L-R: Gardner Campbell (moderator), Shannon Hauser, Serena Epstein, Ben Vigeant, Adam Turner

Last Saturday UMW’s Division of Teaching and Learning Technologies hosted its fourth annual Student Academy on Information Technologies. Like last year, this year’s event closed with a student panel speaking to the general topic of “Life Online.” Acting DTLT Director Martha Burtis invited me to moderate this year’s panel.

Again like last year, the discussion was wide-ranging, funny, thoughtful, and provocative. I hope we can continue to record these panel discussions, for ten years from now they will constitute a rich and fascinating map of changing attitudes and expectations. In fact, just comparing last year’s panel to this year’s is already a fascinating exercise.

Audio note: We had four panelists this year, and in hindsight (hind-listening?) it’s obvious I should have used multiple microphones. You’ll hear an awful lot of volume adjustments in the course of this recording. I hope the result is at least listenable. My thanks to Andy Rush for engineering assistance in the location recording. Special thanks to the four students who participated. This year we had a senior, a junior, a sophomore, and a freshman, so we had an interesting generational spread within the panel, too.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (21.6MB)

I finished Robert Hughes’ stirring memoir, Things I Didn’t Know, a few weeks ago. I’ve been wanting to note this passage here for some time.

The best thing fishing taught me, I think, was how to be alone. Without this ability no writer can really survive or work, and there is a strong relationship between the activity of the fisherman, letting his line down into unknown depths in the hope of catching an unseen prey (which may be worth keeping, or may not) and that of a writer trolling his memory and reflections for unexpected jabs and jerks of association. O beata solitudo–o sola beatudo! Enforced solitude, as in solitary confinement, is a terrible and disorienting punishment, but freely chosen solitude is an immense blessing. To be out of the rattle and clang of quotidian life, to be away from the garbage of other people’s amusements and the overflow of their unwanted subjectivities, is the essential escape. Solitude is, beyond question, one of the world’s great gifts and an indispensable aid to creativity, no matter what level that creation may be hatched at. Our culture puts enormous emphasis on “socialization,” on the supposedly supreme virtues of establishing close relations with others: the psychologically “successful” person is less an individual than a citizen, linked by a hundred cords and filaments to his or her fellow-humans and discovering fulfillment in relations with others.This belief becomes coercive, and in many cases tyrannous and even morbid, in a society like the United States, with its accursed, anodyne cults of togetherness. But perhaps as the psychiatrist Anthony Storr pointed out, solitude may be a greater and more benign motor of creativity in adult life than any number of family relations, love affairs, group identifications, or friendships. We are continually beleaguered by the promise of what is in fact a false life, based on unnecessary reactions to external stimuli. Inside every writer, to paraphrase the well-worn mot of Cyril Connolly, an only child is wildly signaling to be let out. “No man will ever unfold the capacities of his own intellect,” wrote Thomas De Quincey, “who does not at least checker his life with solitude.”

A few quick thoughts:

1. I believe at least some of my faculty colleagues resist their online lives, even at the cost of access to very compelling resources, because they sense a reduction in solitude. I do not myself believe that life online necessarily reduces solitude, but to be fair, most of the talk I hear and myself propogate about the virtues of life online have to do with the kind of togetherness Hughes rightly cautions us about. Bear me witness, my far-flung friends and collaborators: I crave the network, the “thinking-together,” what Vickie Suter called the “thought-jam band.” Yet I am a writer, too, and I crave my solitude as well, and recognize it as a garden that must be tended. With walls, though easily crossed and connected, for walls give shape to the tending.

2. I have expanded a little on my thoughts above in this comment on Jon Udell’s recent blog post on “The essence of openness“:

Collaboration exists at the boundary between self and other, between tribes (what’s a family but a small tribe?), and depends on both the boundary and the crossing to work. In my view, if we talk about erasing boundaries, we risk erasing selfhood and thus one element of true collaboration. Instead, we should talk about boundaries and crossings in the same breath, think them in the same thought. Maybe something like the idea of “semi-permeable” is what I’m trying to get at here.

Milton is all over this idea in “Paradise Lost.”

3. I want my students to thrive together and alone. These are synergistic, symbiotic skills.

4. Hughes’ word “anodyne” gives me pause.

5. In a peculiar way that I’m not sure I fully understand yet, blogging seems to give me both solitude and togetherness. As, presumably, writing and publishing do for Hughes, on whom the gentle ironies of mass publication of his thoughts on solitude are surely not lost.

As ever, Brian Lamb not only draws the community together, but provides its most heartfelt and eloquent history. It’s a gift.

My thanks to Brian for all his encouragement and support, as well as to Jim and D’Arcy for being such cool-cat collaborators in our NMC Online Conference session today. Jim and I even had a brief intimate moment of cross-editing our presentation wiki this morning; we share some obsessions, it’s true.

Brian’s already characterized D’Arcy’s and Jim’s contributions far better than I could. He’s also pointed to the crucial contributions of the indispensable CogDog himself, Alan Levine. All I can add here is a humble and slightly awed testimonial.

When a roaring flame goes out, the room can get awfully cold all of a sudden. When the fire starts up, even fitfully, it’s a welcome moment of returning warmth. Last night, as I went through the wiki of nominations and started to think inside the material instead of about it, some of that old fire sparked up a bit. I didn’t want to go to bed. I got more ideas. For a minute or so, the last nine months melted away. Brief as it was, it was a very nice surprise. 

Brian, Jim, D’Arcy, I owe you. Thanks for the invitation. 

P.S. I’m delighted that one of my film students, Brad Efford, has already jumped in with a contribution to the wiki page. I hope he’s the first of many.

Funny how writers can unlock one’s mind.

Joan Acocella’s article on Matthew Bourne (New Yorker 12 March 2007) helped me understand something about modernism, camp, and sincerity that I’d not quite understood before. Many milestones on this journey for me: John Hollander in 1978 talking about returning to “the truth of the noble remark,” ASE‘s Barbara White talking about glam-rock in 2003, and now Joan Acocella writing about a choreographer whose name and work were new to me:

In his move away from camp, Bourne was following a well-worn path. Camp was an escape route from modernism, a return to the charm and glamour that had been banned by that austere movement. The purveyors of camp had been raised on modernism, and so they treated their pretty things with irony as well as with love, but, over time, in the work of many artists–Pedro Almodovar is a good example–love won out. The left turn (irony) became a U-turn (sincerity). Macaulay, in one of his interviews with Bourne, says of Julie Andrews and “The Sound of Music” that he thinks “half the point of growing up is to outgrow her films.” “Oh, I can’t take that kind of talk,” Bourne replies. “That film’s so much a part of me.” This statement is echt camp, but it is also about three-quarters heartfelt, and it is on that ratio that the post-camp artists, including Bourne, have built their art.

Reading this, I feel the tumblers in my mind click into place, and I hear a door swing open. That’s the grim evangelism I felt in my Modern Novel class in grad school. That’s the reason camp leaves me cold, but not as cold as modernism. That’s the strength I feel in Eliot more than in other high modernists. That’s why I prefer Woolf’s essay on Thomas Browne to her essay on Modern Fiction. Ah.

Apologies for the silliness, but what can I add to what Jim and Brian have said already? I am not worthy. But just to make sure I catch the vanishingly few people in the blogosphere who might come to my blog before they go to Bavatuesdays or Abject Learning, let me accept some nominations here as well for the upcoming NMC online conference festivities. Allow me to quote Jim quoting Brian:

The Web 2.0 Online Learning Film Festival! My colleagues and I have designated ourselves as Festival Jurors. From what we hope will be an avalanche of nominations we intend to select a 45 minute program, adding bits of commentary, analysis, trash talk and awards. (All legitimate nominations will be included on a supplementary program.) We intend to use Mojiti (which allows for annotation of online videos) to facilitate the communication of juror and audience input. We will argue about discuss our respective choices during our NMC online presentation on Wednesday, March 21, and when the conference wraps up we’ll open up the discussion to the wider web world.

‘Nuff said, no-prizes for all, and may the force be with you. My definition of education is as wide as Brian’s, as broad as Jim’s. D’Arcy is still doing Extreme Vacationing in Hawaii, but I’m confident he’s as latitudinarian as the rest of us.

Put your nominations in the comments here. Don’t be shy. This is your chance to shape the Delta Quadrant of the eduniverse. We await your destiny.

Great stuff, as ever, over on The Fish Wrapper. This is my response to Martha’s latest post.

The computer is not only a tool but a meta-tool; I think that’s what makes it so hard at some points to “get” computers. A computer is a tool that morphs into other tools. This, I think, is what calling the computer a “universal machine” is all about. As the author of “Dreaming in Code” noted on a recent IT Conversations podcast, programming is pure imagination, nothing else. Rigorous and ordered imagination, but also weirdly arbitrary, and sometimes uncanny (this is me talking now, if there was any doubt).

Getting people to think of computers as tools is the first step. But then there’s the next step, in which they think of the computer as a tool the way they think of their brains as tools. The brain is a tool that makes tools, and then uses them once they’re made. And every so often it will indeed crash….