Laptops: I asked students to bring their laptops with them to class. Almost everyone had one. The few who didn’t had them on order but hadn’t yet received them. Over time, three or four of the sixteen got out of the habit of bringing theirs to class, but the rest constituted a pretty good yield in my view, and enabled some interesting learning opportunities.

One was what I’d expected (and hoped for): instant research journeys, and use of the class wiki for notes and other materials. It was a great day when we used the Internet to discover the explanation for “black Irish” that made sense of Jimmy Rabbitt’s insistence that Dubliners were “black and proud.” When the student at the end of the table found the resource and read it aloud, the entire class was charged with the discovery. That kind of serendipitous inquiry-fest is exactly what ubiquitous computing and connectivity should enable in classrooms–but it takes being alert to the possibilities.

I should have expected the other use, but I didn’t: students used their laptops to play for the class the music they were analyzing. Early in the class, I had played my own musical examples on CDs I owned or compilations I had burned. Of course I had my laptop with me as well, but it didn’t occur to me to use it to play music for the class. I play my music on my stereo, on CDs and on vinyl, and I also play my music on my iPod. I don’t use my laptop as a giant iPod–when I listen to music on my laptop, it’s streaming from Pandora or something like that. But these students really do use their laptops in a convergent manner: it’s a media center as well as a computer and an Internet device. Lesson learned. Next time I’ll assemble my examples on the laptop and play it back from there. No more boomboxes.

Play by play: I adapted an exercise from my earlier “Stranded” writing workshop and spent one day playing three songs for the class. For each, I asked them to narrate, as precisely as they could, what they were hearing, and to take that narration down in notes on their computers (on this day, we were in a lab, for better music playback and so everyone would have access to a machine). The results were fascinating. I asked them to send their notes to me so I could post them on the wiki. I didn’t get them posted. Why? Because there were multiple steps to get from Word format to MediaWiki format, and I hadn’t yet found the web service that did the quick-and-easy translation. My good intentions were then overtaken by events. Moral of the story: I should have had the students post their notes to the wiki. Good learning for them, low-threshold and brief requirement as well, and it will get done. I will be watching in the spring for ways to keep myself from being the bottleneck, even when it’s a last-minute inspiration I’m acting on.

The Final Project: In the preparation for the final project, begun in earnest about 2/3 of the way through the course, the students got bogged down in their discussions. No action items or organization emerged from those brainstorming sessions. I then intervened, more so than at any other time in the process, to get them organized and outline some basic project management steps to get and keep the ball rolling. The intervention was just what they needed, and things never got seriously off-track again. The intervention was not as much as they wanted, though: the students were very keen to have me tell them what the final project should look like, what they should do, what I was looking for, etc. I specified very precisely what I wanted–in the abstract. I refused to specify anything about the concrete form their project would take. A couple of students were unhappy with what they perceived as a lack of direction. I kept telling them the qualities the project must exhibit, the criteria it had to satisfy–but I simply would not tell them what kind of a thing it had to be, other than that it had to be a website. The result was better than I expected, and in some respects better than I had hoped. It was creative, funny, and showed (to me, anyway) a considerable amount of sophistication and understanding of the course materials. I was proud of their work, and they should be too. If the project was lacking something, it was probably ambition. It succeeded very well, but it didn’t aim quite as high as it might have, at least in terms of grappling with the harder questions in the course.

One more fascinating part of the final project, something that wouldn’t have happened if I hadn’t stepped back a bit, was the way certain leaders emerged. The person who had real web-design chops did a fine job of pulling everything together, and he got a lot of praise and gratitude from his peers. Ditto the person who was a born project manager, a leader who kept everyone on task and focused, and enjoyed that part of her talents. While not everyone bought in to the process as fully as they should have, it was a real treat to see the captains emerge, and indeed heartwarming to see how people responded to their leadership.

If you’re curious, take a look at the blog-aggregation site. There are some fascinating posts from each stage of the semester. Reading them over now, I see how far some of the students traveled from beginning to end–and how much this music came to mean to them as we traveled together. And every now and then, I’m sure I heard that pure and easy note, playing so free like a breath rippling by….

Thoughts more scattered than usual follow.

I have to admit that I’m a bit (okay, more than a bit) shy about this blog sequence. There were magical, beautiful moments in this class. There were also very disappointing moments, and some of them were because of my failures. I’m haunted–probably too haunted–by the gap between my conception of a learning odyssey and what I’m actually able to encourage and live up to myself. I’ll be teaching this class again this term, and I’m going to try to do better, but my best chance is always to let my fascination with the subject carry everything else along with it. When I lose myself that way, I find myself. Or perhaps when I ride the fascination I am better at getting out of the way–my own, and the students’.

There’s such an alchemy about teaching and learning that I feel a strange mixture of eagerness, awe, and trepidation every time I start again. I think back over this particular class and memories crowd to the fore: the Beatles argument, the two days I felt compelled to devote to the Beach Boys, the day we listened to James Brown’s “Night Train” together as we finished up Roddy Doyle’s “The Commitments,” the day a student identified a call-and-response moment in a Led Zeppelin song that I thought I knew inside out and suddenly opened an entirely new vista before me (it was all I could do to avoid jumping up right then and there with a Peanuts-esque “That’s IT!”), the way so many of the third presentations suddenly gelled into the kind of deep, thoughtful, rigorous, playful work I’d been hoping for–and trying to encourage–all along. The best blog posts, one of them quoting the last line of “Glimpses” in a way that made me think something had really resonated. One of those posts finding a YouTube tribute to the “female Elvis” whose obituary I had mentioned in passing that day. (By the way, YouTube was the single greatest resource for our class all semester long. I was worried about how we’d be able to share the music. I needn’t have.)

There were times I thought we wouldn’t get there. The day it became apparent I may have messed up the book order and left “High Fidelity” off the list. The day I tried to explain my follow-your-nose approach to research and left one student bewildered, apparently beyond recall. The day I asked the seminarians why they weren’t more lively in the question-and-answer period that followed their classmates’ presentations, and they replied that they didn’t want to ask questions for fear of making their peers look ignorant or stupid. I felt something rip inside when I heard their answer that day. A couple of them were passive and couldn’t be bothered to be answerable with questions, but for most of them it was the absolute truth: they didn’t look at the Q&A as a time to go deeper with what their classmates had already showed they knew, or to bring in interesting connections, or generally to take the level of engagement and enthusiasm and inspiration up a notch or ten. No, they were worried about catching their classmates out. And this in a class with no tests at all–but that’s another story.

Then there was the day when it became clear that I’d have to tell them they should blog twice a week, when I had hoped that with this small group and a topic of some urgency to all of us music lovers, I could just step back and let the blogging commence. That was certainly true for a few of the students. One in particular became a champion blogger within a week and I learned a ton from reading her blog (and told her so, too). But for most, especially at first, the overriding question was “how much do you want us to do?” I didn’t resent the question, really, but it was disappointing to realize how much their focus was task-oriented rather than inquiry-oriented (a facile dichotomy but I’ll leave it to advance the argument, for now). I know they were puzzled that we would be doing all this reading but they’d not be tested on it. I figure some found this a good reason not to read, or not to read very carefully. I used to be well-known for my regular reading quizzes, and I think those quizzes did a great deal of good as a constant indicator of the level and kinds of detail I expected them to attend to as they prepared for class. Somewhere along the way, though, I stopped giving these quizzes, probably because I grew impatient with them or tired of talking about them. I felt, and feel, that the time could be better spent. But as my wife always and rightly reminds me, much of what I need to bring concerns modeling, stepping students through certain paces. I will again attempt to find a balance between structure and emergence in this instance as well.

Then there was my own struggle to keep up with my evaluations of their oral presentations. Even with a (good) rubric sheet and recordings and copious notes, I found it hard to get the marking done. My mistake was not to evaluate the presentations right away, while I could replay the presentations in my head from memory, using my recordings and notes as supplements. Here I can find my biggest improvements next term. More structure for me.

I did not revise the syllabus with the students, exactly, though I’ve been powerfully influenced by the idea ever since I heard Barbara Ganley speak about it at Faculty Academy last spring. My version was to make it clear to the class that my revisions responded to my sense of the way the class work was emerging. I wanted them to understand that I did not view the syllabus as a “contract.” I tried not to abuse my privilege in this respect, and I tried to earn their trust so that any changes I made would  be seen not as “gotchas,” but as support for our work. I also put the syllabus on a wiki and asked students put their own contributions, notes, presentation materials, and so forth on the wiki. In that sense, their work enlarged and augmented (and completed, really) the outline my initial syllabus represented. I’m going to try to ramp up all these aspects next term. I’m also going to try to weave in more powerful, frequent knowledge-networking, specifically work with del.icio.us and online music resources. But I’m wary of piling too much on, as there were moments of what-do-we-do-now silence out of which some powerful ideas emerged, particularly the final project. (I’ll need to blog about this final project separately.)

I marked their oral presentations. I also evaluated their blog participation, their class meeting participation, and their class commitment generally. That evaluation was influenced by the self-evaluations I asked them to write at the end of term. I asked them to evaluate their own work on the final project, as well as their group members’ work (they had organized themselves, at my suggestion, into various task forces to construct the website). These self-evaluations also influenced my marks for their final projects. I explained to them that this was a chance for them to impress me not only with the quality of their argument but also, and primarily, with the quality of their reflection: its candor, expressiveness, and depth.

Most of all, though, I wanted for us all to listen with better ears. My strategy each day was to get us gripped, either by something I brought to the table or by a sudden insight or even a chance remark from one of the students, either in the class or in a blog post. And “gripped” here means not just fascination in the moment, though it certainly means that, too. In its larger sense, “gripped” means unable to let ideas alone, unable to keep from trying out an insight. If they could see that popular music could reward such scrutiny, they might be able to transfer that sense to other areas of their education, their lives. I can sum up my deepest joys in two ways: when students would point out a connection or a resonance I hadn’t expected or understood, and when students would say they found themselves listening to their songs more carefully and with greater interest than they had before, as they considered whether each song was rock, soul, or progressive. Sonic Youth, Backstreet Boys, Janis Joplin, the Kinks. Whatever. The students who gave the most to the class showed me, by the end, that they could stretch from Peter Guralnick’s patient, thorough, deeply committed Sweet Soul Music to the sparkling insights and arid bitterness of James Miller’s Flowers in the Dustbin to the rush and verve and swing and kerrang of Nik Cohn’s Awopbopaloobop. They could see, or begin to see, how these writers, and these musicians, were themselves gripped.

I feel pained by the disappointments, especially the ones I contributed to, but as I think about the best of what the class produced, I start to feel elated, too, by where we found ourselves going. I aimed to bring the class powerful readings, a sense of history (and historical disputes), and a varied palette of songs from the 1950’s to the present. I wanted them to understand that sophistication can increase commitment and joy, as well as a healthy (and sometimes corrosive) skepticism. We played records for each other, and thought about everything from the technological pseudo-folk-song of Patti Page’s “Tennessee Waltz” (Miller’s analysis here is brilliant) to boy bands, Britpop, and John Cage. We could take the measure of a season of astonishing cultural fermentation–and enjoy the blushful Hippocrene as well.

Perhaps the most startling moment of all came after the class was over, when a student in my freshman seminar commented on my Theme Parks and Sandboxes blog post. It was as if something I had been saying over and over, all semester long, had suddenly connected. Both he and I wish it had connected earlier. Yet I suspect that for this class, as for many, the deepest connections will occur in its wake, and that even if I had asked them to read my blog all semester long (that’s always seemed a little presumptuous to me, but maybe it shouldn’t) and had written that particular post at midterm, the ripeness that is all would not yet have come–to them or to me.

What’s lovely about blogging, of course, is that the connections endure, and the ripeness may always yet come.

Much left I would like to write about. I’d like to say more about each of the students. I made a study of them during the course, and thought hard about how to reach each of them, and how ready they were to be reached. I’d like to write about the first incarnation of this course, when I taught it in the summer of 2003 as part of the Advanced Studies in England summer program. I’d like to think through the freshman Writing Workshop I taught for many years in the late 90’s and early 00’s, often with my colleague  and partner-in-crime Bill Kemp, that we called “Stranded.” Since everything I did in Rock/Soul/Progressive last fall was in some ways influenced or inflected by everyone I was talking to, everything I was reading, and everything I was watching or listening to, I really should have a contributors acknowledgement page with a hundred or more names on it. I can’t end, however, without citing an essay that has long haunted me with its vision of an authentic self meeting the authentic otherness of the world, including all those other selves: Walker Percy’s “The Loss of the Creature.”

I think that some part of me believes that careful attention to popular music can open more doors of perception than one usually finds in a course of study, but that may be largely the product of my own passion for rock-and-roll.

I see the students’ faces now, sitting around that table in Combs 348. I hear their voices, think about the apparent silences that their subsequent blog posts proved were not at all quiet, mull over the detachment they slowly overcame by the end of the semester. I think about the student who clarified a Blur song for me. The student who seemed so resistant yet wrote some of the most candid blogs. The student who shared with us how it felt to go home for the Thanksgiving holiday, and who thereby demonstrated the community we had begun to experience together.

I wish them well. I am grateful to them and hope that what I have learned will do justice to the work we did.

FSEM 100Y, Fall 2007. The University of Mary Washington had begun a program of freshman seminars the semester I left for the University of Richmond in summer of 2006. As I prepared to return to UMW for the Spring, 2007 semester, one of my first deadlines was for proposing a freshman seminar for Fall, 2007. Faculty were encouraged but not required to apply. I wanted to put that oar in the water, however. Many schools across the country were focusing on the “first year experience,” stressing its importance for bringing students into an intense community of learning that would strengthen and inspire them for the work they would take up during their college careers. I wanted to be part of that effort at UMW.

So I decided to propose a course built primarily out of heuristics and passion–though I didn’t put it exactly that way in the application. The heuristics were in the course title: rock for music derived from blues, country, or a mixture of the two; soul for music derived primarily from the gospel tradition; and progressive for music whose roots were in the various classical music traditions of Europe and, to a certain extent, of other cultures as well. These heuristics would allow us to ask questions about musical form, about performance practices, about musical history, and about cultural contexts. The overlaps and uncertain taxonomies were obvious from the start, but the categories were nevertheless useful as a way of focusing our analytical work and keeping us aware that the musicians we studied always located themselves within a tradition and within various communities of practice. A couple of times I brought up the connection between traditions and communities of practice within popular music and traditions and communities of practice within school. Once it came up in a particularly intense way at the end of a class session, and seemed to resonate within several students for some time afterward.

The passion was essentially a love for popular music, music that inspired social exchanges but also individual dreams, deep emotional bonds but also solitary, introspective pleasures.

I wanted to try to shape a course of study in which stronger and more precise analytical practices would emerge from an immersion in idiosyncratic but compelling musical histories, from oral presentations that would take the form of debates over whether a given song was rock, soul, or progressive, from novels deeply concerned with popular music, and from a final class project that would demonstrate what the students had learned in a way that would a) offer outsiders a powerful, entertaining, creative, and thoughtful experience of our work together and b) reflect as comprehensively as possible each part of the course of study, not just what was easiest or most obvious to include. Threading its way throughout the course was a dialetic between the US and the UK / Ireland. We read three music histories, two by US writers and one by a UK writer. We read three novels, one by an Irishman, one by a Brit, and one by an American. I assigned songs for the first two oral presentations, and I kept the dialectic going in those assignments. The students themselves chose the music for their final oral presentations.

As I look back on the course, I can see how every bit of the structure I built into the experience was there to support emergence. All the theme parks were inside a sandbox. It was a very risky instructional design, especially for the first time out. Yet I felt compelled to do it that way, for several reasons. One was that I wanted my freshmen to experience a fairly radical version of the freedom college grants the learner. I wanted them to see as vividly as possible that they would get out of it only what they put into it. Another is that the academic study of popular culture can quickly become highly inauthentic. “We murder to dissect,” and I think that’s particularly true of vernacular art–not because the art is not sophisticated, for it certainly can be and often is, but because it is so close to the essence of human yearning, joy, and anguish. There is a sense of immediacy, of voices emerging from direct and intense lived experience, that I feel must be respected. Not only respected, either: participated in. When Milton writes, “Come, knit hands, and beat the ground / In a light fantastic round,” the thought is not only a thought, but an invitation to keep time.

I’ll tell more of the story of this course tomorrow. For now, here’s a link to the syllabus (itself the product of some rather intense emergence at time–I was always scrambling to keep the revisions coming and keep them current), and here’s a link to the final project website, which I will eventually move to a more permanent location. I’ll have more to say about both of these tomorrow as well.

I’ve been re-reading this small and plangent volume. Claudia Emerson gave it to me eight years ago. It resonated very deeply with me then, and does so still. Though the lessons I need have changed over those intervening years, this inexhaustible book continues to anticipate and meet those needs. I think I will not ever stop learning from it.

A short quotation tonight:

“But they are difficult things with which we have been charged; almost everything serious is difficult, and everything is serious.”

Tomorrow I hope to start writing about my freshman seminar last fall.

As a postscript to “Structures and Emergence,” I offer a recent story in the New Yorker about intensive care, checklists, executives and practitioners, and a stubborn practical expert visionary. (The story is also about nearly intractable institutional and professional dysfunction, but neither of those qualifies as news or deserves more than a sad acknowledgement followed by the next several steps in the long trek onward and upward.) It’s not the first time I’ve been inspired by Atul Gawande, the article’s author. Gawande gave me the idea for an APGAR for class meetings, and I see from a random spam trackback (a kind of shuffle-playback for the blog?) that my first Gawande reference came way back in December, 2004, when he wrote about the “focus, aggressiveness, and inventiveness” that characterize the pursuit and achievement of excellence, even more than skill or knowledge.

Once again Gawande’s exploring the idea of excellence, and again the exploration is by way of a story about a perceptive, inventive, doggedly committed professional who’s able to realize a vision, glimpse by glimpse. To use current jargon, the “outcomes” seem easily described: more patients live and leave the ICU. The real lessons are deeper, however. They concern the space between innovation and standards, between experimentation and automaticity, and how expertise, or more particularly a culture of expertise, can lead to a sometimes fatal detachment from the necessary routines of effective practice.

A physician named Peter Pronovost (not unlike Virginia Apgar) has established a basic checklist of ICU procedures designed to minimize infection, to manage pain effectively, to limit complications linked to mechanical ventilation, and in general to remind nurses and doctors of what should happen routinely to give patients the best chance of surviving whatever disease or trauma had brought them to the ICU in the first place. His physician colleagues resisted the checklists at first. Some of the arguments bordered on the absurd: “spend time with patients, not on paperwork,” though the paperwork was short, focused, and designed to keep patients healthy, not satisfy bureaucracy. However, by concentrating on a single metric, infection rates, Pronovost was able to sell the idea. (I am reminded that a tactical gain can be the legs that push a strategic imperative over the goal line.) The results were interesting:

The checklists provided two main benefits, Pronovost observed. First, they helped with memory recall, especially with mundane matters that are easily overlooked in patients undergoing more drastic events. (When you’re worrying about what treatment to give a woman who won’t stop seizing, it’s hard to remember to make sure that the head of her bed is in the right position.) A second effect was to make explicit the minimum, expected steps in complex processes. Pronovost was surprised to discover how often even experienced personnel failed to grasp the importance of certain precautions. In a survey of I.C.U. staff taken before introducing the ventilator checklists, he found that half hadn’t realized that there was evidence strongly supporting giving ventilated patients antacid medication. Checklists established a higher standard of baseline performance.

Thus checklists need not be a reductive substitute for complexity, but can instead serve as vital first step in complexity management that actually frees up time and attention for the more idiosyncratic or urgent needs. In their explicit articulation of “minimum, expected steps in complex processes,” checklists also turn information into knowledge by expecting (even compelling) a certain kind of attention. A checklist is not just a list, after all. It’s a script; it anticipates a performance.

It seems to me that our students often deal with complexity by reducing it rather than managing it. Who can blame them when much of the schooling they experience obviously and maddeningly does exactly the same thing? It also seems to me that all of us in school tend to confuse lists with checklists. This is a subtler distinction, and I may not be making it well, but to keep the implicit stage analogy going, it has something to do with the difference between repeating lines and acting them out.

For me, the most provocative bits of Gawande’s essay come at the end in a restatement of his mighty theme:

We have the means to make some of the most complex and dangerous work we do—in surgery, emergency care, and I.C.U. medicine—more effective than we ever thought possible. But the prospect pushes against the traditional culture of medicine, with its central belief that in situations of high risk and complexity what you want is a kind of expert audacity—the right stuff, again. Checklists and standard operating procedures feel like exactly the opposite, and that’s what rankles many people.

It’s ludicrous, though, to suppose that checklists are going to do away with the need for courage, wits, and improvisation. The body is too intricate and individual for that: good medicine will not be able to dispense with expert audacity. Yet it should also be ready to accept the virtues of regimentation.

There they are, beautifully pulling against a tensile center: expert audacity and the virtues of regimentation. The tension is beautifully recursive, for to manage this tension expertly, one must establish and manage–perform?–another instance of it. Like a rosined bow pulling across a violin string.

The essay’s subtitle, presumably invented by an editor, asks a haunting question that effectively concludes the piece: “If something so simple can transform intensive care, what else can it do?”

The new term begins in ten days, and I’m thinking about how to prep the sandbox for the fifteen weeks that follow. Truthfully, “thinking” is too mild a word. “Yearning” is more like it: yearning for the inspiration and insight into form, tempo, and activities that will give my students their best chance at surprising themselves and me with the depth and quality of their work.

For this post, rather than try to work out that yearning in my own prose, I want to experiment with some quotations, both audio and text. The two audio quotations come from KCRW’s “The Treatment,” in which host Elvis Mitchell does weekly interviews with actors, directors, writers, and other creative personnel from film, music, television, and other media. The two text quotations come from two Jerome Bruner books I’ve just started. Together, these four quotations fuel my yearning. I see the character of what I aspire to. That’s a good thing, though it certainly sharpens the yearning.

I hope you find them provocative too.

1. Director Paul Greengrass, from KCRW’s “The Treatment.”

2. Jerome Bruner, from the Preface to the 1977 revised edition of The Process of Education:

Let me turn finally to the last of the things that have kept me brooding about this book–the production of a curriculum. Whoever has undertaken such an enterprise will probably have learned many things. But with luck, he will also have learned one big thing. A curriculum is more for teachers than it is for pupils. If it cannot change, move, perturb, inform teachers, it will have no effect on those whom they teach. It must be first and foremost a curriculum for teachers. If it has any effect on pupils, it will have it by virtue of having had an effect on teachers. The doctrine that a well-wrought curriculum is a way of “teacher-proofing” a body of knowledge in order to get it to the student uncontaminated is nonsense.

[An aside: Bruner’s assertion, which I agree with, runs counter to much of what I heard at the humanities session of the NCAT “Learning By Design” day last November in Richmond.]

3. Director Sarah Polley, from KCRW’s “The Treatment.”

4. Jerome Bruner, from “The Shape of Experience,” in On Knowing: Essays for the Left Hand:

What is characteristic of the great work of art is that its metaphoric artifice, its juxtapositions have not only surprise value but also illuminating honesty. The two combine to create what we shall later refer to as “effective surprise.” The work of art also has a cognitive economy in its metaphoric transformations, which make it possible for a seemingly limited symbol to spread its power over a range of experience.

I yearn for that effective surprise and for the cognitive economy of powerful symbols, for the structures and the illuminating honesty, the theme parks and the sandboxes, to make of courses of study episodes of buildable wonder. In posts to follow, I’ll try to articulate some of my efforts to do so last term, and to be as candid as I can about what worked and what didn’t, and insofar as I can tell, why.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (340.6KB)

I resolve to blog at least once a day. Short or long, ill- or well-considered, focused or rambling, a post is better than silence, and I have learned to my cost how difficult it is to sustain momentum when I skip a day, or two, or ten. This blog has been a crucial part of my own teaching and learning for over three years now. It deserves more care and feeding than I’ve been giving it. Nothing against slow-blogging and its magnificent practitioners–but I feel I need the daily discipline.

I resolve to comment on at least one blog each day. Comments that grow into blog posts of their own don’t count. 🙂

I resolve to prune my Bloglines list and keep current with my personal suite of trusted and inspiring experts.

My thanks to my readers, and to those whose blogs have played, and continue to play, a crucial role in my work. Now more than ever, blogging matters, and I claim the humble, silly-sounding word “blogger” as a badge of honor.

Happy New Year.

On December 2, Brian Wilson received one of five Kennedy Center Honors Awards for 2007. The ceremony will be broadcast by CBS on December 26, 2007 at 9 p.m. EST.

It’s impossible to know what Brian is thinking in this photograph, and impossible not to wonder. We know he struggles daily with what they’re now calling a schizoaffective disorder. We know that despite these struggles, he’s managed to initiate and complete some astonishing work over the last decade, including 2004’s release of the completed SMiLE. Over the years it’s become increasingly apparent that even after his 1967 meltdown over this project, Brian continued to be productive. There’s great Beach Boys stuff coming from him, even with diminishing returns and increasing disability, right up through the Holland album and even up to the strangely compelling The Beach Boys Love You, as close to a punk album as Brian ever made, and in its way every bit as psychedelic as “Good Vibrations.” Yes, Brian Wilson was an acid casualty, with collateral damage all over the place, but even that story is not simple or straightforward.

More to the point, the story of Brian Wilson is far from over. Look at Brian’s website and you’ll see an artist still at work–vigorously. In fact, just a couple of days ago he went into the studio to craft a birthday card for his late brother Carl, who would have been 61 this year. The song, and a slideshow honoring both Carl and the bond between the two brothers, are both on the website. The tribute has a special poignance for those of us well-steeped in the Beach Boys’ music and history, for we know that Carl stepped in and took over the group’s musical direction when Brian could no longer carry that weight. We also know that Brian thought Carl the best singer in the group, and asked him to sing lead on both “God Only Knows” and “Good Vibrations.” Carl was the one who did much of the arranging and mixdown production for the Beach Boys after 1967. And Carl was the peacemaker in a group that badly needed one. So Brian’s tribute to Carl resonates on multiple levels, and the fact that it’s also a performance by Brian makes it all the more affecting.

The work continues. Brian’s recently completed and performed his second song cycle, and SMiLE collaborator Van Dyke Parks contributes at least some of the lyrics: “That Lucky Old Sun (A Narrative).” Here’s a review from a listener in the audience at the UK premiere. Obviously Brian has found the group of sympathetic, sophisticated collaborators he lost when his first band couldn’t or wouldn’t follow him any more. Not that they were averse to raiding what they thought was his tomb time and again, notoriously in the “Brian’s Back” debacle of the mid-70’s but periodically since then, most recently in Mike Love’s nuisance suit claiming that Brian was “shamelessly misappropriating… Love’s songs, likeness, and the Beach Boys trademark, as well as the ‘Smile’ album itself.” This from the man who more than anyone rejected and reviled Brian’s most ambitious work.

What is Brian thinking in that photograph from the Kennedy Center? What is he feeling? His survival and continued creativity are a triumph for all of us. Can he share that feeling of triumph? That this genius regularly hears not only beautiful music in his head, but also voices that tell him he’s terrible, is cruelly faith-shaking. It’s beyond unfair, whatever that means.

Maybe in another universe, along another timeline, rock-and-roll was never invented, and the Beach Boys never formed. Those boys in Hawthorne never pooled the money their mom and dad left them when they went on vacation, never bought those instruments, never recorded a local hit that led to almost half a century of extraordinary music.

But maybe there’s yet another timeline, another universe, in which Carl, Dennis, and Al (or maybe a time-traveller from the 90’s?) rally to Brian’s side and help him finish SMiLE, in which the acid, cocaine, and other drugs (like money, say, or familial approval) don’t cripple Brian. A universe in which Brian hits a rough patch but grows strong because of it.

Maybe. Back in the universe we live in, and the timeline we live on, there’s not nothing, and there’s not everything, but maybe there’s something in Brian’s survival to age 65, continuing to make music and perform it, and living long enough to understand, at least a little, what he’s done to make us fall in love with him. J. Freedom du Lac’s sensitive piece for the Washington Post a couple of weeks ago outlines all the troubles Brian’s seen, but closes on a note that brings deep gladness and hope to me. Perhaps to you too.

He’s willing to agree that he is “in some ways” a musical genius — but, he adds quickly: “In other ways, no. I sometimes don’t come up with music when I should. I’ve been called a genius, but I don’t know. People admire me, and that makes me feel good. It makes me feel like I have a purpose. I could not express how thankful I am to have that kind of thing in my life.”

This is all something of a revelation, apparently.

“Brian didn’t really have an understanding of what his music means to the world,” Melinda [Wilson, his wife] says. “He’s finally understanding that. He totally gets that now, and he’s accepting who he is. It’s getting a little bit easier. From time to time now, he’ll even accept a compliment.”

Merry Christmas, Brian, to you and yours. Thank you. And Melinda, special thanks to you for saving his life.

Brian Lamb’s latest post over at Abject Learning is clear-eyed, thoughtful, and more than a little poignant. Extraordinary, really.

All I can say to the first two bullet points is “right on.”

I’m going to be mulling over that third bullet point for a long time. It’s early here and I can’t vouch for the coherence of my response, but I want to try, so bear with me please. (I’m hoping to recover some bold bloggery over this holiday break and get back in this conversation–and Brian’s post is nothing if not inspiring in that regard.)

My first thought, maybe my most urgent thought, is that we must teach our students and our colleagues (and ourselves!) to be technology strategists. That kind of education ought to be one of our institutions’ top priorities. The range of options, the dizzying implications, the come-and-go services, the question (as Col. Tom Parker used to ask) “how much does it cost if it’s free?”: these are questions that education should address from an early age in the specific context of networked computing. There’s more to being a technology strategist than just being a savvy user. All digital citizens should be digital strategists. That’s going to take some significant curricular and attitudinal change–though I think we can take important steps in that direction without bringing all the current machinery of education to a screeching halt.

A bubble may well burst in 2008, but I feel the Web 2.0/3.0/x.0 landscape will continue to expand in all the ways Brian has described. There’s no going back. I understand the feeling of panic that can engender. I’d argue that that feeling is not different in kind from the feeling of having to mature and take one’s place in a very complex civilization that may well be eating itself, but which (as always with our species) holds enormous promise and often great joy and splendor.

I am no techno-utopian and am not always optimistic about the scalability of benign self-organization, but I do believe in the power of allegory, or at least extended analogy, and I see the emerging situation Brian’s outlined as no different from the basic questions that should always engage us with regard to schooling. I think we’ll look back on the last century or more of higher education as a time when we got sleepy and forgetful about the difficulties of creating and sustaining real school. I think the open web and its successors, with all their mess, peril, and promise, may force us to wake up. That’s my hope.

It’s the alternative that frightens me.

I’m always in the mood for rich analogies.

This one comes from the November 28, 2007 New York Times’ Arts section. I’ve been tempted to do a granular analysis of the entire section, as I was startled by how casually and completely it featured various computer-related stories, ads, etc. Alas, any such analyses will have to wait until the end of term when all the grades are in. For now, however, I would like to offer these paragraphs from a story about EVE Online. I won’t explain EVE here–you can read the article for that–but I will say that the dichotomy CEO Hilmar Petursson proposes is especially interesting to me from the point of view of education, or curriculum, or online learning, or even a course syllabus:

“There are basically two schools of thought for operating an online community,” Hilmar Petursson, CCP’s chief executive, said in a telephone interview yesterday.

“There is the theme-park approach and the sandbox approach,” he continued. “Most games are like Disneyland, for instance, which is a carefully constructed experience where you stand in line to be entertained. We focus on the sandbox approach where people can decide what they want to do in that particular sandbox, and we very much emphasize and support that kind of emergent behavior.”

Substitute “educated” for “entertained,” and “learning community” for “online community.” Several things come to mind, ill-formed and in no particular order:

1. Most colleges and universities are more theme-parks than sandboxes. That trend is accelerating, given that theme-parks seem to be able to scale better. I say “seem to,” because EVE’s business model clearly indicates their belief that sandboxes supporting emergent behavior can scale as well. Yet we live in a time of dramatically declining public support for higher education in which one very popular solution to the problem is to make learning experiences as uniform as possible (guaranteeing more uniform outcomes), increase access by scaling class sizes (especially at the introductory level) to 300-500 students per professor, and cut costs by outsourcing grading and class management to various contractors. Bigger turnstiles and better oil for the gears. More people get in, more people do just well enough to get out. And we all drive home satisfied at the end of the day. That’s a theme-park, not a sandbox.

2. Assessing emergent behaviors in sandboxes requires much more imagination and rigor than assessing the results of a theme-park experience of education. The current (and worthwhile, in my view) resurgence of interest in thorough assessment unfortunately drives more theme-park construction than sandbox construction. Our answers are only as good as the questions we ask. Can we not devise imaginative, rigorous assessment of emergent behaviors, despite the fact that by definition we will have to think of “outcomes” and “value-adds” differently?

3. As I understand it, Ivan Illich’s radical view of “deschooling” does not devalue curriculum per se, but it does insist that only a sandbox approach results in authentic learning. That’s a bold claim and I’m not sure I agree entirely. Sometimes learners have to be brought through an experience, a course of study, a set of assignments, that will support more valuable kinds of emergent potential on the other side. In other words, sometimes rote memorization (think of the alphabet or the multiplcation table), or what my German teacher in college called “sitzen und schwitzen” (sit and sweat), are necessary admission requirements to the more interesting sandboxes. I also believe in the value of vertically-building curricula that recognize and support the unavoidable developmental aspects of education.

And yet I wonder if the passivity and lack of deep curiosity I see very often in my students would be different if Ilich’s vision were fully realized, or if they saw the ends to which the means directed them. But this is to say that I am not sure my students have a deep understanding of what school is good for. I am not sure schools understand that very deeply either.

4. I wonder if the dichotomy of theme-park vs. sandbox has certain false aspects. For example, one could put sandboxes within theme parks, and theme parks within sandboxes. Vary the experience, find a rhythm. Not every movie is a game, not every game is a movie, not every learning experience requires emergence within the experience to be satisfying. That said, without emergence, I don’t see how the core academic mission, and the strategies that follow, have much integrity beyond drill-and-kill.

Probably the most emergent, sandbox-type learning experience I ever had was writing my dissertation. In the humanities, especially in English, the Ph.D. dissertation can be (and often is) nothing but a bootstrapping operation. I remember feeling almost entirely alone, becalmed on vast sea with no landmarks or compass to steer by. On one level, that was clearly an illusion. I had a library full of landmarks, notebooks full of compasses. I had peers working on their dissertations. I had a director, a second reader, a third reader at another school. All in all, I had a deep and wide support network. No, I think I felt so alone and lost because I knew that this project, unlike any project I’d tackled before, was entirely up to me. It existed outside any container. I was the experience. I was the project. And that’s why it was truly transformative.

I understand that not everyone has that experience as a result of their dissertation, but in some respects I think that’s what the dissertation is for. I wish the loneliness and terror weren’t so bad, and perhaps they’re not that bad for everyone, but there’s also some useful authenticity there. The profound uneasiness I felt was not just neurosis. It was also a signal that something real was occurring.

I’ve come a long way from EVE Online, I see. But I sense certain connections that merit a mull or two. And the word “sandbox” has a special resonance for me.