a hero.

If you haven’t seen Fast, Cheap, you should: immediately. If you haven’t seen his web site, ditto. And his latest series of postings on the NY Times blog site is remarkable.

Here’s the interview. Thanks, Errol–for everything.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (19.1MB)

Since I took up this work in 2003, I’ve met some great, great people. One of them is Liz Kocevar-Weidinger, Instruction and Reference Services Librarian at Longwood University. Liz is a very creative and imaginative person who understands the power of metaphor and has an uncommonly interesting strategic sense of how libraries can become vital partners with faculty and students. She’s a visionary.

Liz was kind enough to invite me to speak at the 2007 Virginia Library Association Conference. My topic was mobility and mobile learning. I had delivered an earlier version of this talk at the 2006 EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative Focus Session on Mobile Learning. Unfortunately, the audio recording didn’t work out for that talk. Thankfully, the recording worked this time, and in the intervening year I’d had a chance to revise, polish, and extend the original argument. For the VLA conference, I pushed into some new areas, trying to work in some of my recent thoughts having to do with intimacy, imagination, and emergence. I’m still working on those concepts, testing them as heuristics in several contexts. My thanks to Liz for the invitation and the opportunity.

I also need to footnote and thank Bryan Alexander for the idea that mobile devices can be compellingly intimate. In fact, Bryan’s talk at NLII 2004 was the first talk I ever heard on mobile computing, and for that matter the first time I had seen a Bryan Alexander presentation. A most memorable and fateful evening, one for which I remain very grateful.

As I tried to think my way through this topic during my prep for the VLA conference, I was struck by how much had changed from 2004-2006, and how much (perhaps even more) had changed from 2006-2007 when it came to mobile computing and mobile learning. In an era of continuing miniaturization and increasing sophistication in human-computer interfaces, it may very well be that “mobile learning” will soon be superseded by the simple term “learning.”

This time I really did miss a day–but as they say in Wikipediaville, “assume good faith“: “Well-meaning persons make mistakes, and you should correct them when they do…. Correct, but do not scold.” Consider me corrected, though there’s always the comment section if you’d like to help.

Yesterday was a complete blur of writing projects in quick succession, climaxing with the tardy delivery of my slides for Monday’s ELI Webinar. I’m confident I won’t even begin to do justice “Teaching and Learning with Web 2.0.” Given the time limits, the breadth of the topic, and my own ignorance, we’ll see an old phrase–“a lick and a promise”–given new life. That said, I admit that I did find myself getting a bit playful at times. Moonwalks are a serious and risky business, but don’t forget the golf club.

But enough talk about me. Apropos of Claudia Ceraso’s comment on my most recent Bruner post, I offer for your consideration this portrait of an active learner:

I’m no professional philosopher, still less a mathematician, but I understand just enough of Alex Ryan’s paper to see a little ways into the depth of this definition:

“Emergence is the process whereby the assembly, breakdown or restructuring of a system results in one or more novel emergent properties.”

Assembly, breakdown, restructuring: it seems to me that Web 2.0, like education, invites and expects these activities. (So does life, but don’t let on to the folks with good window seats; it will only upset them.) Of course, the definition does not say that the assembly, breakdown, or restructuring of a system inevitably results in one or more novel emergent properties. Indeed, it seems to anticipate that these activities will often not result in novel emergent properties. I note that Ryan’s definition does not give a name to what happens when the novel properties do not emerge. Chaos? Failure?

It seems to me that within the assembly, breakdown, or restructuring of a system, the teacher’s role, perhaps her or his primary role, is to shape and support the process of emergence. The activities must be authentic (real assembly, real breakdown, real restructuring–things could get broken) so that they have their best chance of resulting in emergence, which means there will always be the risk of flying apart into chaos and outer darkness. The other side of this idea is that not engaging in processes that can lead to emergent properties reduces both the risk of chaos and the chances of significant innovation–and understanding can be understood as a kind of cognitive innovation–to near zero.

On Monday I’ll be thinking about these issues, and others, in relation to using Web 2.0 in teaching and learning. I hope to throw some new thought-ingredients into the well-stirred Web 2.0 stew … or at least contribute an old boot and parsnips. I promise to talk about practical stuff, too. 🙂

Photo by Martin Argles, from a recent interview in The Guardian

Just when I think Jerome Bruner has extended my horizons all the way from Virginia to the Antipodes, I read something else by him that demonstrates how much farther I need to stretch. Two days ago I read what may be the single best essay on education I’ve ever read–and given some of the stuff I’ve been reading over the last four years, that’s saying something. “After John Dewey, What?” is collected in On Knowing: Essays for the Left Hand (Harvard UP: 1962, rev. ed. 1979). I’m using the eighth printing (1997), so clearly the book’s got a considerable audience. I’d like to be among them to hear what they think about this book. I have the funny feeling I sometimes get when I’m immersed in a scholarly or literary author: I want to find the online discussion forum devoted to the author’s work, the fan sites that document all the errata and all the various editions and include multiple interviews with the writer, all the dense, prolific, easily accessed community-of-interest resources I take for granted in other areas (film, IT, consumer electronics, music). I know those materials are there, but they’re scattered, and they’re not flowing into a mighty online conversation. One day that will change.

But I digress.

What I’d like to do is reproduce each paragraph in this essay and follow it with commentary, observations, questions, and a considerable number of amens. If the Talmudic metaphor seems strange, here’s a stranger metaphor still: I’d like to be with this essay the way I’m with the crowd and the musicians at a concert. I’m not even sure what that means, so perhaps I’ll leave the metaphor alone for a more satisfying exegesis at another time. And I’ll leave the bulk of the essay for your reading pleasure.

For now, here are some choice moments in an essay I urge you to read as soon as possible. And once you have, or if you’ve read it already, please tell me what you think.

Bruner begins by quoting from John Dewey’s My Pedagogic Creed, written when Dewey was thirty-eight. Part of the second article of faith caught me by the heart immediately: “Education, therefore, is a process of living, and not a preparation for future living.” I might have that engraved on my tombstone.

Bruner is candid and rigorous about where Dewey fell short, and what in Dewey’s thought responded to a cultural context that is no longer the one we live in, but he’s also scrupulous about recording and probing into what endures, and what we forget at our peril. He responds to Dewey’s warnings about educational sentimentalism, and reminds us that we should not be reluctant “to expose the child to the startling sweep of man and nature for fear it might violate the comfortable domain of his direct experience.” Bruner rejects “the cloying concept of ‘readiness.'” He asks the vital question: “In what form shall we speak our beliefs?”–and goes on to state his own pedagogic creed.

Tonight, I offer two quotations from the first of Bruner’s own five articles of faith.

What education is. Education seeks to develop the power and sensibility of mind. On the one hand, the educational process transmits to the individual some part of the accumulation of knowledge, style, and values that constitutes the culture of a people. In doing so, it shapes the impulses, the consciousness, and the way of life of the individual. But education must also seek to develop the processes of intelligence so that the individual is capable of going beyond the cultural ways of the social world, able to innovate in however modest a way so that he can create an interior culture of his own. For whatever the art, the science, the literature, the history, and the geography of a culture, each man must be his own artist, his own scientist, his own historian, his own navigator. No person is master of the whole culture; indeed, this is almost a defining characteristic of that form of social memory that we speak of as culture. Each man lives a fragment of it. To be whole, he must create his own version of the world, using that part of his cultural heritage he has made his own through education. [Emphasis mine.]

In other words, the goal of a liberal arts education is to enable students to innovate and inquire within their own ongoing liberal arts education, that is, their lives. Bruner beautifully re-views Dewey: “Education … is a process of living, not a preparation for future living.”

The section ends with the paragraph, one that I think should be memorized and recited before, during, and after all discussions of curriculum (my that sounds prescriptive, but I’d like to try the exercise):

Education must begin, as Dewey concluded his first article of belief, “with a psychological insight into the child’s capacities, interests, habits,” but a point of departure is not an itinerary. It is just as mistaken to sacrifice the adult to the child as to sacrifice the child to the adult. It is sentimentalism to assume that the teaching of life can be fitted always to the child’s interests just as it is empty formalism to force the child to parrot the formulas of adult society. Interests can be created and stimulated. In this sphere it is not far from the truth to say that supply creates demand, that the provocation of what is available creates response. One seeks to equip the child with deeper, more gripping, and subtler ways of knowing the world and himself.

Much confusion about what it means to be truly student-centered could be mended by these words.

Bruner goes on to discuss “what the school is,” “the subject matter of education,” “the nature of method,” and “the school and social progress.” Each of those discussions is just as challenging, nuanced, and lucid as the bits I’ve quoted. What Bruner seeks to equip the child with, he has also bequeathed to me. I wish I had discovered this writer a decade ago. I am glad, very glad to be learning from him now.

My thanks also to my colleague Tom Fallace for piquing my curiosity about Dewey, a process that made this Bruner essay all the more resonant. I have so much to learn.