Brilliant.

I was particularly happy to see both Oliver Sacks and Oblique Strategies in the same post.

Pull quote:

Apple’s original Shuffle promo said “Life is Random”, but that’s stating the obvious. Perhaps a better mantra would be, “Random is Life.” We could all use more of it, and if we can give our users a few more moments of serendipity, we’re giving them a wonderful gift.

I’m reminded of an article in the Columbia University alumni magazine that profiled some of Columbia’s best-loved teachers (Mark Van Doren is the one I remember). Students reported that they often remembered their teachers’ digressions more vividly than anything particular in the lessons.

Digressions, like randomness, put more hooks in the Velcro(tm) of cognition.

Interesting comment over at Creating Passionate Users, where guest blogger Dan Russell has been doing some blogs on “sensemaking.” I’m just tuning in, but this bit from reader Julien Couvreur caught my eye:

I find that this model fits my own learning model. For example, when I learn some new computer code or library, I build a representation in my head as I go. Many of the gaps are filled by intuition, because things that are designed for a purpose usually make sense.

That last clause is a corker: “things that are designed for a purpose usually make sense.” Stands to reason, yes? Trouble is, many students begin with an assumption, reinforced in many instances by the casual skepticism that can pass for insight in academic communities, that “purpose” is either absent or unknowable, and “design” is either hopelessly idiosyncratic or functionally irrelevant. In other words, many students believe (or act as if they believe) that there is little agency or deliberate craft in our academic pursuits. Instead, it’s iteration iteration iteration, turtles all the way down.

Probably that’s too pessimistic, but the larger point still resonates: if one believes (and it really is an article of faith, sometimes) that elements of human culture are meaningful in terms of individual agency, i.e., designed with a purpose, sensemaking becomes much easier.

Campus Technology reports on a January 25th decision by the United States Patent and Trademark Office to review Blackboard’s CMS patent. Take your Dramamine(tm): Blackboard’s spin is as dizzying as ever. One choice example, as Blackboard general counsel Matthew Small explains how to tell if you’re infringing on Blackboard’s patent:

If you have a system of course-based instruction, a course-management system, and it enables a single user to have multiple roles across multiple courses, and that’s done in conjunction with a whole bunch of other types of functionality: If you have an application that does that, you might want to see if you fall within [the patent’s claims].

‘Nuff said.

Bryan prepares to address the multitude. Though his closing rant (Bryan’s word) didn’t prompt an immediate uprising, give it time dear reader, give it time.

In a typically rich and provocative address, three things in particular grabbed hold in my own mind:

If we engage our students with seriously open opportunities for linking, building, and sharing, we inevitably “let Loki in the with learning.” To which I would add, mischievously, can there be any true learning without Loki in the room?

There is indeed a “delight in social archiving.” A very fine phrase from Dr. Alexander. My reflection: we can all make not only civilization’s library, but civilization’s magic attic, the place where the intimate, uncanny cabinet of wonders stands in the corner, awaiting our exploration. 

Bryan closed with brief but very provocative call for a re-examination of the idea of a republic of letters. I’m eager to think about this with him, and with you all. And with my students. Perhaps we could re-imagine matriculation as a ceremony, not unlike naturalization for an immigrant, in which one joins the republic of letters, with all the privileges and responsibilities of citizenship.

Number one of a series (I’m confident): 9% of HS students have a smart phone or Blackberry.

Can we feel the paradigms shift yet?

EDIT: Bryan rightly reminds me that there are huge class issues involved here. The digital divide redux. We need some intelligent urgency here.

Though I had to duck out for an hour in the middle, doggone it, I did learn a ton from my fellow presenters at the workshop. In particular, I was struck by how thoroughly UCF understands what it takes to influence a culture–and how carefully they’ve worked to prepare attractive events, activities, and materials without sacrificing a bit of depth. In fact, they’re mining intellectual depths in many admirable ways. Information fluency without deep roots in the campus’s intellectual culture makes little sense to me–and it’s inspiring to see what UCF is pursuing in this regard. What IF indeed.

Cyprien and Steve

Originally uploaded by Gardo.

I’m at the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative Annual Meeting, here in rainy and chill Atlanta. As you can see, the conversations begin immediately, and given my insatiable appetite for conversation, I’m guessing the “buffet” will be unusually rewarding this year,

I’m also going to try hard to blog as much as possible, just to get those ligaments loose once more.

Tomorrow I’m the closer for a session on information fluency, led by my friend Chuck Dziuban of the University of Central Florida. Chuck’s very gracious to invite to me to speak, especially given that I will be going off on a metaphorical (not to say metaphysical) tangent that’s likely to be rather different from what precedes my bit. On the other hand, who knows? At our warmup meeting tonight, I met a co-presenter who’s a philosopher specializing in Thomas Hobbes. What’s not to love about a conference with professors, IT specialists, librarians, and administrators mixing it up into the wee hours as we try to figure out where higher ed might (and should) go from here?

I’m teaching my Milton seminar this spring for the first time in a couple of years, and I want to try podcasting some of Milton’s poetry and prose as (I hope) aids to comprehension.

As always, I find that recording the words forces a certain kind of attention that I might not otherwise find. This time, for example, I noticed a fantastic internal rhyme in the “Proem” (the first four stanzas of the poem, written in a different stanza form than the subsequent “Hymn) between “clay” and “say,” one that stretches across two stanzas in a very powerful echo. I also noticed that Nature’s wooing is confined to “speeches fair,” not her usual wantonness. The exception is very interesting when one considers the license the poet grants his own “speeches fair” in the race to lay a gift at the newborn child’s feet. I caught the rhyme during the reading, but I didn’t catch the latter emphasis in time to make anything of it. Some day I’ll do this poem over and achieve a better recitation–but in the spirit of blogging, better to publish a good thing than to withhold it and wait for perfection. Perhaps my efforts here will encourage someone else to do their own reading. I’d like to compare.

So here, without commentary (it’s long enough), is Milton’s “Ode on the Morning of Christ’s Nativity.“

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (12.8MB)

Browsing idly at Borders yesterday, I spied this book: George Steiner’s Lessons of the Masters. I’m embarrassed to say I had not known of it before, even though Steiner is one of those thinkers and writers I try to follow as closely as I can. His Real Presences continues to inspire me and was a great comfort in the worst days of dogmatically theory-driven literary studies.

I’ve just begun reading this book but already find it electric, bracing and deeply instructive. I am confident there’s much here that must have been greeted with some alarm or even dismay by the reviewers (I haven’t looked any of them up yet, but the cover alone will likely induce anger or worse in some readers), and certainly there’s much to argue over here, but as always the depth of Steiner’s insights, drawn from the astonishing breadth of his knowledge (and what he simply attends to), touches me to the quick.

Here are magical moments I want to set down now, while the glow of my first reading still lingers:

The fortunate among us will have met with true Masters, be they Socrates or Emerson, Nadia Boulanger or Max Perutz. Often, they remain anonymous: isolated school masters and mistresses who wake a child’s or an adolescent’s gift, who set obsession on its way. By lending a book, by staying after class willing to be sought out. In Judaism, the liturgy includes a special blessing for families at least one of whose offspring becomes a scholar….

The Socratic teacher is, famously, a midwife to the pregnant spirit, an alarm clock rousing us from amnesia, from what Heidegger would call “a forgetting of Being”…. What prevails is the motif of a creative sleeplessness. The Zen Master beats his disciples to keep them awake. Great teaching is insomnia, or ought to have been in the Garden at Gethsemane. Sleepwalkers are the natural enemies of the teacher. In Meno, Anytus, alert to the subversive, unsettling tactics of Socratic pedagogy, admonishes: “Be circumspect.” But no committed Master can be. Where there is acute discomfort–Socratic questioning can numb like “a stingray” says Meno 84–there is also love…

The pulse of teaching is persuasion. The teacher solicits attention, agreement, and, optimally, collaborative dissent. He or she invites trust: “to exchange love for love and trust for trust” as Marx put it, idealistically, in his 1844 manuscripts. Persuasion is both positive–“share this skill with me, follow me into this art and practise, read this text”–and negative–“do not believe this, do not expend effort and time on that.” The dynamics are the same: to build a community out of communication, a coherence of shared feelings, passions, refusals…. The Master, the pedagogue addresses the intellect, the imagination, the nervous system, the very inward of his listeners…. A charismatic Master, an inspired “prof” take in hand, in a radically “totalitarian,” psychosomatic grasp, the living spirit of their students or disciples. The dangers and privileges are unbounded….

A “master class,” a tutorial, a seminar, but even a lecture can generate an atmosphere saturated with tensions of the heart….

Fascinatingly, the interactive, correctible, interruptable media of word processors, of electronic textualities on the internet and the web, may amount to a return, to what Vico would call a ricorso, to orality. Screened texts are, in some sense, provisional and open-ended. These conditions may restore factors of authentic teaching as practised by Socrates and dramatized by Plato. At the same time, however, electronic literacy, with its limitless capacity for information storage and retrieval, with its data banks, militates against memory. And the face on the screen is never that live countenance which Plato or Levinas judge indispensable in any fruitful encounter between Master and disciple.

I just read the latest from Jon Udell, entitled “Conceptual Barriers.” I must have grokked it through the noosphere before reading it, as Jon’s central emphasis in this post has very powerful connections to the sort of thing I’m wrestling with in the post below. Indeed, of Jon’s many wonderful posts, I’d say this is one of his most important. He correctly intuits that the conceptual barriers are the hardest to overcome, and that the technical barriers are so far distant from the conceptual barriers that once the conceptual barriers are overcome, a rush of social progress might well follow.

That’s an Engelbart-size goal and one I want to support in any way I can.

Now, about those conceptual barriers, two quick thoughts. One is that school ought to be the place where we help our students think conceptually, think about conceptual thinking, and grow skilled in the bootstrapping process of improving ways of overcoming conceptual barriers (this would be level “c” in an Engelbartian schema). Notice the words “conceptual barriers,” words Jon has chosen very wisely. We in education like to talk about critical thinking, but often what we mean by “critical thinking” has more to do with overcoming or becoming sensitive to biases of one sort or another. Of course this is an extremely important element of education, but the larger issue has to do with imaginative and conceptual limits, for those limits mark the difference between what Illich would describe as “schooling” rather than true education. My second thought is that if Illich is correct, and conceptual operations have a certain gamelike quality, then one powerful way of overcoming conceptual barriers is to encourage playfulness of one sort or another.

One of Cyprien’s presentations at Faculty Academy 2006 touched on this aspect of Flickr. As I think about it, sandboxes for community playfulness, or simply a playful nature to certain aspects of the interface, characterize much of what I think of as Web 2.0. Not just interaction, but also playfulness of one sort or another, perhaps something as simple as Amazon‘s “statistically improbable phrases” (SIPS, now apparently defunct) or their “surprise me” feature on some “search inside” pages, or the little decorations that Google uses for its logo. Or Martha‘s Halloween theme for the DTLT community site she built a couple of years ago. Something gratuitous, i.e., gracious. Something gamelike and deeply playful.

How playful is the CMS your school is using right now?

Play is a perpetual motion machine that generates and uses energy simultaneously and about equally, at least until we get to what Emily Dickinson calls “The manner of the children, who weary of the day, / Themselves the noisy playthings they cannot put away.”