If the exhibit at Baylor’s Mayborn Museum had it right, none of Leonardo’s flying machines actually worked. The notebooks in which he sketched them were untidy, disorganized to the point of apparent recklessness. Sometimes he was so far off in terms of scale or proportion that one has to wonder what he was thinking. To cite but one example: how could a parachute too heavy to carry up a hill ever be tested?

Yet Leonard’s breathtaking powers of invention and visual expression continue to inspire us. Such powers set the standard. In a way, they guarantee their own success, if not in their time, then certainly in the time that follows. If we take the long view, Leonardo’s inventions did in fact work. All of his flying machines flew. His vision would not let us be satisfied with anything less. We created to the standards he helped to set, and that’s one of the big reasons we remember him with gratitude, though I’m confident he was a pain in the neck to be around most of the time. Never content, always off in another galaxy, never facing facts.

If one thinks of Leonardo’s vision as a kind of song, a music that challenges us to shed our mannered attention to the grinding and broken processes of our wonderless calculations, it is a music that may well shake us out of our grim and measured comfort zones.

He stood among a crowd at Dromahair;
His heart hung all upon a silken dress,
And he had known at last some tenderness,
Before earth took him to her stony care;
But when a man poured fish into a pile,
It seemed they raised their little silver heads,
And sang what gold morning or evening sheds
Upon a woven world-forgotten isle
Where people love beside the ravelled seas;
That Time can never mar a lover’s vows
Under that woven changeless roof of boughs:
The singing shook him out of his new ease.

In “The Man Who Dreamed of Faeryland,” Yeats reflects on the hazards of vision. Sentimental? Only if the emotion is out of proportion to its object. And who is to make such a judgment? Is a cabinet of wonders or a rag doll a waste of time? Are all matters of consequence obviously so?

You see where this is going. Stubborn visionary optimism can seem pretty naive, even dangerously so. Perhaps it is both naive and dangerous, some of the time. But I will say that the better part of our highest accomplishments as a species has been driven by stubborn visionary optimism, insistent hopefulness of Engelbartian proportions. Half measures and incrementalism just don’t seem to get us very far, certainly not when it comes to education. The “grammar of school” is simply too vigorous and resilient.

What am I advocating? Nothing in particular beyond  a commitment to the highest hopes and grandest ambitions. Within my lifetime I have seen things you people wouldn’t believe: if not quite C-Beams glittering off the Tannhauser Gate, then certainly wonders on a scale nearly as large. I type these words and send them to you in a blog-shaped bottle upon a sea of articulate connections that depends on daily miracles born of technological innovation. Many of those miracles need tending. Probably not all of them are sustainable, at least not in their present form. But I am grateful to live among them now and to be part of the effort to understand and use them in the central activity of any civilization: the transmission of culture, and the tools to modify that culture and innovate within it, through education.

Whatever we call this age we live in–the information age, the computer age, the network age–I think we do live in a great age, with the chance to be part of a world-changing moment. We may be forced in the circumstances of our various lives to work on smaller scales, but even a modest contribution may change the world if one is inspired by the vision of that possibility.

Sometimes in the middle of reading Paradise Lost or The Faerie Queene, or after we’ve watched Citizen Kane or Fast, Cheap & Out of Control together, my students will turn to me and voice their incredulity that a human being actually made that thing, imagined it and realized it in conversation and collaboration with others, to be sure, but nevertheless in a way that only they could do, and that no one else would have dared. Sometimes, overcome with wonder myself at the vast accomplishment of these artists, I can do little more than shake my head and say, slowly, “You know, there are extraordinary people on this planet. You’ve just seen something of what our species at its best can do.” And though I know these marvelous information and communication technologies we live with every day are fraught sixteen ways from Sunday, I believe they are also a kind of poem we have written together, a film we have made together, a medium that has enabled what Clay Shirky identifies as “the largest increase in expressive capability in the history of the human race” (Here Comes Everybody). That increase happened because we wanted it to, because we have not yet found the boundaries of our ambitions for connection and expression. I have high hopes for the results of this increase in expressive capability, not because I am a techno-utopian (or any kind of utopian, for that matter), but because of what I have learned and will continue to teach of the great expressive accomplishments, in every discipline and domain, of humanity’s history.

I believe I am called to such hopefulness, though there are many days that call sounds faint or ridiculous. You may have a word other than “vocation” for your sense of your own answerability to this moment. Either way, a great age beckons, and I’m glad we can answer together.

Steve over at Pedablogy has an insightful post about note-taking, an activity that I find crucial for my own cognitive focus and ordering when I’m at any kind of presentation. Lately I’ve found that tweeting is a great form of social note-taking, as I can get back my notes *just from me* but at the same time enjoy the benefit of a kind of more-or-less synchronous conversation about the notes as I take them. I’ve even gotten great feedback about the clarity of my attention and articularion from the remarks of my Twitterfriends who are not present at the event. It’s an interesting exercise, like trying to describe a sight to someone over the telephone (that is, before we had the ability to just take a picture and send it along–which frankly, I prefer, even though I love the verbal challenge).

So given that experience, given what Steve says, given the Twitter experiment done by the history prof. at UT-Dallas, and given my own stubborn insistence on varieties and uses of collective and individual intelligence, I came up with an idea that I can’t quite execute, at least not the way I’d hoped. Perhaps you can help, dear reader.

My vision is to make a way for real time notes, observations, questions etc. to be posted to Twitter, and then to flow from Twitter (via a hashtag feed) into a wiki, automagically, and then be groomed, ordered, shaped, and begun to be answered by students in the class after the class is over. They’d probably be assigned as “wiki managers” or whatever on a rotating basis, but perhaps not. Back back back in the day, I was told that note-taking was the first step and note-revising was the second and even more important step, for there the mind began the process of review, consolidation, assimilation, etc. So my notion is that students will take notes individually and revise notes collaboratively. Not a new vision, really, but the cool part for me is having the aggregation take place more-or-less automagically as a demonstration of the resource we’re all building together whether or not we realize it. I’m convinced that Bruner’s “consciousness-raising about the possibilities of communal mental activity” depends first and perhaps foremost on consciousness-raising about the fact that we are acting in a communal mental fashion at the same time we’re doing our individual cognitive projects. The automagic part may not work. We may have to rely on copy-and-paste. But it would be cool to do it automagically as a kind of object lesson in the one-and-the-many idea that I’m trying to convey.

Right now I’m stuck with embedded RSS readers within wikis. The readers will bring the Twitter stream in automagically but a) not display all the stream at once (RSS readers typically limit the number of entries shown, for good reasons of course) and b) not embed the Twitter stream within the wiki as clear text–i.e., not write to the wiki. What I’m imagining may well be impossible. My analogy is FeedWordPress and other republishing affordances that will aggregate and republish content. I do understand that writing to a wiki is a bit different–or is it? In any event, I’d be grateful for any leads, ideas, or cautionary advice. The one lead I’ve not run down yet is something with SimplePie writing to a MediaWiki instance. That one I’ll probably investigate this weekend, unless someone here tells me not to bother trying.

EDIT: It occurs to me that an open MediaWiki site can easily be written to by spammers, as I know to my sorrow. I wonder if there’s a way to use this openness for my own purposes–while of course I’ll need to be vigilant about the spam as well….

Hillary Blakeley, a Ph.D. candidate in neuroscience and the Academy for Teaching and Learning‘s first Graduate Fellow, has launched an interesting series of posts over at Blogging on the Brain. She’s working through the book pictured above, selecting thinkers she’d like to respond to, and blogging about them from her own experience as a student, a teacher, and a brain scientist. Think of it as a summer reading project we can all participate in, with Hillary framing the issues to spark the conversation. By the end of the project, which may well continue through the fall, Hillary’s posts will also be a valuable resource for the ATL and for anyone interested in teaching and learning.

Feel free to comment, or to link to Hillary’s posts in true distributed-conversation style, or to do both. If you’d like to get a copy of the book to read along, so much the better. There’s even a Kindle edition available if that’s your platform of choice.

Five years ago today I posted my first entry to this space. About a half-hour later I posted a second time. Testing one, two … then a day of silence. The following Monday I posted something a bit more substantive. And so it began.

At that point I’d been in my new role as Mary Washington College’s (we weren’t a university quite yet) Assistant Vice-President for Teaching and Learning Technologies for about a year.  Such a year it was! So many firsts: my first teaching & learning technologies conference (AAC&U) and my first visit to Cambridge and the Hotel @ MIT, my first EDUCAUSE conference (in 2003), my first National Learning Infrastructure Initiative annual meeting (the NLII later became the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative).   My first risky project (turned up to 11 by my boss, Chip German): turn a biology lab full of desktop-computers-on-wheels into a sleek, wireless learning environment with a tablet PC at every station.  My first Faculty Academy as leader of DTLT and chair of the MWC Teaching, Learning, and Technology Roundtable.  For our keynote speaker, I recruited Dennis Trinkle, whose presentation with his DePauw cohort at EDUCAUSE 2003 (my first EDUCAUSE conference) had knocked me out.

The year felt very full to me. There had been many events, a bit of traveling, and an entire new way of life within the academy to get adjusted to. Though I couldn’t have known it at the time, many of the new people I met that first year would be crucial for my professional and personal development: Vicki Suter, Cyprien Lomas, Dennis Trinkle, Brian Lamb, Bryan Alexander, to name only a few. Several colleagues I’d known over several years–some of them very well–would assume new importance in my life and work. For the first time I was managing a staff–not as well as I’d have liked, but one has to start somewhere–and attending administrative meetings on both the Academic Affairs and Information Technologies sides (a combination that would turn out to be of critical importance).

And in that first year, I began to learn what it was like to work for Chip German. That’s worth a blog post or ten all by itself. Suffice it to say that Chip augmented every single moment of personal or professional development in that year for me, and catalyzed most of them himself. We fell into the habit of talking for two or three hours most every Friday afternoon. Looking back, I’m astonished at the time and energy–and sheer patience–Chip invested in me. I knew I was green as grass, but Chip gave me the great gift of never making me feel that way. I was quaking in my boots many days in that new job, but never once did I feel that anxiety in his presence or as a result of any communication from him. I’m still not quite sure how he does that, but I can see how very important it was for me, especially that first year, when the big decision points were still beyond my ken.

Then came the real turning point.

Chip and I took a road trip to William and Mary to meet with another of my future mentors, Gene Roche, to discuss W&M’s recent move to Blackboard “Enterprise.” At the close of several hours’ conversation, Gene casually mentioned his experiments in a hosted web space, including a blog he’d just begun to keep. As I recall, the first entries had to do with W&M’s new laptop project. Gene was writing about his plans to go laptop-only himself in his daily work, and thus “eat his own dog food.” On the return trip to Fredericksburg, Chip and I talked about Gene’s blogging and about the hosted webspace. I asked Chip if I might purchase hosted space for each of my DTLT staffers and ask them to begin blogging. He readily agreed, turning it all up to 11 as is his wont …

… and that was that. I can’t remember for sure, but I think the trip was on a Friday, and that evening I signed up for my $5 a month hosted space. The next day, having installed WordPress by means of Fantastico, I named my blog (I knew right away it had to be “Gardner Writes”) and  published my first two blog posts. And here I am, five years later. Still at it, through fits and starts, through fat and lean, through exuberant and strained. Still in awe, really, of how this distributed conversation can work, and how it has worked in my own experience.

On this anniversary, then, 584 posts later, I thank all of you (whoever and however many you are) for following along, for commenting, for linking, for nurturing this space with me over these many years. Special thanks to those of you who blog: thanks for keeping at it, thanks for risking it, thanks for giving me something to link to, something to learn from, something to emulate, something to aspire to. Blogging lives. I take that lesson to heart and will do my best in the next five years to keep “Gardner Writes” full and frequent (and I’m sorry I’ve not always hit that mark this year).

By 2014, when we all have our lifestreams published, syndicated, and subscribed to by family, friends, and followers near and far, I’ll still have one of those lifestreams labeled “blog,” that silly-sounding word for a rich and rewarding medium that opened a new world to me in the middle of my life’s journey.

My colleague Carl Flynn forwarded me a link yesterday to a YouTube video documenting Professor Monica Rankin’s use of Twitter in her history class at the University of Texas-Dallas. (Yes, he used Twitter to do it–all about the recursion, folks.) I retweeted the link, and Derek Bruff at Vanderbilt sent me a link to his very thoughtful and extensive analysis on his blog. It’s worth considering just that layer of social-network interaction, which is still news to many people in higher education and which is also a great answer to the question of “why should I invest time in social media?” Even though I’ve been in this space for many years now–my fifth-year blogging anniversary is coming up on June 27–I still marvel at the ease and power of the social life of shared experience, let alone information, that this platform enables.

But back to “The Twitter Experiment,” which you can view here.

In addition to the many fine thoughts and questions Derek offers in his comprehensive analysis, two things stand out to me.  One is the way the work of the TA is positioned. As Derek notes, the TA really does become part of the instructional team. In fact, I’d say she’s almost a “research assistant” and “teaching assistant” at the same time, with the object of her research being the class itself. I can’t help thinking such an arrangement makes for an excellent apprenticeship in mindful teaching and the possibilities of research on classroom practice (aka “the scholarship of teaching and learning”). Another standout for me is the YouTube video itself, especially when it’s considered as an interdisciplinary project. As the videographer (Kim Smith, aka “kesmit3”) writes in the YouTube sidebar and in her blog post about the project:

She [Professor Rankin] collaborated with the UT Dallas, Arts and Technology – Emerging Media and Communications (EMAC) http://www.emac.utdallas.edu faculty and as a Graduate student in EMAC I assisted her in her experiment.

I documented the experiment for a digital video class with Professor Dean Terry, @therefore, and assisted Dr. Rankin in the experiment as a part of my collaboration and content creation course with Dan Langendor, @dlangendorf.

How do I cross domains with thee? Let me count the ways. The videographer collaborated with both the TA and with Dr. Rankin. Indeed, I’d say the videographer herself became a kind of TA for the course. The collaboration was part of her work for yet another course on “collaboration and content creation.” The documentation of the experiment was part of yet another course, this one in digital video. And these cross-pollinations were repeated at the professor’s level, too, as Dr. Rankin worked with experts in the Emerging Media and Communication faculty at her university to understand the potential for Twitter and to shape the experience for her students. Apparently the usual wrangling points of FTEs and who-gets-credit-for-what were resolved early on. Kudos.

And now the potential collaboration is taken to an even higher level, as the documentation is on the open web, on the most widely used platform for video, freely available for anyone wanting to understand, emulate, tweak, mashup, or otherwise adapt these techniques and ideas. Oh, and the video’s been viewed over 17,000 times since it was uploaded in early May.

Obviously, Michael Wesch’s example has been very instructive along these lines.  I’d like to see even more of these five-minute videos relating innovative practices using social media in the classroom (and in the informal learning outside of it). Perhaps these little videos could become the “learning objects” we’ve been waiting for: not so much reusable modules of course content as cogent expositions of provocative, innovative practices in teaching and learning. No matter what the public effects, however, I’d argue that the project has catalyzed and demonstrated exactly the kind of domain-crossing, interdisciplinary co-creations our schools need to invent, model, and propagate among our faculties, staffs, and students. I hope the Twitter Experiment goes viral–indeed, it already has in my own Personal Learning Network. But what I really hope will go viral is this kind of academic creativity and partnership. We’re only scratching the surface of the “uni” in “university.” This project offers us a glimpse of a way forward, inspired by some of the powerful ways in which new media can help form and spread communities of practice.

Now, what if a university’s official website, often a project centered on “branding” and and search-engine-optimization, were to be reimagined as a site for information sharing and social mediation? There’s a great example of just such a project going on right now, and I’ll be blogging it very soon. Stay tuned.

EDIT: Blog comments can be very rich, and some great stuff can emerge in a long thread without being very visible or findable. On Kim Smith’s blog post,  all the way at the end of the comments (so far),  Dr. Monica Rankin links to her full post-course analysis of the experiment. Great reading, and another great example of the way these social media work recursively: publish, subscribe, get responses, and let the responses elicit even more material. As I’ve said before, it’s very much like a library in a time-lapse photograph, all the books calling forth other books in response….

It’s also interesting, for me at least, that I’m about 22 days behind on this. Even when these experiments are reported widely, it takes a whole network of social media channels to keep the word going out. There’s no old news here, just network effects and continuing relevance.

Now comes the valedictory moment, the climax and the moment I’ve been dreading, too. I’m lousy at goodbyes. I feel the dark pull of leavetaking long before I rationally should. The “sense of an ending,” as Frank Kermode argues, can lend shape and meaning to the arc of a narrative. For me, that’s certainly part of the experience. But the sense of an ending also makes me mournful, both because it means saying goodbye to some dear, inspiring friends, and because I can’t help thinking that another week, another month, another year together could provide the breakthroughs we all seek. The sense of expectancy, of sheer possibility generated at a meeting like this make me so hopeful that we can be a force for positive change, that we can reach the transformative moment. That we can bootstrap ourselves into a better world.

Larry’s taking his leave by talking about what inspires us, what makes us proud. He’s getting ready to present NMC’s annual Centers of Excellence awards to three highly deserving schools. Just ahead of me on a darkened stage left sits Doug Engelbart, a thinker and human being whose vision has shaped more of our information age than any other single person’s. There sits a man who has inspired me as much as John Milton has. (That’s saying something–I call my friends to bear me witness.) Doug is watching full-screen, full-motion video projected on a large central screen. The man who in 1968 sat on a stage and projected the images of his vision and his team’s accomplishments–and in the words of one observer “dealt lightning with both hands”—is watching a video of Abiliene Christian University’s iPhone mobile learning project.

In 1962, Doug Engelbart, the father of interactive computing, published a seminal essay called “Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework.” The essay impressed one J.C.R. Licklider, the father of the Internet, who set Doug up with a research lab that would help bring the information age into being. Today, forty-seven years later, Doug listens as the team from Abilene Christian University talks about students having computers in their pockets that connect them to a universe of invention, innovation, and conversation, a universe that manifests the collective intelligence he’s devoted his life to describing and encouraging and empowering. My heart is full beyond the telling. The question he asked all those years ago at the Mother of All Demos is being answered. We’re answering it. What value could we derive in partnership with a computer that is always on, always connected to information, always connecting us to each other?

Doug, this is the value we can derive. This is the value you have empowered us to imagine and recognize. This is the value your life and work embody for our world. I am grateful beyond measure.

Now the Berkeley Center for Digital Storytelling is honored for helping us “understand what it means to be human,” in Larry Johnson’s apt words. The CDS’s work has inspired people around the world to share their stories and “lend their minds out to help each other,” as the poet Robert Browning wrote. We’re hearing one of those storytellers right now. She’s musing aloud about a time and place “where fists of fear don’t fly”–voices imagining and yearning for that better world. The voices and the images that illuminate their breath. Listening deeply and speaking our stories. Stories that unite us even as they portray the bleak and destructive differences that divide us–the fists of fear that do fly, that insist only a few voices can speak and only a few should be heard.

But there are alternatives. Instead of shouting and creating divisions, we share ourselves into being. With technologies–interventions in the natural and cultural world–that belong to us. “It’s not like talking about it–it’s like going into it.” See E.P. Thompson on the seven-year arc of an idea–an inspiration for Joe Lambert. Joe notes that in many ways YouTube is the triumph of digital storytelling, so now we must renew our efforts and refocus our attention to find even more innovative ways to inject meaning into our stories.

I thought the emotions were running high before. What did I know? These stories wring the heart and lift up the soul.

“Inside each one of our hearts is a life-changing narrative…. We have a responsibility for getting those stories out of ourselves and into the world.” Joe Lambert, Executive Director, Center for Digital Storytelling, Berkeley University.

And still Doug looks on, taking it in, watching and listening to the stories of a world in which we still try to bootstrap ourselves into community and innovation. Stories of a world he helped us create, and inspires us to re-create, co-create.

Now the Open University of Catalonia, the first institution outside North America to receive a “Center of Excellence” award, and a testimony to the growing global context in which the NMC does its work. (To take but one example: the Horizon Project–click here for the 2009 report, and please comment–continues to be shared with the world, and has been translated into Spanish and now Catalan.) The UOC has 47,000 students around the world. Their openness has extended over their 15-year life, from open to students to open to the world. “Our difference is the name … we are open to develop, to create content, and we are open to collaborate,” says the director of their Learning Technologies Center. Again I am struck by how Doug’s pioneering work in the augmentation of human intellect by means of collective intelligence and bootstrapping methodologies has blossomed in extraordinary, often unexpected ways.

As we continue, quite rightly, to identify and even to rail against what’s breaking and broken in our schools, it is good also to see and remember what school at its best can be, and is: a means of augmenting human intellect, a place for bootstrapping, a place for hearts and minds to work and play together. School’s not the only place that happens. But it can happen there, and I want to help make it happen there–to preserve the fragile magic that rests upon a flawed but vital infrastructure.

Now Larry Johnson has begun the tribute to Doug Engelbart. His testimony moves me deeply. He plays excerpts from a videotaped interview he did with Doug about ten years ago. As always, the clarity and poetry of Doug’s vision take my breath away.

I’ve got to stop typing now.

The rest here is from memory, as I was too overcome with emotion on that morning to write another word as the tributes rang out.

Lev Gonick, VP for Information Technology Services at Case Western Reserve University, and Kristina Woolsey, NMC Fellow and head of Woolsey & Associates, lead Doug onto the stage. The room is instantly on its feet, applauding and cheering. How many times does one get to thank, face to face, the inventor and visionary who has made a new vocation possible? For the work we do is a vocation, a calling, and we hear the voice of that calling through the stubborn insistence of this man’s efforts.

Doug was called many names during his years leading the Augmentation Research Center. Some were flattering, but many were not. He was thought by many to be (not to put too fine a point upon it) off his rocker. One early colleague warned him quite explicitly not to share his vision with anyone else lest he be fired or completely marginalized. This we know from the awed testimony of his colleagues’ speeches at last December’s celebration of the fortieth anniversary of the Mother of All Demos. Those colleagues testified to the awe they continue to feel of Doug and his achievements. They are awed by Doug’s persistence, awed by how wrong his critics were, awed to know and to have worked with someone who despite “the loneliness of the long-distance thinker,” as Howard Rheingold so aptly put it in Tools for Thought, fought through the isolation and misunderstanding and, yes, at times even antagonism and hostility, to keep his vision alive and aloft.

The ovation continues as Lev and Kristina and Doug settle into their chairs at center stage. Finally, the applause subsides, and Lev and Kristina begin to speak. They speak of Doug’s accomplishments. They recall what it was like to discover Doug’s writings, many years into their own careers, and to read their futures in the work of his heart, hands, and mind. Lev and Kristina help us understand the scale and significance of Doug’s vision. They look at him with affection, with respect. With wonder.

Several times Doug covers his face in genuine humility. Can he be the person they’re describing? Certainly he did not do his work alone. But of all the great seers and doers of the nascent information age, Doug’s achievement is the most singular, the most to be driven by a single imagination. And yet his imagination was never the point. Always, the goal was to enable us to identify, harness, and raise our collective IQ. The idea was to augment human intellects one by one, but by means of a fine tracing of mental and spiritual connections from which would emerge a true “capability infrastructure” to prepare us for the dangers, questions, and opportunities we would encounter as civilization continues to develop.

Doug thought at scale. He understood that a car is not simply a faster tricycle. He had faith that an augmented intellect, joined to millions of other augmented intellects, could clarify individual thought even as it empowered vast new modes of thinking, new modes of complex understanding that could grasp intricately meaningful symbols as quickly and comprehensively as we can recognize a loved one’s face. For Doug, computers are the tools we have invented in our quest for a new language, even a meta-language. A manner of speaking that can move us through the enmiring complexities of our shared lives and dreams, and thus help us to use those complex lives and dreams wisely instead of being their puppets or victims.

Lev has spoken; Kristina has spoken. Now it’s Doug’s turn.

Doug accepts his NMC Fellows Award with these words:

Well this is, you know, a trite thing to say, “I’m overwhelmed,” but I sit here just feeling overwhelmed. You know, I wasn’t doing all of those things in order to sit here and get something like this. It’s been so many years … and I still have dreams about how the world could be … anyway, I appreciate this very much, so thank you, thank you.

Afterward, these photographs:

The four NMC Fellows: (l-r) Ted Kahn, Doug Engelbart, Kristina Woolsey, Carl Berger.

Christina Engelbart, Director of the Doug Engelbart Institute, and her father, Doug Engelbart

A family triumph

Or, a carnival of thought, practice, and community innovation. This session has got to be one of my favorite parts of the NMC summer conference. The mood is festive and expectant, the presentations are delightful and delightfully rushed, and the gong is the great leveler. (A gong sounds when the five minutes are up.)

Given the location this year, I’m tempted to say that watching the 5 minutes of fame is like dipping a net into the sea and coming up with an array of beautifully gleaming fish. Never fear: everyone gets thrown back into the ocean of innovation. No participants were harmed in the making of these presentations. (Though they all looked a bit winded by the end. And don’t get me started on the five-finger exercises these info-and-inspiration-whooshes posed for me and my fellow live-bloggers Leslie and Chris. In fact, I’ve had to wait until now to finish my post–and of the three of us, I had the only relatively clear view of the slides. Kudos to them for getting theirs done in closer to real time! Most About half of what follows was also real-time for me, but my notes were not always clear and the post-production today is, shall we say, a non-trivial task–but also a labor of love. 🙂 )

Bronwyn Stuckey, IUPUI, Indianapolis, IN: Building Community Out of Online Professional Development. (Unfortunately, I was too slow on the shutter button to get a photograph of Bronwyn in action.)

Bronwyn presented on Quest Atlantis, a  3D multi-user virtual world and game environment developed by the Learning Sciences team at Indiana University and offered to classrooms globally for students 8-14 years of age. The environment features a rich narrative with lots of backstory–this part reminds me of “cut scenes” in video games. The idea is to provide a game structure inside a virtual environment for curriculum delivery. From what I saw of the virtual world, it looks like a very pretty Second Life sim (it also looks a bit like World of Warcraft and Croquet. Is there a “virtual world filter” that gives these builds a certain look? Note to self: find research on aesthetics, design, and hardware that analyzes the extent to which a certain look-and-feel is driven by need to standardize on widely available hardware and performance). Bronwyn’s group made this world on the “Active Worlds” platform. The driving idea here was “socially responsible games” build around learning, playing, and helping. Two other important criteria: the program had to be “highly protected … [a world] where children are safe” (important for all sorts of reasons, though I note that considerations of safety also justify locked-down laptops that can’t access safe blogs, etc.) and the program had to incorporate gaming principles into the learning design. (I wonder if any commercial games were models here? Bronwyn may have spoken of these, but the five minutes of fame go by very quickly and your humble reporter had multimedia vertigo more than once.)

Here’s the professional development piece: to get in with their students, teachers needed to be trained. Bronwyn seized this opportunity to introduce teachers “to a variety of social media and tagging to build ties within and beyond the workshop cohort” (quoting from the conference program). Bronwyn noted that the research platform for this project means that teachers must use it “with some level of fidelity”–I’m not sure what “fidelity” means in this context, perhaps “purposefully” or “mindfully,” or even “to match a research protocol”? The overall design uses principles of situated/embodied cognition (James Gee is an obvious touchstone here–I’m looking forward to reading his book on situated cognition, as I found his book on video games very impressive indeed). Bronwyn and her team have also constructed external communities to match the inworld communities: see her blog at questatlantis.edublogs.org (I seem to have gotten that URL wrong–I’m not finding a blog there. There is a small set of posts from 2007 at questatlantis.blogspot.com).

This project sounds like a greatly synergistic opportunity, and very well-framed too: take student enthusiasm, combine it with the affordances of a gaming world for active learning, and blend in plenty of learning for the teachers that goes well beyond “here’s how you move forward and backward in the world.” Fascinating stuff, and a fine example of how to get maximum positive ramifications out of one opportunity or idea. Plenty of deep, detailed resources at the main project page. I’ll be certainly be reading up on it in the weeks ahead. (Turns out there’s also a Wikipedia entry–nice.)

Just under five minutes. And where was the Donovan song? (Ah, generations; ah, copyright.)

Jackie Gerstein, International Society for Technology Education: Creative Web Tools For and By Kids.

Website: http://weewebwonders.pbwiki.com

And here are the kids (they’re really kids: third grade?) on video now, speaking from a script–a script they wrote together. Highly charming, to say the least–and a great introduction to the student creativity this program emphasizes. Jackie describes her role as a teacher thus: she’s a “tour guide of learning possibilities.” (Nice.) Her students take on “stewardship of their own learning experiences.” Now we’re watching great little videos of the kids speaking through their own animated avatars. They offer us words of welcome–welcome to their worlds, the worlds they’ve made. (In my notes I see these words: “Elvis, Alicia Keys, Madonna, and Billy Ray Cyrus.” For the life of me I can’t remember what these refer to–I think it’s what one of the kids said about her own ambitions as a musician, or her range of musical inspirations? If someone has better notes than I, please chime in. Those of you who know me will recognize why I took note of the words….)

Student get their own wiki pages, one per student. They create their own identities. They choose tools to fit their learning styles and needs. Moblyng, wordle, imagechef, tux paint and doink, newspaper generators, animotos, piclits, tikatok books (big favorite there), dipity timline, etc. (See Leslie and Chris for more tool lists–they were really whizzing by.) The learning goals are established by the students themselves. They do extensive research on the topics they choose, largely (entirely?) on the web. How do the students ensure their sources are good? They go through a web site analysis questionnaire with a set of questions that allow them to rate the websites with care. Students also choose their own tools. They make their own quizzes and send them to each other as assignments. The project website has had over 10,000 visits (I’m not sure of this last figure–notes got sketchy there). Someone from Ethiopia joined their website (it was an international visitor–not sure I got the country right–in any event, as Chris points out, international connections emerged serendipitously).

Jackie’s five minutes ended with a quotation from Rachel Carson. I only got a bit of it, but I believe this is it in full:

“If a child is to keep alive his inborn sense of wonder, he needs the companionship of at least one adult who can share it, rediscovering with him the joy, excitement and mystery of the world we live in.” (As I was hunting for that quotation, I found this bit in a longer excerpt: “A child’s world is fresh and new and beautiful, full of wonder and excitement. It is our misfortune that for most of us that clear-eyed vision, that true instinct for what is beautiful and awe-inspiring, is dimmed and even lost before we reach adulthood.” I’ve not read Rachel Carson’s A Sense of Wonder. I clearly need to rectify that, pronto.)

Another video with the kids comes on the screen. Together they say, “The End!” And right on cue, the gong sounds. Whoosh!

Virginia Kuhn, University of Southern California: Documentary is the New Black: Filmic Texbooks in the 21st Century Classroom

(Note: for some reason–finger fatigue?–these notes aren’t as cogent or coherent as I wish they were. Blame the scribe, not the presenter!)

This project used film as a central course text. Students in the school of cinematic arts are not all film students. The idea here is to encourage visual literacy across the disciplines. There’s a thesis project in final year–in any of a number of disciplines. The inaugural cohort just completed their theses. Students needed help figuring out how to launch and deploy a multimodal research thesis project. Answer: IML 340–The Praxis of New Media, a course that can help students acquire these multimodal and project management skills. This small project could seed the larger project or at least model the project process.

Example: Iraqi doctors on the front lines of medicine. Exchange between Baghdad and USC medicine. The exchange project included a trip to the White House. One of the doctors was there on the eve of Saddam’s capture–his dad had been hurt (killed?) by Saddam. Very moving experiences.

Hence “The Iraqi Doctors Project:  on the Front Lines of Education.” Project website: http://hurricane.usc.edu/iml340/ (thanks to Leslie for the URL).

Implications here for large scale public literacy. Virginia cites Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television by Jerry Mander (1978). Mander critiques TV and film and praises books because of their “infinite patience”: one can go back and re-read books, which remain stable instead of rushing by the way film and TV do. Mander’s arguments don’t apply in 2009, obviously: ever since the home video revolution and the subsequent rise of new media we can “go back” and read films and television shows the way we can a book.

Quick mentions here of Eric Faden “the documentary’s new politics”–an alliance with Brave New Films–Gong!

Marie Carianna and Derek Toten, Tulane University: Good! ¡Bien! ¡Ütz! Maya Language Learning from Guatemala to Tulane

The project started with the Dept. of Education, then brought in the Stone Center and the Innovative Learning Center. The object was to promote the study of less commonly taught languages. The language chosen was the Kaqchikel Maya language, ad the course design stressed cultural immersion. Marie and Derek’s team developed self-paced Flash-based instruction modules to support the course.

The modules are in two formats: CD-ROM and online. We’re seeing the online version. The interface shows four quadrants in a Mayan glyph. One selects a unit by clicking on one of the quadrants. Unit one is objects, unit two is family and social. The other two units are in production. Each unit features dialogues and exercises. The interface can switch on subtitles in Mayan, and can supply English or Spanish audio. Students can listen, record their own voices repeating the words they hear, and compare the two. This is a full-fledged tutorial. The project involves five summer trips to Guatemala, with postproduction and design work done in the spring and fall. The project will be complete by 2011.

Each trip to Guatemla involves a crew of four: two pedagogists and two videographers. The crew works with local folks to do the work. Videographers use two cameras, lights, basically a full production rig. The video is shot on hi-def cameras, and for obvious reasons they are very, very careful with the audio recording.

The video we’re watching closes with an English greeting from a Guatemalan man–then Gong!

Li Zhu and Michael Beahan, Dartmouth College: Jones Media Center, How do I…?

The staff opportunity: a paid one-year internship that changes every year. The challenge: the media center needed a higher profile marketing campaign that would get the word out to potential users as well as help those users do their best work. So they did the logical thing: they put media to work to publicize their media center. These are very short videos, no longer than 90 seconds. The publicity videos show people using the equipment and making things. The idea is to come up with a better imagination stimulus than a mere list of services could ever provide.

One video example: “how do I get started with my multimedia project?” The videos are both encouraging (indeed, motivational) and serve as a kind of FAQ. They strive to keep the videos short. Students reserve the equipment 24 hours in advance. Li used the very programs they had available in the Media Center to construct the materials to instruct patrons on how to use the materials. (Nice recursion.)

Center website: http://www.dartmouth.edu/~library/mediactr. They’ve also published their materials and information on their YouTube channel and on Facebook.

And the happy ending: the intern got a paid trip to the NMC summer conference in California. (And here she is.)

Kate Borowske, Hamline University: Library On A Stick and On the Air.

The stick: not just for food, but also for research. Kate works with the MFA program in Writing for Children and Young Adults. It’s a low-residency program: two ten-day visits, and the rest online. She helps with students need and desire for more info on how to use the tools. She does this with “Toolbar,” online workshops, and recordings.

She shows us the MFA “Library on a stick” and the three prongs that make it up. First, Toolbar (a Flash video demo). The Toolbar sits on the browser (like a Yahoo or Google Toolbar) and presents links to many resources, meaning the student doesn’t have to go back-back-back in a browser. (The Toolbar essentially presents a set of easy-to-navigate bookmark buttons–a nifty pre-surfed web that makes the navigation very easy indeed and allows for great self-paced learning.)

The other part: “Conduit.” Conduit is the tool that makes toolbars. (This is a very interesting resource–new to me). Kate demonstrates the authoring tool. The toolbar also permits messages to be sent to users in real time, though this can make the user feel spied-upon.

Second prong: four online workshops. online, synchronous, using Elluminate Live. She designed the content around Toolbar. Kate likes Elluminate very much–intuitive, functional. breakout rooms. She uses the webtour, demonstrates search, etc.

Prong three: record the Elluminate sessions and make them available on the website 24/7. Now there’s a library available to students for asynchronous reference.

Kate begins to talk about going for responses, and then GONG goes the gong….

(Alan says Toolbar is a cool tool–it’s apparently new to him as well. Phew.)

Larry Johnson, The New Media Consortium: The NMC’s Hakone™ Project: New Life for Second Life

First, a minor controversy: is this Larry’s first time as a “5 Minutes of Fame” presenter? No, but it’ s been ten years, and he wasn’t CEO then. Glad we got that cleared up!

The project name comes from the location in Japan where the NMC was born, at a forum hosted by Apple Computer in 1992. Larry recently discovered an article on this forum in the Independent. The story is dated 24 August 1992, and reports on the forum’s discussions “last month,” a lag in coverage Larry notes we’d never accept today. (Such are the changes high-speed telecommunications have wrought.)

The topic of this historic meeting: convergence. Larry reads the article to us. What did the discussion center on? Joining together the telephone and the computer. IBM had just bought a major telephone company. Then a third dimension entered the discussion–delivery. At this meeting Apple also announced the Newton, to appear the next year.

The Hakone™ Project is a Second Life sim built to honor the start of the NMC. Larry fires up Second Life to take us there, but just as we get to the virtual city center, the gong sounds.

So what exactly IS the Hakone™ Project? Stay tuned, dear listeners. 🙂

Paul Iwancio, Aaron Weidele, William Shewbridge, University of Maryland, Baltimore County: Taking Digital Stories on the Road.

This project got started with an effort to collect stories from Meyerhoff SScholars at the program’s 20th anniversary celebration. (The UMBC Meyerhoff Scholars program encourages underrepresented groups in the sciences to pursue degrees.) How to do maximum story collection during a two day event? Answer” capture sixty stories (!)  in “the story booth” (great idea). Nice video here of Paul and Aaron setting up a story booth, transforming an ordinary classroom into a recording studio. Now we see the students and hear their voices–the movie climaxes with impressive matrix of all the storytellers. W00t! 60 interviews over two days, with all sorts of other things being shot at the same time. They set up their story booth in many different locations, even in a coat closet.

For gear, they went out and bought a black cloth backdrop from theatrical supply company (this is a great idea). They warn us: be aware that it might break on you! (The scale and diversity we see here really make this impressive.)

Who did the interviews? Many alumni were interviewed by current undergraduate Meyerhoff Scholars. (An amazingly good idea.) Some of the undergrads were so devoted to class that it was hard to get them to cut class and do the interviews–so sometime the interviewees would interview each other. This worked too.

What about distribution? They rebuilt the Meyerhoff website. The videos are scattered throughout and located in a central gallery (EDIT: the central gallery is here). They made a DVD and distributed thousands of copies. Plenty were uploaded to YouTube as well.

Future projects–see picture above–GONG!

Morgan Reid, University of British Columbia: Talking to Our Computers? Transcribing Interviews at 2:1!

Morgan notes that “even Jared Bendis called me crazy” for attempting what follows.  He warms up, and lets fly. Question: how to transcribe recordings? Transcription service? (Very expensive.) Voice “wreckognition”?–cf. the famous Microsoft crash and burn demo.

Start with good quality recordings. The assumption is that voice recognition won’t work as well with a live feed. Morgan tries simultaneous translation (essentially, revoicing live what one hears–my thanks to Chris and Leslie who were obviously more tuned in than I was at this point) compared with working from a recording. The idea is for the person who’s trained the computer to recognize his or her own speech to “revoice” what’s on the audio recording as it plays back. The result is a much faster and more accurate transcription than can be achieved even by a skilled transcriber who types as the audio plays back. (I had to study Chris’s and Leslie’s blogs and try to recover my own memories to piece this account together–my apologies, since I’m not doing  justice to Morgan’s efforts by a long shot.)

Morgan uses Mac Speech Dictate. Asks for a volunteer from the audience. Chris (NMC staffer) “volunteers.” Using Mac Dictate 1.2.1 and a text editor (in this case, Express Scribe), Morgan competes with Chris’s recording-to-text transcription.

Morgan’s quite the performer. The race is on. Just when it’s heating up–GONG!

Jared Bendis, Case Western Reserve University: Teaching the Elephant to Walk Itself: Self-Generating Pachyderm

Alan notes that Jared is always going last–he’s a clever veteran of the Five Minutes.

Jared aims to present a self-generating pachyderm interface, using a database to feed a set of design rules. (The presentation seems to be self-destructing at this point–I think it’s a part of the act.)

Digital Case: an initiative of the Kelvin Smith Library.

They seek to disseminate digital assets but the archives have almost no user interface–a common problem with digital archives (too true) and one that the archivists typically neglect. Jared consulted the wheel of new media solutions, and up came Pachyderm!

Pachyderm offers four steps to a great user interface, but Jared wanted something even more advanced. The quest: to integrate an existing database into pachyderm without authoring an interface in Pachyderm at all. The solution: use Pachyderm as a data standard, an output standard. Query the database, results are jpg xlm and pachyderm flash files. Get the interface by using design rules instead of authoring. Thus the authoring will be inherent in the curation of the collection.

Several disclaimers here, among them that Jared is using a beta of Pachyderm 2.1. We see another example of a digital asset here: Great  works of art and the back of someone’s head (ATBOSH). (Now that’s curation. Or something close.)

What’s next? Design new rules systems. “Thanks everyone,” Jared says in closing, “and please join my mobwars mob on Facebook.”

Alan wraps it all up:

And the famous gather for one more minute in the (collective) limelight:

(whew)

Like Alan, Marco likes to start with examples: partly because of nerves, partly because he’s aiming for balance between examples and ideas and the balance starts for him with examples.

Pretty good idea for this audience, which will say “awww” not only for puppies (Kathy Sierra did that for us yesterday) but for neat pieces ‘o gear, like the portable mini-keyboard from Korg he shows us as he begins his demo with GarageBand. He advises using the black keys (“you can’t mess up the songs”) and the string presets (“string instruments have great range”). He demos John Williams’ two-key melody from Jaws and shows how the iPhone can map the dissonance, then plays a perfect fourth for us to show how the story can have a happy ending (“Free Willy”).

He seems to be driving toward the idea of musical storytelling.

(Musicians have long debated the way(s) in which music might convey meaning, from the “program music” of something like Scherezade to something as remote and abstract as Schoenberg’s Verklarte Nacht (I hope I spelled that correctly). I actually went down this path in some research back in grad school, and found that musicians have widely varying ideas about the nature of musical expressivity. There are some interesting angles to pursue here with regard to the specific natures of particular media–films are not illustrated books, photographs are not the same as paintings, etc. It would be interesting to complicate the idea of creativity along these lines.)

Torres had an uncle who produced what he calls “some of the worst movies ever to come out of Mexico.” His mother was a photographer. These influences brought home to Torres (literally) the nature and importance of story. The relationships here also taught Torres that trust and collaboration were crucial to the creative process, especially with storytelling, because no one of us knows everything. Story gives stuff a purpose. The purpose isn’t in the stuff itself. (He connects this idea to material in Sierra’s presentation yesterday–a good connection indeed.) Narrative yields meaning. The search for meaning elicits narrative. (I wonder: is this true for music and the visual arts, always?)

Receive, create, produce, broadcast: here are today’s channels:

Receive, create, produce, broadcast: here are the channels we had when the average principal was in school:

What to conclude from this difference? Are we stuck on assessing the products of pen and paper? What should we do with the varieties of expression we have available to us now? How do we move from students as recipients of information to students as producers of information? Another important point: we may bring information in through one channel, but produce or make something with that information in another channel. We may be auditory learners but visual creators.

At this point the talk turns to what-do-we-need-to-know, and does knowing that stuff confer expertise? Einstein says “don’t ask questions that you can look up.” (True, but there’s more to truly knowing facts than simply being able to repeat them. Schools may not know this yet, of course. But I’m not sure that finding the fact on Google is exactly the same as having memorized the fact yourself. My own memorization, if it’s done well and in a meaningful context, will have assocational ties that stretch in many directions, the way a word has connotations even when I “know the meaning.” A complicated issue.)

Torres mentions in passing the need to teach the grammar of math and not just the facts of math, by which he means the context and uses of mathematical knowledge and procedures.

Now the talk turns to the need for school not to suck. Most folks in the room here think their 9-12 grade education was “boring.” Last year Torres worked with Alton Brown. He shows us a couple of videos, one an ad for the show itself. Great stuff. The melancholy bit comes when Torres recounts Brown’s production team’s description of their process: “we just do what you educators do.” Yeah, right.

Now to Mythbusters: Don’t watch guys teach you. Watch guys learn. They don’t know the answer. We’re in the journey together. Now the audience are participants. And we see not only the result but the process (which is the story).

Schools are trying to perfect routine cognitive skills, but what we need are complex cognitive skills. Learning takes place in a complex web of relationships. Schooling interferes with learning. Schooling is more like “Frogger” and learning is more like “Call of Duty.” He’s also going through the example of the learning networks that have assembled around Lost. (I need to see Lost and I’m looking forward to getting into it, but I do have a small concern that puzzles will become the gold standard for learning, the model by which we understand all aesthetic and narrative experiences. Seems a bit narrow. And having Gilligan’s Island stand in for all TV in the 1960’s is rather a straw-man argument. There are plenty of brainless shows on now as well, and some with much less charm than clumsy old Gilligan’s Island.)

Torres now plays us some excerpts from his students’ work reimagining songs from Star Wars in a mariachi mode. Very creative stuff, very funny. He observes it’s also helpful to be friends with George Lucas so he doesn’t sue you. The point is that it was important to provide the opportunity for students to demonstrate learning and mastery in multiple modes, not just in text and print. It’s important for students to find the channels for their greatest strengths to grow and produce. His student David wanted to learn; he was “desperate to learn.” The challenge is to find a way for schooling to nurture and encourage that desire, not to block it.

As I wrap up this post, I wonder if Torres’ frequent and heartfelt connections to Kathy Sierra’s presentation yesterday will help elicit and frame some of its more subtle depths. Just because someone is a dynamic speaker with a message they carry in much the same way from venue to venue doesn’t mean the person or the talk is superficial or inauthentic. If learning is self-help … or vice-versa … bring it on.

Alan Levine walks to the platform. “Hi there,” he says, confessing to his email habit, the one that’s filled our email inboxes. Then suddenly, in true CogDog fashion, he introduces the speaker and quickly takes a seat. A truly modest man, and also one who like the rest of us is delighted to have this remarkable woman here with us to open this conference.

The Kathy Sierra story. It’s a dramatic narrative that’s had its share of tragedy–but I’m not going to rehearse that here. The real Kathy Sierra story is more a romance, in the older sense of a narrative of wonders and marvels, as well as in the newer sense of a love story. In many respects, Kathy Sierra is in love with love–that is, in love with the loyalty, delight, and sheer enlargement of being that the sense of sheer mastery generates in people. The thing we want to be really good at.

Now Kathy’s asked us to discuss what we wanted to be really, really good at but never quite got there. Chris and I say “guitar.” Leslie sighed and said “oh, men” and confessed her husband had a similar wish. Obviously she married a good man. But I digress.

Kathy’s talking now about mastery generating “high-resolution experience,” exactly what I tell my film studies students they will have after they’ve learned the language of film. They report that they actually *lose* resolution on the way to that learning, which I think is true and not just whingeing. There is a loss of deep experience on the way to certain kinds of mastery. This may explain why I’m neither an astronaut nor a guitar hero.

Ah, now Kathy’s got a slide of our “legacy brain,” the brain that focuses pretty relentlessly on food, tigers, and sex. Ergo, “brain and mind are in an epic battle.”  Our legacy brain’s spam filter is just too relentless, too narrow. (Funny, this is what I was trying to persuade my students of in the New Media Studies class last spring–trying to get them beyond the undoubtedly good study habits that have blocked creative wandering and curiosity.) Can we find a way to work with our legacy brain to get cognition and affect to work together to get us to our goals?

I can’t help pointing out the John Donne connection here. T. S. Eliot wrote this about Donne: “To Donne, a thought was an experience: it modified his sensibility.” And I think the process will work in reverse.

Kathy notes that we must choose our cognitive/affect triggers carefully so we encourage relevant practice and not irrelevant personal tangents. I agree, though there’s real artistry needed here, as that legacy brain spam filter will skew “relevance” toward very narrow channels if we’re not careful.

Great point here: adopting a more conversational voice triggers the hold-up-my-end-of-the-conversation reflex in our minds. We feel we’re in a real give-and-take, not simply a one-way broadcast. Now, dear reader, a thought experiment from Gardner: to what extent is Blackboard a “conversation”? To what extent were we in search of a conversational encounter in our schooling to begin with? If we’ve gotten the LMS we deserve, can we change course and strive to deserve something better? The problem, dear Brutus, is not in our LMSs, but in us….

If you were here, I bet you’d be in a good state of “flow” right now, with Kathy’s provocative, conversational presentation making all sorts of thoughts emerge from your stimulated mind. This is great stuff: Kathy Sierra teaches us about our legacy brains while getting past them in fine style. That’s a teacherly triumph.

And now she goes one better: she makes us stand up and stand on one foot. Then she tells us “you just got smarter,” since exercise is better than any puzzle at getting our brains to work better. Guess I’ll take that walk tomorrow morning.

Here’s the “superset game”: find the larger concern and blog/tweet about that. A corollary: find the pattern and shorten the duration to Gladwell’s “10,000 hours to mastery.” A Campbell observation: helping students find the larger concerns, find the patterns, and shorten the timeline to mastery (or at least discovery) is one of the teacher’s highest callings, and one of the teacher’s most valuable contributions. I don’t know who said it, but it’s true: “I can’t teach you anything; I can just save you some time.”

Now the plot thickens: Kathy says we should always be practicing. And here’s an opportunity for creativity: how can we shape the utility infrastructure of our environments so that it’s always giving us practice situations. Kathy bought a “personal scaffold” from Home Depot and arranged her workdesk so she’s practicing saddle time and getting better at horseback riding. Ingenious–a learning environment, cannily designed. There are obvious connections with the growing emphasis on the value and importance of informal learning. Constructing opportunities for practice–but opportunities embedded in lived environments, not just practice rooms.

Circling back now to the notion that new learning involves loss. We all fear going down to the “I’m no good” level again, which is what we confront when we upgrade software or tackle any new phase of learning. There’s a slide up there right now with a face-palm and a thought-bubble that says “I’m an idiot.” Evoking this response is what we must avoid. (I have to say it: the culture of expertise in school can sometimes seem aimed at evoking that very response–and the great ironic payback is the “imposter syndrome” that dogs all our steps as we do our best to avoid feeling we’re idiots. Could we not change this game? If we stop making students feel small and submissive in those destructive ways, will we gradually grow out of our own faculty fears and nagging imposter syndromes? These are complex pathologies without easy answers, but it’s urgent to talk about them.)

Oh, here’s an interesting thought: Kathy says there are no dumb questions *and no dumb answers*. This idea aligns beautifully with what Ken Robinson says about how kids will “have a go” even if they’re not sure what they should say. (But the big pushback here comes from the sciences, and I understand the response–what to do here?)

I must disagree with Kathy at this point. She says experts don’t remember how they suffered to acquire their knowledge. I suspect the opposite is true: the memory is so vivid that it generates some of those complex school pathologies.  The focus is then on the need for suffering instead of the need for joy, for wonder. I’m certain that that’s reductive on my part, but I’m not sure it’s entirely wrong.

The grand finale: total immersion jams. Yes! Only total immersion gets to peak experience. That was a big part of the all-night Milton readathon idea. Total immersion alters consciousness–and the alteration persists. Kathy talks about the Ad Lib Game Development Society. The idea is ABC. Always Be Closing. At the end of the total immersion, you have to have the product you came in to make. The 24-hour filmmaking festivals are great examples of challenge, constraint, and ABC.  “The surest way to guarantee nothing interesting happens is to assume you know exactly how to do it.” Kathy’s not sure who said that, but she loves it. So do I. Great and painful connections here to the pathologies of the culture of expertise. Expertise matters. It sure does. But the culture of expertise cannot be founded on the assumption that expertise means exact and final knowledge–or that school is a matter of transmitting that exact and final knowledge directly into legacy brains so they can spit it back at exam time.

Many thoughts, but even more yearnings after that keynote talk. Yearnings for real school. I’m not done with that hope. And a talk like Kathy Sierra’s keeps me pretty wound up about it.

Never sure if I have the sports metaphors exactly right, but I’ll toe the rubber and try the slider.

Hmm, that sounds weirder and weirder.

I’m sitting here next to Leslie Madsen-Brooks and Chris Lott, my fellow “designated bloggers” at the New Media Consortium’s 2009 annual conference. We’ll be live-blogging the plenary events. I’m in some pretty outstanding company at this table–in the room, too, as many of my favorite thinker-practitioner-imagineers are seated within an easy hailing distance, with the intellectual ferment and freewheelingness that implies.

The introduction is going on now, mentioning collective brainpower and the sessions ahead. I feel the Muses descend upon us. Hail Terpsichore! Hail Urania! Hail Euphrosyne! (Not a muse, but stay with me.) At last, back to metaphors I understand….

Excelsior!