I’ve been commuting to the University of Richmond since Monday, when I started my new job as Director of Teaching, Learning and Technology. Each day in the Silver Surfer (my new Honda) I’ve been choosing my music carefully, listening closely for “winding chains of harmony” that can tune me for my new role in a new place. Plucked, bowed, hammered, or humming with sympathetic vibrations, taut or slack, the strings need to sound together, so something beautiful can emerge. Once the tuning is right, my job is easy: focus, amplify, and sustain that beauty.

In a word, my job is to resonate, and to resonate I must be tuned.

Monday I pulled out of my Fredericksburg driveway to Who’s Next. “Baba O’ Riley” was what I needed to get to I-95 South, but “Bargain” prayed for me and tuned what lay “too deep for tears.”

Tuesday I went even deeper, and departed to the strains of the live version of Tommy as realized on disc two of the deluxe edition of Live at Leeds. My heart grew strong with the first few bars of the “Overture,” and found its ascent during “Amazing Journey.”

Wednesday the tuning was more enigmatic. (How lovely to have a little breathing room for an enigma at last.) Perhaps Aja will not seem enigmatic to some readers. I urge them to listen again. There are mysterious narratives implicit in each song on this glossy album, some of them grim, but almost none of them desperate (in contrast to a couple of real downers on The Royal Scam, for instance). Even “Home At Last” seemed oddly determined to me as I powered down Interstate 95. Or was that determination mine?

Today’s tuning drives me back here, to a place silent too long. As you might guess from the title of the post, the Silver Surfer and I shook to Rubber Soul. The shaking kept me steady. And when “In My Life” sounded, I knew how to blog today.

Last week I ended twelve years of employment at the University of Mary Washington, where I joined the Department of English, Linguistics, and Speech in the fall of 1994. I’ve lost count of how many students I taught there. A back-of-napkin tally might go like this: an average of 100 a term for 24 terms equals 2400, not counting summer school, but probably a little too generous because I taught many students more than once. The number of colleagues I worked with is much smaller, of course, but even there it’s in the hundreds, and over time I got to know most of them. So last week there was a tremendous scaling problem for me. How could I possibly say goodbye even to a fraction of the people I had come to love? More to the point, how could I do any justice to the deep gratitude I feel for them, students and colleagues alike?

I couldn’t, of course–not that I could stop trying, either.

What I could do, I did. I resolved to take the full measure of their farewell, which is to say I resolved to take the full measure of the community we had created together. There are no words to describe how full to overflowing that measure was. Births, weddings, funerals, and leave-takings all release abundance. I was unprepared, though, for the scale of this abundance. Though I’m still grieving over the parting, the biggest lump in my throat comes when I remember, not the goodbyes, but the looks of delight and maybe even surprise on so many faces as we recognized our abundance together.

Inadequate words, but they’ll have to do. The details, the many narratives woven and shared in that astonishing week, are beyond me, where they should be, so I may follow.

Now I come to a new place, a new job, new colleagues, new students. Yet not entirely new, for I began my full-time teaching career in Ryland Hall right here at the University of Richmond. I can walk to that first office in five minutes, even faster if I’m in a hurry. Several dear colleagues from those days are still here. I’ve already gotten email from a student I taught during that time, a student who now works in the UR Alumni Office. I’ve also heard from an especially dear former student from UMW who’s teaching in the UR School of Continuing Studies. And the connections continue to multiply. No doubt living a certain number of years makes those connections more frequent and likely for anyone, but my apophenia also kicks in and I have the uncanny sense of pattern, of an upwardly-spiralling return.

Find, tune, resonate. There’s new abundance here, new colleagues to know and treasure, golden moments hidden in plain sight to discover and share. “Fresh woods, and pastures new,” and I am nothing if not an uncouth swain. Yet I know something of what’s possible, and delight to imagine what I’ll learn from this new community.

In my life, I’ve loved you all.

I began this blog on one topic and found it morphing as soon as I began to write. The real focus didn’t emerge until the end.

Tama’s eLearning Blog notes a Melbourne appearance by James Wilkinson, Director of the Derek Bok Center for Teaching and Learning at Harvard. Tama’s pulled a fine quote and links to the remainder of the address, available both as a Word file and as an audio recording. (Three cheers for the document, four cheers for the audio.) My thanks to Tama for the link, and his work and support generally.

Wilkinson’s metaphor argues that specialized education builds high on a narrow base, like a obelisk, while generalized education builds less high on a broad base that enables rebuilding when necessary without tearing the whole structure down. The metaphor strikes me as intriguing but limited, though I’ll obviously need to listen to or read the whole thing to understand what Wilkinson’s getting at. That he’s getting at something of great importance in the way we conceptualize higher education, however, is undeniable, and I’ll look forward to mulling over his address. UPDATE: five cheers for audio, as I got to listen to half the talk on the way to work today. So far it’s a fascinating and helpful overview of the history of the idea of curriculum. NB: the idea of “majors” was invented as way of bringing coherence to a mass of free electives. But I digress (if one can say that in an unusually digressive blog post).

One larger point: the educational blogosphere is particularly valuable to me for the way it alerts me (and others) to contributions like Wilkinson’s–and more, for Tama’s link brings me to an entire page of Menzies Orations on Higher Education, a resource I didn’t know about. I’m delighted by the discovery. It seems to me that such intense, focused, expert, and highly philosophical discussions of education are more important than ever, given the reach and power of high-speed telecommunications.

Richard Weaver once wrote that any theory of education is a theory of what it means to be human. I agree with him, and I believe that these basic questions should always guide and shape the educations we create for ourselves and for others.

I also applaud the University of Melbourne for making these orations available to a worldwide audience, and look forward to the day when every university has a “speeches and presentations” section (with an even broader title) that makes such rich content face outward, toward the public.

Musings and surfing bring yet another discovery: though it’s not structured as a systematic repository, “Harvard@home” (which I found by clicking on the link at the Derek Bok Center) publishes about sixty videorecordings, primarily of lectures and panel discussions featuring Harvard professors and guest speakers. The site dates back to 2001, and it has an interesting mission: “The mission of Harvard@Home is to provide the Harvard community and the broader public with opportunities for rich in-depth exploration of a wealth of topics through Web-based video programs of the highest calibre.” I’m happy to see there’s an RSS feed, too. Look for even more items of interest in Harvard’s Office of News and Public Affairs, though there’s no RSS feed here.

So: click on some links, and courses of study begin to emerge. It occurs to me that once all these resources are RSS-enabled, it should be possible for some large-scale aggregation to occur that will collect these scattered resources in something more valuable than link-farm directories. Something like a YouTube for higher education. UTube?

So far I’ve been doing all the post-production on these Faculty Academy podcasts. That will change–time to share the joy–but it has been a tremendous learning experience for me, and it puts me in the mind of an assignment for students. A seminar format would be perfect. What if each presentation were recorded to be podcast, but the presentation respondent also did all the post-production and, afterwards, wrote a reflective essay on the presentation? My proposal comes from my sense that careful audio work can make one unusually attentive to the content of the presentation, just as editing a text manuscript can burn all the good, bad, and ugly parts into one’s brain with unusual intensity. Just a wisp of a notion of a possibility, but there it is.

No bad or ugly parts to this podcast, however; in this instance, it really is “all good.” This panel discussion on “What is Web 2.0?” has great contributions from each of the panelists: Jon Udell, Rachel Smith, and Cyprien Lomas. It also features intense, candid, and sometimes even moving contributions from the folks in the audience. I was so in the moment that I couldn’t think about it all as it was happening, but going back and listening again I’m struck by the commitment and richness of the conversation. (There are also some very funny moments.) The focus is where it should be: on what the tools enable, not on the tools themselves. Even better, the discussion builds many bridges between philosophy, pedagogy, research, publication, culture, and innovation. If we could foster and sustain such conversations more frequently and more widely, higher education would come much closer to fulfilling its promise, and its responsibilities. On this day, I could see real school just a little more clearly.

I hope you enjoy the podcast.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (30.3MB)

About fifteen months after Jerry Slezak introduced me to the wonders of Jon Udell, I was standing before a capacity crowd in Combs 139 introducing Jon as the keynote speaker for Faculty Academy 2006. Now, almost two months after that introduction, you too can enjoy this moment. Beginning with Teilhard de Chardin and Doug Engelbart, and ending with a stirring challenge to transform higher education into a truly open, outward-facing public resource, Jon provided every bit of the focus, insight, and vision that mark a truly great keynote address. More than that, however, Jon combined a deep conceptual grasp of the project of higher education with the top-level professional expertise generated by a lifetime of leadership in information technologies. In this address, and in the Web 2.0 panel that followed, you’ll hear the depth and precision I’m describing.

You’ll also hear a world-class imagination at work.

Thanks, Jon. You did us proud.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (37.5MB)

is catching up with back issues of other blogger’s work. Case in point: Lisa Williams’ excellent “Principles of Blogging,” a golden oldie (2003) from her “Learning the Lessons of Nixon” blog. I found her blog by following one of Obadiah’s links, making an educated guess that a Bloggercon IV session he found particularly inspiring would be of interest to me as well, and then following that link to Lisa’s blog, where “principles” was a permanent tab at the top of the page. I read the principles with admiration. I just downloaded the podcast. I’ll listen to it on my way in to work this morning and even if it isn’t my full cup of mp3 I know I’ll learn something valuable, given the principles list I just read.

I’d call this an example of reading for reading. It probably lines up with George Siemens’ whole notion of “connectivism,” except that when I’m reading for reading, it’s not just about being a node on the network or even looking for other nodes on the network. At least, that’s not how it feels. It feels more like hearing a record at someone’s house and then going out the next day and buying it for myself. The network leads me, not to another node, but to another place to be, to reflect, to experience. Connections will radiate from there, of course, but the “there” is not entirely defined (may be defined very little) by what it’s connected to. Although I admire much of what I understand Siemens to be saying, there’s something a little concerning there for me, something that seems to define meaning as endlessly deferred, or located only in the network itself. For example, I cannot agree with his statement that “the network itself becomes the learning.” In my view, the network enables learning and represents learning, but it is not learning itself. Only persons learn. The network points to meaning, and enables us to share meaning, and the network itself is meaningful, but it is not meaning itself. Meaning is prior to the network, and subsequent to it. No Saussurean, I. A link is a portal, a pointer, but not the thing itself. Or so it seems to me this morning.

Back to the principles. I wish I had found them earlier. They’ll be a great resource for my next classroom experiments in blogging. I’m naturally a little skeptical of such lists of principles–how could I not be, having seen Charles Foster Kane’s “Declaration of Principles” and its painful denouement close to one hundred times?–but I’m also an idealist and a good audience for anyone’s attempts at a comprehensive ethics. So I salute Lisa Williams, and thank Obadiah for the link. And I look forward to more.

The next podcast from the University of Mary Washington’s Faculty Academy 2006 features Rachel Smith of the New Media Consortium. Her topic: “Gaming in Education.”

Rachel has inspired a number of changes in my life, including some recent investigations into Second Life. That exploration has had several effects: some impassioned conversation, sometimes a little less sleep than usual, and most interesting of all, a sudden rush of understanding (or at least partial understanding–mustn’t be presumptious) between me and my two children, ages 15 and 11. Sure, I IM, I blog, I Skype, I have an account on Facebook where my students poke me and write on my wall, and my online bona fides seem pretty, ah, bona around my dream team and most of my colleagues. I’ve done some twitch games, watched my son become enthralled by Guitar Hero (arena-rocking to the music I grew up with–what’s not to like about that?), paid some Continuous Partial Attention to my daughter’s Neopets activities, even hoofed it now and then with Dance Dance Revolution, where there’s a pretty good version of “Let’s Groove” that I really need to get back to. But it wasn’t until I started to get comfortable with a persistent online world and an avatar that I created, one who looks the way I’d like to look–buff, but winsomely so, and sans corrective lenses–that I began to understand something crucial of what my kids prize about their online interaction and creativity.

Listening again to Rachel’s thoughtful, funny, and sensible remarks on gaming, I realize that she prepared me to make a leap I needed to make, and that life after the leap is pretty much the way it was before, with the exception of a new, brilliant window I can suddenly see through. I won’t pretend I can recognize (or even focus on) everything I see through that window, nor will I conclude, prematurely, that everything beyond the pane is paradise. I’m pretty sure it isn’t. But for this habitual learner, the latest lesson has been fun, illuminating, intellectually stimulating, and a new avenue of contact with my children–and perhaps my students as well.

Thanks, Rachel.

Technical Note: This podcast was recorded with a Sound Projects C3 condenser microphone at the front of the room, set on a figure-8 pattern to grab audience response as well as speaker audio. The mic was powered by (and fed) a Mackie mixer, which in turn fed the line input of an Edirol R-1 digital audio recorder. Audio was captured in mp3 format at 320kbps. Post-production was done in Sound Forge 8 by converting the mp3 recording to a .wav 16 bit/44.1khz sampling rate format. If I had it all to do over again, I’d put a wireless mic on Rachel. I love the Sound Projects mic, but you’ll hear a number of level changes and a lot of off-axis miking that took a long time in post-production to get even to this condition, which I hope is listenable. The speaker really does need to be untethered, and the mic needs to follow her. Live and learn.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (34.0MB)

A big shout-out here to Obadiah Tarzan Greenberg, product manager at Webcast.Berkeley. Obadiah’s just recently joined the blogosphere, as I learned when his link to my blog appeared on my WordPress dashboard under “incoming links.” It’s delightful to be linked to, of course (more of what Brian Lamb calls “the power of positive narcissicism”), but it’s even more delightful to know that Obadiah is blogging. In addition to being a swell chap he’s also a vital resource for all of us, as I learned over a year ago when I consulted him for advice on setting up our own UMW Webcast series. In fact, the whole idea of a UMW Webcast series was inspired by Obadiah’s work. Doing research for a paper I was writing on Errol Morris’s film The Fog of War, I had discovered Berkeley’s webcast of a public forum featuring both Morris and Robert McNamara, the subject of the film. I was enthralled both by the forum and by the idea of putting all those resources onto the web. I immediately went back to my faculty and staff colleagues and said, “we must do this, especially for our Great Lives series.” When I got widespread agreement, I was then faced with the question of how to make it all happen–so I simply emailed the contact person at the Berkeley site, who directed me to Obadiah.

One charming phone call later, and I had all the information I needed to get the website up and running.

So here’s a public thank-you to Obadiah, and another installment in what could be (and I hope will be) the continuing saga of the growth of real school. When a mighty Research I university helps a small, public, primarily liberal-arts university get its start in webcasting, and when high-speed networked computing makes those contacts not only easy but likely, the sky gets a little bigger and blue-er. I am grateful.

Martha’s just written a wonderful blog post (“A Second Lifetime“) on Second Life. I was commenting on Martha’s blog when suddenly my comment morphed into a blog post of my own. Rather than leave the world’s longest comment, I decided to move my remarks here. They’re provisional, and I don’t have any pictures (they’re on my home desktop), but more will follow, I’m sure.

I’ll start by saying that Martha’s observations seem pretty fair to me. There’s a lot of SL that’s puzzling, a goodly amount that’s repellent, and it is discouraging to move back into a Garden of Eden only to find that we’re bringing the serpent in with us. I hadn’t looked at the user forums for anything more than technical help, so I’m interested to see that some SL folks are wondering why so much of SL culture is so impoverished or appeals to lowest-common-denominator desires.

However….

I’ve been exploring in SL for an average of about 30 minutes a day over the last 10 days. If you look at the curve, though, that average would look like 10 minutes a day until the last four or five days, when it shoots up to about 45 minutes a day. (Don’t worry–this is all at home, and in place of my listening-to-the-stereo time, alas.) Why? Because of an unplanned meeting with a stranger. After that, my in-world experience went from intriguing to a much more satisfying aesthetic and cultural experience (in the non-mature areas–Martha’s right that the, ah, other stuff is all over the place, both virtually and metaphorically).

The reason for the change? Not only conversation, though that’s part of it (my extroversion has room to play in SL). Mostly it’s because the person I met shared some landmarks with me. Suddenly I grokked something important, something that makes SL very much like RL (real life) and means that Linden Labs should not be engineering development and it’s a good thing they haven’t. It may even be a good reason why you shouldn’t be able to add a friend unless both are in-world, as that process would likely short-circuit the process I describe below.

In Real Life, most of our awareness of surroundings and resources comes from word-of-mouth. That’s horribly inefficient if one wants to compile a good shopping list quickly, but it’s incredibly efficient at making information exist in a human context. That human context makes the information meaningful. SL has demonstrated, in a rather awesome way, just what makes a society a society. It’s not just the stuff you go to see, it’s the people who tell you about the stuff you should see. That makes the stuff, when you see it, the result of sharing, not of a Google search (which of course is a bad analogy because it too is built on sharing, not just on indexing–but I digress).

The three landmarks the stranger gave me in that one encounter led me to places that were very beautiful, intriguing, and (in their way) gentle. Not busy, clangorous, or mature (at least, not aggressively so). Now SL felt like being in a storybook, or a lovingly crafted movie.

Those discoveries meant I had even more to talk to the stranger about. I then learned the trick of looking at the “picks” when I met people, or when I met a FOAF. Those are the places people say “hey, you should check this out.” Yes, some of them have been abandoned, and some you may not want to see, but others are still there in all their glory. I’ve taken a ride on a train, visited a drumming room in a castle on a volcanic island (even played drums with some other visitors, streamed in real time audio), seen new art and listened to a player piano in a treehouse, etc. You can look at people’s picks even when they’re not in-world, just by looking at their profile. (That bit may contradict some of my earlier argument, but never mind.)

And why all the replication of RL in SL? Why all the houses and sofas and so forth? Because people want to craft a space that’s theirs, an environment that’s an extension of their identity, and we ‘re all hard-wired to recognize signals of embodiment as identity cues. That’s not a good or bad thing; it’s just a thing. And it does mean that there’s an interesting boundary layer between, say, the familiarity of a porch swing and the strange exhilaration of flying around everywhere. Call it a comfort zone for inspiring lucid dreaming.

There is indeed a depressing sameness to much of what’s on offer in SL. Sex and money, sex and money, sex and money: gee, didn’t I just leave all that behind in the RL? (People are people, wherever you go.) That said, where the different things happen, there’s something quite magical the place makes possible. I’m beginning to think that one has to build to get the full experience–and that’s a good thing. If one wants to learn to build, one’s spoiled for choice: many in-world building tutorials are held every day, for free, by citizens who want to help other citizens. That’s good for Linden, of course, since they’re selling land, but still: the community creates itself by passing along its skills and knowledge.

Also, last night, my avatar was dancing to 70’s music streamed live from the host’s RL turntable/record collection. It was a party full of people I’d never met before, a party I went to on a whim, one that looked safe and interesting. I could dance along by clicking on one of the hosts, which another dancer also did, so that suddenly the three of us were dancing in formation, together, to “Don’t Fear the Reaper.” In the chat, we were all cracking jokes about more cowbell, letting out text-whoops at our favorite parts of the song, acting nutty, booing the “mandatory downtime in one minute” Linden warning (there were crashes, apparently, that they were trying to fix), and in general acting the way people do at parties. The host had huge bunny slippers on. The dancemaster gave us some cool John Travolta moves, including periodic flights up into the air as we continued dancing next to the disco ball (I had requested one, and it promptly appeared). Each time a new song came on, the crowd of 10-12 dancers cheered and cracked more jokes.

It was a very strange and compelling experience. My children were watching this and were fascinated–they thought it was very cool, especially when they saw their dad’s av spinning on his head. (You’ll be sore tomorrow! the other folks told me in the chat.) Oddly, I could feel my muscles responding a little, almost as if I really were dancing.

The social aspects of play, the way communities are built and strengthened, the way in which everyone greeted me by name when I arrived (most events are public) and said farewell when I had to leave: there’s something very interesting here, with strong connections to much of what we think of when we consider telepresence and the residential college experience. I can see a fascinating horizon of possibilities here. I’m also aware that some of what I’ve described will sound silly or perhaps even dangerous to some people. I can’t see that it’s any more silly or dangerous than reading fiction or poetry–you know, stuff people just make up, out of words–or looking at paintings–what is that? just pigment on a canvas–or listening to music. It’s play, it’s culture, it’s society, it’s people. As Lear says, “Reason not the need.”

A modest recommendation to NMC from a SL newbie: don’t make all the campus structures institutional meeting places. Build some dorms, rooms where we can hang out in environments that reflect some idiosyncracy.

Our first Faculty Academy 2006 session after the general welcome was a plenary panel discussion/presentation on blogging at UMW. Session leader Steve Greenlaw enticed, coaxed, and otherwise motivated a whole raft of bloggers from many disciplines and both campuses into sharing how they’ve used (or in one case, refused to use) blogs in their teaching and learning.

The results, as you’ll hear, are quite varied. Taken together, they reveal for me a fascinating record of a particular moment in the life of what is still a new IT tool in many learning environments. My staff and I are finding that the idea of a blog is surprisingly resilient and capacious, and that a WordPress blog (for example) can be scaled from a personal journal to a full-blown content management system. That’s not just our discovery, of course; others in the blogosphere report that blogs can be the front end to a complete e-portfolio. I suppose my own fascination is that the notion at the heart of blogging–the narrative of a mind, linked to other narratives and cognitive encounters–turns out to be another way of thinking about thinking itself.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (35.3MB)

Funny how these changes creep up on you, and then one day: another world.

I’m teaching a summer school class on “Film, Text, and Culture,” and yesterday a little thing happened with big implications. We’re on the Little Women unit right now, reading the book and watching three film adaptations (1933, 1949, 1994). Yesterday was a group presentation day: one group presented on two critical/theoretical essays concerning adaptation, and the other presented on two critical/theoretical essays concerning feminism. One of the essays in the latter group argued that Rudolph Valentino’s subject position in film was unique in relation to female viewers. (That’s a crude summary, but it will do for my purposes here.)

On the preceding day, one student had asked me about an image of Valentino mentioned in the essay. I didn’t know or have a copy of that image, unfortunately, though I did find a large photograph in a film history book, which I duly brought in to class and handed around. That’s a perfectly fine and teacherly thing to do, but it clearly meant I didn’t understand something about the Internet in June of 2006, for the student’s presentation featured an actual clip from a Valentino movie, one she had found on YouTube.

Although I’ve used YouTube myself many times, once even in a professional presentation, I hadn’t even thought to direct her there.

Clearly this example says something about my own need to think more carefully and comprehensively about web-based resources. At the same time, it prompts me to reflect on the fact that YouTube was just starting up midway through last fall’s semester, when I was teaching my Intro to Film Studies class, and when I might have made the mental connection earlier. The larger point is that we’re witnessing not just the now-routine Internet phenomenon of major new resources, but also massively and unpredictably scaled repositories of public domain materials that are vital information resources for ourselves and our students. As the information abundance spreads, and if we are brave and curious enough to embrace it, we will find our own serendipity fields dramatically expanded. And we will find our students bringing archival gems into the classroom, casually and crucially. At that point, the professor’s role as advanced learner, one who models the “ah, what do we have here?” that’s the result and nursery of a good education, will be explicit and essential as never before.

Bring it on.