“The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom.” William Blake, Proverbs of Hell, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

The road of cool can lead there too.

It doesn’t hurt to be a little skeptical of the oh-wow, gee-whiz, how-cool gadgetry with which we’re surrounded, or by the same responses to information technologies and the latest-greatest therein.

But it may hurt to be a lot skeptical.

Sometimes we should take a look, maybe even try something risky, just because we think it’s cool. “Cool” taps into a moment of wonder, surprise, pleasure, delight, and intrigue that can lead to all sorts of encounters, with ourselves and with others. As Donald Norman very persuasively insists in Emotional Design (a very cool book full of pictures of very cool things), the pleasure we take in design need not be fleeting or superficial. Instead, that pleasure can be the foundation for deep, purposeful cognitive activity, an agent of lasting engagement.

Cool can be something to run toward, not away from. Seeking out cool need not be a sign of immaturity. Rather the opposite.

I was talking this blog idea over with my wife, a children’s librarian, who gave me the crowning story and urged me to post it. (Very generous of her, seeing as how she has her own venue–but she’s got lots of stories, so I don’t feel too bad about taking this one with her permission.) She told me of a storytime in which a young child, just learning to toddle, had obviously found his new walking powers to be so cool he just couldn’t stop ambulating around the story circle. He did his toddler walk. He did a Frankenstein’s monster walk. He demonstrated to everyone in that story circle just how cool it was — to be able to walk! As my wife pointed out, that moment of cool was an essential moment of maturation, one propelling that child into a lifetime of wonderful destinations. She spoke as well of young babies finding their hands for the first time, sensing their power to grip, to throw, to flex, to drop, again and again. How cool it is to have a hand!

Things of beauty, grace, power, and agency surround us. Some of them are built in. Some of them we find. Some find us. Some we share with each other, as we watch our faces light up in shared delight. From these moments we step forward, together. On the road.

Postscript: Don’t miss the William Blake Archive, one of the cooler sites I’ve discovered lately. In fact, I discovered it when I went to write this blog. I’d like the site’s words of welcome to be inscribed above my office and written all over my classroom walls:

“We are pleased to offer its resources to you for pleasure, study, or intensive research.”

Cool.

I will use Twitter to teach me what I can use Twitter for.

I understand that logic doesn’t scale, and that one cannot explore everything all the time in self-directed recursive learning (although now that I think about it, that’s not a bad way to imagine Paradise). But having learned another lesson from the kind of contact Twitter enables, I thought that in my heady state I’d be bold and provocative. Blame it on the altitude.

So what did I learn? Well, I was in an SAC session on gaming in education with the redoubtable Rachel Smith of the New Media Consortium, and the discussion in the room turned to the differences between games and simulations. (That question proved much more interesting and tricky than I’d imagined–nice, and very shrewd of our facilitator.) At one point, as Huizinga’s Homo Ludens popped into my head, I spoke up and said, “We play games. But we don’t play simulations. What do we do with simulations? What’s the verb there?” No one in the room, including me, had a ready answer. It’s always a cool moment when no one has a ready answer.

I had Twitter up in another window, so I put the question to my Twitter friends. I’d had such good luck with the streaming video question that I had great hopes for this inquiry. I got my answer, all right, and fast–fast enough to share with the group and continue that moment of shared inquiry. But that’s not the most interesting part of the story.

My answer came from a fellow blogger named Claudia Ceraso who teaches and learns in Buenos Aires, Argentina. She responded that the Oxford Dictionary of Collocations said “carry out” or “run” were verbs typically associated with “simulation.” (She also expressed some amusement that my question required her to consult a paper source first.) I’d never heard of the Oxford Dictionary of Collocations. I immediately looked it up on Amazon and learned that it’s a reference work devoted to helping non-native speakers of English speak more idiomatically. This extra bit of information sparked my imagination in several ways. First, I thought “what an interesting reference work.” Second, I thought “what a great way to start a conversation about language with native speakers.” Third, I thought “I’ve never heard the word ‘collocation’ before.” So I did a Google search on “define: collocation” and got this back:<!–

I have several (dozen) blog posts brewing (distilling, fermenting, cooking), but this isn’t one of them. It’s merely some links and embedding experiments coming out of last night’s NMS final projects festival. Ustream.tv was new to me–I learned about it at about 2 p.m. yesterday nearly simultaneously from Catherine, Vidya, and Alan via a timely tweet. A similar timely tweet elicited this warm and wonderful blog post from Chris Lott.

Looks like I can’t embed more than one thing at a time–not that I’ve tried that before. So I can’t embed the plain chat viewer or “off the air” window for the “show.” Andy has an example of the latter here.

Next, the URL for the “show” (in Ustream lingo):

http://ustream.tv/channel/nms-final-projects-night

Next, the URL for the archived recording:

http://ustream.tv/Gardner/videos/KZox0b,UlUhPpLkHAH0JGwUyBKjIDFx4

Next, the embedded viewer for the archived recording:

I don’t think the chat was recorded, alas. I did notice during the recording that the chat window was scrollable for some time, then scrollable no longer. I suppose we overflowed the allotted space, but I don’t really know.

As the author (or initiator) of last night’s recording, I’m also able to download the 0.5GB Flash video file but for some reason I can’t get it open in Flash MX 2004. Experiments continue.

Can’t shake the weird feeling we just made the jump into hyperspace. Many steps to get there, and a jump at the end. Each step was fun.

Then the jump crowds the sky with stars.

Regarding Mike Caulfield’s latest thoughtful post:

On one level, I couldn’t agree more. I write this post after long silence not to refute Mike’s ideas, wonderfully expressed, deeply encouraging.

But I’m driven to respond because the matter is not simply one of awakening from a “hasa” world into the brave new “isa” world. If only it were that simple. “Hasa” and “isa” are not alternatives. They are partners in a dance. They are both parts of the inescapable, imperfect, provisional, necessary work of conceptualization itself. Of identity.

There’s a “hasa” element in our experience that we should not reject, lest we swing from one mistake to another.

What I’m finding this summer, for example, is that the course of study, as an experience, does indeed have its own integrity and identity, and that students in some cases want to keep their front page (let’s call it) unique to each class. (Yes, I understand that RSS makes this possible and even trivially easy, but there’s more to it than that.) Example: I have two students who decided to start a new blog for a new class, with an entirely separate URL, because they wanted to craft their work in a different “room” (see below). They didn’t want simply to tag their work in one common space and feed those tagged materials into separate places. They wanted to start in those different places, perhaps to recombine the work later in different ways, perhaps not.

I hope they do find the connections and decide to explore recombinations, of course. Not only do I hope it, I encourage it. Part of the problem is that many students will have to be taught to understand the linking and cross-pollination opportunities the web and a CMS like WP present to them, because those opportunities are hidden by systems like Blackboard, and because for many reasons those opportunities are what schools say they provide when what’s truly rewarded is High Compartmentalization. Sure. But we who provide these opportunities also need to understand that students may want to work through, experience, and communicate in different environments depending on the course of study (or the nature of the experience), a course of study that is itself an experience locatable in time and (often) in space. And that location can matter in beneficial ways, like measures in music or a frame around a picture. Context yields meaning. The trick is to teach people that context is not always a given. It too can be shaped by our decisions. There’s a metacontext, after all, or before it….

(Maybe it’s the difference between a narrative and an interactive game. We need both experiences to help us shape our understanding. Folks who speak of the boring “linear” narrative vs. the exciting “interactivity” of a game are missing the glories of each. But I digress.)

A container is not necessarily a bad thing. It all depends on how we create, understand, and use those containers. Identity is a container, for example, and often a problematic one. But without identity there’s no alterity, and without alterity there’s no love, no freedom. But of course the identity-container needs to be both whole and open, both bounded and permeable.

Or maybe it’s like having different rooms in a house. Sure, it’s one house, but having different rooms is a way of acknowledging the different facets of one’s experience, even though all the experiences are at home, and home is indeed uniquely personal and intimate.

The typical LMS, of course, is not like different rooms in a house. It’s like different peeling-paint waiting rooms in different grey buildings in Anywheretown. Instead of open doors leading easily from one room to another, there are walls and gardens locked away from view, etc. The horror: Blackboard and the many administrative conveniences it serves and mirrors give us all the malignancy of difference with none of its real benefits. In many respects, there’s no real “difference” in these different locked grey buildings at all….

But the impulse of which the LMS is an institutional perversion is not, I’m beginning to think, wholly wrong. The challenge is to re-imagine school so that the boundaries can be artful, changeable, semi-permeable, and the result of creative decisions, not administrative convenience.

Most of all, learning management itself should be part of what a student studies and crafts, part of what the teacher models, not a one-size-fits-all monstrosity that keeps all the work and all the teaching materials hidden and hermetically sealed. Every course of study, in one way or another, should ask of its teachers and students, “What do you make of this? What can we make of this?” And, yes, the ethical question: “what should you make of this, and what should we make of this, and while we’re at it, what should we make of this you-me-we thing, anyway?”

Sadly, as I realize every day (I seem to forget it every night), many students, faculty, staff, and administrators will view this freedom and self-reliance as at best a nuisance, at worst an attack on carefully ordered and compartmentalized lives. To a considerable extent, the educational system we have is the system most people apparently want. It’s a transactional system, not a community of shared endeavor.

I am not sure what to do about this situation. I do feel strongly, however, that we must immediately abandon talk about “learner-centered” or “student-centered” education vs. “teacher-centered” education. That dichotomy seems very appealing on the surface, especially because it seems very democratic, and also because of the home truth that only the student can decide to learn. I embrace that home truth, wholeheartedly. No teacher can decide that a student will learn, and no system can simulate that decision for the student in any truly effective way. No system should try. Nevertheless, “student-centered” starts to sound like “power to the people” to me at times, and I’m increasingly skeptical that it means what we want it to mean. Who are these people and what is the power we imagine? (Related question: Why do we think most students are unhappy with a transactional model? I’m not sure that most of them are.) I also think, with all due respect, that “student-centered” can all too easily become a communitarian fiction that hides the real power, and the real value, of teaching, and teachers, and mastery.

Worse yet: it’s one short step from “student-centered” to “customer-driven.” David Wiley’s post, linked to by Martha above, is relevant here as well.

For me, at this point, all real school must be “learning centered,” that is, devoted to identifying and shaping and nurturing a community that has devoted itself to learning. Real school is centered not on people, per se, but on people’s commitments. It’s a crucial distinction. Our rights, responsibilities, and identities as members of this community are conveyed not automatically, or statically, or unthinkingly, merely because we’re on the payroll or registered for a class. Those rights, responsibilities, and identities are conveyed because of shared commitments. Commitments born of trust, commitments reflecting each person’s willingness to risk, to contribute. Commitments born of each person’s decision, like the books in Donne’s heavenly library in his “Mediation 17,” to lie open to each other, to read, and be read by, the other.

That commitment is our homework: the work we do at home, and the work that builds a home.

I don’t have the whole answer, but at least for this day, I do feel I understand one part of it: any educational system, whatever its design or ideology, that hides, downplays, avoids, or otherwise redirects our attention from the absolute necessity of shared, wholehearted commitment is, in my view, deceptive and destructive. Specifically, anti-human.

Our identities are real, and meaningful, but their meanings are activated only in relationship.

I began this post in darkness, several hours ago. Now light frames my basement window. What do I see? I’m not sure. Do you see what I see? I’m not sure of that either.

S’io credesse che mia riposta fosse
A persona che mai tornasse al mondo,
Questa fiamma staria senza piu scosse.
Ma perciocche giammai di questo fondo
Non torno vivo alcun, s’ i’odo il vero,
Senza tema d’infamia ti rispondo.

http://tinyurl.com/yv2yad

It’s going to be pretty quiet here until I get all the grades in (I think of that old country song “When The Work’s All Done This Fall”), but in the meantime, I want to record this bit of wisdom from Daniel Goleman’s Emotional Intelligence, wisdom quoted by Doris Kearns Goodwin in her fascinating study of Lincoln and his Cabinet, Team of Rivals:

“Having hope,” writes Daniel Goleman in his study of emotional intelligence, “means that one will not give in to overwhelming anxiety, a defeatist attitude, or depression in the face of difficult challenges or setbacks.” Hope is “more than the sunny view that everything will turn out all right”; it is “believing you have the will and the way to accomplish your goals.”

It’s been very good to read Goodwin’s book. I see I will need to read Goleman’s next.

Pull quote from the Technology Review article: “The dog becomes a kind of online avatar.”

Okeh. It’s interesting to think about the general unintelligibility of that statement before, say, 1990. It’s also interesting to think about happy dog owners meeting some enchanted evening when the SNIF tracks down their most-wanted other.

Okeh.

The Washington Post reports on two Supreme Court decisions that are widely viewed as making it harder to obtain and protect patents. The article quotes John R. Thomas, a Georgetown University professor specializing in intellectual property, calling the decision “the most detailed technical discussion that’s come out of the Supreme Court since the 19th century.”

My immediate thoughts turn to the current Blackboard patent review, of course.

You’ll find the relevant Supreme Court opinions here and here.

Monday I was honored to deliver the keynote address for the 2007 Kemp Symposium here at the University of Mary Washington. The event is named for Bill Kemp, a Shakespearean who taught at UMW for over 30 years, and it showcases work done by students in English, Linguistics, and Speech courses.

A few notes about the talk. I wanted to do something unusual. I wanted to honor Bill, a colleague with whom I’ve had many fruitful collaborations over the years. I wanted to thank my department for their support. I wanted to speak some word of hope to us all at the end of a difficult few weeks. And I wanted to do all of that by exploring the connections between lyric poetry and popular music.

I structured the talk around six audio events, the last of which included video. Four of these are recordings under copyright, so for the podcast I’ve included only beginnings and endings, and hereby claim fair use. One of the recordings is my beloved English teacher Dr. Elizabeth Phillips reciting “What Are Years,” and I’ve included that in full. I hope that the snippets convey the flavor of the talk. I also hope they send you out to buy Tommy (The Who), Rain Dogs (Tom Waits), Hejira (Joni Mitchell), Welcome Interstate Managers (Fountains of Wayne), and The Last Waltz right away, if you don’t have these albums already.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (18.9MB)