Here’s a podcast of my presentation last Sunday at the “E-Learning Futures” pre-conference workshop for the 2006 University Continuing Education Association conference. The occasion represented a number of firsts for me. It was my first presentation for this organization. I hope it won’t be my last, as I found my colleages at the conference to be focused very intensely on what colleges and universities must do to address our mission of providing opportunities for life-long learning to our world. It was my first time presenting from a wiki. Thanks (as ever) to Brian and Bryan for inspiration and guidance in all things webby, and thanks to Alan for Levine’s Law: start with the demo. It was my first time learning of Berkleeshares (where have I been?), and of the many fascinating models of online education at the Berklee College of Music, where Debbie Cavalier is Dean of Continuing Education. Debbie organized the session I was part of, superbly. I look forward to what I will continue to learn from her. I was also very impressed by her presentation on “Collaborations,” in which she was joined by two other fine presenters, Barbara Macaulay of UMassOnline and Linda Behrens of UC-Davis Extension. And coming to us from Adobe Systems and the Learnativity Alliance, Ellen Wagner‘s lunch presentation on “Mobile Learning Comes of Age?” was a great capstone to the session: funny, informative, pointed, thoughtful.

One other first: I had never before asked attendees to take a survey before the presentation. Inspired by the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative, I decided to give it a try. I used phpSurveyor to whip up a fast thirteen-question survey. Along the way, it occurred to me that it would be interesting to survey my students before a course begins, for several reasons: it would communicate to them that I want to know them and want to help them know each other, it would give me useful information for my own planning, and (this was the stealth realization, the a-ha for me) it would allow me to plant seeds for our work together. For example, let’s say I ask them a question about their familiarity with this or that, and their answer is “no, don’t know that.” By even asking the question, I’ve planted a seed in their minds that may help them later when the topic comes up. Some little bit of scaffolding, a little bit of prep.

phpSurveyor is open source, and I run it on my Bluehost account, which also hosts my blog and podcasts (among many other things). There’s a lot of power here for very little money. Best of all, I learned something valuable. Special thanks to Jerry for the inspiration to try phpSurveyor.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (18.7MB)

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Originally uploaded by Gardo.

On my way out of the San Diego airport last week, I spotted this celebrity. So did many others in the airport. His art has meant a great deal to me over the years, and to see him in person was very moving. I almost went up and said “thanks,” but decided against it, a decision I’m regretting now.

Trying to evoke old 70’s TV shows is a full-time job. I’m sure that someone, somewhere is drawing a nice salary doing so. Me, I’m just trying to get the caffeine past the blood/brain barrier.

Which brings me to this interesting article from the Seattle Times, by way of the reliably interesting Podcasting News. Seems that lots of Seattle colleges and universities are finding podcasts very much to their liking. Some quick points from the article, with even quicker comments:

Three students discussed their online lives, both academic and social, at the conclusion of the 2006 Student Academy on Information Technologies at the University of Mary Washington. In the photo above, they are (l-r) Carmen Ruth, Whitney Roberts, and Bethany Phillips.

It was a fascinating discussion. The audio for some of the questions is marginal, as the questioners were very far off-mike, but the panelists’ remarks come through loud and clear. I won’t offer any commentary of my own; the discussion speaks for itself.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (30.6MB)

It occurs to me lately that I don’t blog very much about my own experience teaching specific classes. I’m not sure why. Part of it may be because teaching at its best is such a rush for me that I risk sounding even more trippy and wiggy than I already do. That wouldn’t bother me so much, but it might make it harder to connect with the story. 🙂 Or it may be because the stories feel so intimate to me. I don’t mean the routine stuff. The usual kerfuffles and complaints are tired and predictable–the papers to grade, the disengaged yawners and watch-checkers, and worst of all, the days when I feel empty and flat and uninspired, indeed a bear of very little brain and no fresh ideas to catalyze the students into following the traces of their own engagement. No, I mean those days when the magic happens. When the big bell rings and a sudden, wild surmise seizes half the class, and me, with an idea or insight or epiphany that leaves us breathless. I assure you I do not exaggerate. Nor do I boast: I have some part to play in all this, but my experience is that great classes achieve greatness because of the students. When they come off the blocks from the first challenging or puzzling thing I say, when they fill the discussion forums with a burning intensity, passionate curiosity, and even a committed playfulness (Lewis’s phrase “solemn romp” comes to mind), when they work and work and work at an idea until they have not only understood it but extended it and taught me things I never suspected, then that’s a great class. To that festival of making I bring expertise, commitment to the conversation, strategies to keep the conversation going and the answers complex, and most of all, a desire to keep us all ready for the magic. That’s certainly not nothing. That’s necessary–but not sufficient.

There was some magic yesterday, and while I don’t like to single out one bit and privilege it over another (I also have a commitment to welcoming magic in disguise, and to avoid making up my mind too early about it), I feel compelled to record two instances. One moved me deeply. One intrigued me mightily. I can’t capture either for you–in the first instance, you really did have to be there–but I feel I should set them down, if only as a reminder for me.

In my Sixteenth-Century British Literature class, truly one of the most invigorating classes I’ve ever been part of (read: almost every day I am Just Blown Away), we’re working our way through Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, Book I. This is an almost unbearably complicated work, but it’s also almost unbearably compelling, for the richness of its imaginary landscape, the beauty and care of its poetic craft, and the intensity of its observations regarding the tangle of human experience at every level. Yesterday we lighted on the topic of despair, one of Spenser’s great concerns. There in the middle of talking about Una’s despair over the Red Cross Knight’s abandonment of her, I was trying hard to push at the largest sphere of human concern in the context of Spenser’s allegory, namely, the utter certainty that, to quote C. S. Lewis once more, if you “give your heart to anything it will most certainly be wrung and quite possibly be broken.” Leaving aside the question of betrayal and misunderstanding, we must finally confront the Great Betrayer, death itself. Unless we are Baucis and Philemon and blessed by the gods with simultaneous deaths, we will always be either abandoned or abandoning. At that point, one very serious student who sits near the front raised her hand and told the story of having to put to sleep their family’s beloved dog of fourteen years. As she told the story, she got to the point of telling us about the anguish her child in particular felt over the dog’s death. And then she took it a step farther, weeping as she did, and at the same time doing beautiful justice to the depth of Spenser’s great poem. She told us that she knew her child would eventually want another dog, and that she would indeed get her another dog, knowing as she did so that she was getting another inevitable death to wring their hearts.

That may sound as if a maudlin, personal, pass-the-orange-and-discuss-your-feelings moment interrupted the scholarly flow in that class. It may sound as if an “I can relate to that” took over the work of analysis. That’s exactly my point; that’s exactly what didn’t happen. What did happen was a breathtaking, absolute commitment to sounding the depths of Spenser’s work, a moment that took us right back to the work itself with utmost answerability. The class, in short, had decided long ago–how, I do not know, but I wish I could bottle it and carry it around with me always–that it was ready. Ready for what? It’s in the nature of things in education that the “what” reveals itself only after the readiness is demonstrated. “Readiness is all.”

The second thing I need to record is a moment growing out of an afternoon class that is never quite so intense as the morning class, though it has its own sneaky rewards. Yesterday we were to discuss Pope’s “Essay on Criticism,” part 1. When I got to class, I sensed that some folks probably hadn’t done the reading, and that that might be partially my own fault given that I had had to cancel class on Thursday but didn’t send a message out to say “we’re still on track on the syllabus.” So that was the wobbliness at the outset. My strategy, given the wobbliness I at least was feeling, was to get at the big questions Pope is asking about critical judgment. Are there standards? Does it all come down to personal taste, and if so, what justification does any professor have for the selections on her or his syllabus? If it’s all taste, why should we learn about that? If it’s not all taste, how can we know what is and what isn’t? The discussion soon got into the wonders of canonicity, grading papers, improving as a writer (if it’s all taste, what does it mean to “improve as a writer”? is it all a popularity contest? etc.), and a host of other considerations. I won’t say the class was on the edge of their seats–I would be lying if I did–but several students were engaged to the point of speaking out quite a bit, including at least one who rarely speaks but, as it turns out, writes her own poetry and would like it to be good, not just popular, so that it might live on after her.

Here’s the hook, though, for me anyway: after I got back to my office and started my round of afternoon attempted catch-up (I didn’t make it, again), one student came by to continue the conversation. It got interrupted, of course, and alas. I feared that the readiness I seek would evaporate as the student found the prof too busy to keep getting after these vexing questions now that class was over. (I hate thinking that anyone would ever think I would every be too busy to keep getting after these vexing questions, but the truth of course is that the work piles up and as a half-time admin I am committed to those responsibilities, and by choice.)

I shouldn’t have worried. Readiness is all. And this student was ready. I know this because she later sent me an email inviting me to look at her continued efforts to think through the questions. Those efforts were on her blog, in LiveJournal, and they amounted to a dogged, insightful, and inspiring 1000+ word essay that simply poured out of her four hours after class was over.

I was honored by the invitation to look at these musings, and struck once again by how valuable (and rare) it is to have such a view of the learner’s mind. If I can see the cognition happening, I can have a much more powerful and sophisticated understanding of what I can contribute as an advanced learner (i.e., as a teacher). If I were a music teacher, or a golf pro, I could watch the fingering, or the swing, and say “ah, I see that you’re doing this, or that, or forgetting this, or that.” But as a professor, I have a hard time seeing the fingering or the swing. Instead, I see bits of cognition happening in class, and some more-or-less ossified traces of cognition in papers. Often, I see the cognition happening in discussion forums, and those moments are crucial to me. But to see an essay–for that’s what it was–that really was an essay–an attempt–was particularly valuable to me as I consider the shape and needs of this learner’s quest. And the serendipity of it all made it feel more authentic, more like what happens when the mind begins to understand the scope of the question, the contours of the problem space. Those beginnings are rarely the result of connecting dots. They’re more in the way of a wild surmise.

Can these moments be scaled? Can they be assessed? I am haunted by these questions. All I know is that both these moments, and the others like them that make teaching such an addictive profession, are at the heart of what I call education. Real school. Any answers or theories of education that don’t at some level speak to this heart will not satisfy me.

Readiness is all.

He’s always on, of course, but now we have the treat of being in the room while he’s on for all of us. At once. We’ve already had toothing, handsets in the grave, RFID at the coffee shop, silicon-brain connections, and more great text than you can shake a commonplace book at.

Here you can see heads bowed at the outset of the talk. We’re all asking to be able to rise the occasion. (Not really, but I couldn’t resist.) Ah, that voodoo that he do so well. Viva Bryan!

Not just to access information.

We come to class for the same reason we come to the ELI Focus Session on Mobile Learning.

1. Face-to-face is another way to set up a serendipity field, with very rich (though often fragile and difficult to capture) channels of communication.
2. There’s a sense of occasion: dearly beloved, we are gathered together….
3. We demonstrate a shared commitment to an ideal, to a set of core values, and think about both that commitment and those values. That demonstration and that thinking yield astonishing benefits. It’s what Bruner speaks of when he describes school as always an exercise in consciousness-raising about the possibilities of communal intellectual effort.
4. To be in the physical presence of a highly-trained cognition working through complex and rich ideas and experiences is to have a gestalt experience of the life of the mind as it is located in individual identities. That gestalt conveys will, purpose, direction, interiority in ways that may elude language, but perhaps not the explaining voice….

During the break, a fellow sitting next to me at the table suddenly said, “Oh, I read your blog, and I just realized you’re the guy who writes it.” He wasn’t sure how he had found it. He asked many probing questions about my experience as a blogger. I’m gobsmacked. How rich are these connections! The blogosphere is a serendipity laboratory; we craft the occasions for a-ha and oh-it’s-you. To arrive where we began, and know it for the first time.

Uncanny. And I know that reading my blog means reading through me all the stuff I’m reading and learning from constantly. Sometimes I think I should be paying tuition. Or perhaps I’ve found the deepest meaning of “professional courtesy.”

Professional courtesy. A phrase to mull over.

Julie Little from UT speaking now on mobile learning initiatives at her school. They started in 2001 when the president said “we’re going wireless.” What happened next? A group of folks in academic technology got together over strong Turkish coffee and said “what do we do now?” Sounds like a recipe for disaster–or not. Venimus, videmus, colemus (we come, we see, we cultivate), Julie says.

It takes a president to say “here we go.” It takes an enormously talented and committed learning community, administrative and instructional, to say “let’s go here, and here, and here.” And most of all, it takes full ownership campus-wide to effect and sustain institutional change.

Getting from leadership to community and back again, recursively, is one of the central problems of any civilization. It strikes me once again that higher education is a civilization laboratory. We must devise the most interesting experiments we can imagine.

Go Julie! How fortunate I am to have met so many strong leaders at Frye 2005. Days like today, I pinch myself: I know that person; I’ve spent many hours with her and others just as strong and talented, soaking it all in, thinking “emulate, emulate, share, share, aspire, aspire.” Real School!

Coming to you live from Adelphi, Maryland, while the student panel is talking about their experience of information technologies in their learning. Whitney Roberts from UMW is on the panel and doing us proud. A couple of things strike me right away. “Students” is a necessary, useful, unwieldy, and misleading category. These students are young, and they’re pursuing degrees, and there are of course powerful commonalities. On the other hand, their experiences and habits of mind, along with their own disciplinary “scaffolding,” diverge pretty widely.

I can’t get all this together on the fly, but I need to blurt it out anyway: we are all students. There are factors unique to various stages of student development; but at a deep level that for me, at least, provides a more useful paradigm, we are all students. Teachers are students advanced enough to be able to shape, guide, and inform students at an earlier place in their learning. Teachers are also students advanced and accomplished enough (accomplished means “peer-reviewed” in the largest sense) to be able fairly and usefully to assess the work of younger students.

I’m feeling as if greater awareness of continuities in life-long learning is necessary for us to make sense of this activity we call “school.” It seems to be hiding in plain sight. Whitney just talked about how engaged learners don’t mind being surrounded by learning inputs all the time; she said that technology is another way of talking about philosophy on campus walk.

I wonder: have we designed school so that it–“it” meaning the challenge of constant intellectual activity–is compartmentalized and segmented (Whitney’s word) into toothless, leave-me-alone blanditude? Get your skills, punch the clock, move on to “real life.” We’ve made school into a job, not a calling, and that quite deliberately. Jobs are jobs. Vocations–callings–are always.