The Frye Institute sent me into a deep, deep mull. That’s an excellent thing though hard to manage in some respects. The preceding post came from my center and I’m reluctant to move it from the top of the blog. At the same time, it needs to take its place in the timestream if the words and the parting command and the comments from people I grew to love are to be realized. So there’s another message in a bottle, tossed from the riverbank, sent to the sea.

I hear that the sea refuses no river.

Thank you, friends at Frye. Thank you, friends at UMW. Thank you, friends from other cities and nations. Especially, thank you my family, for supporting me all this time, and for the gift of those astounding two weeks, and the gift of all the weeks and months and years ahead.

I’m back.

In the waning moments of one of the most remarkable days of my life, I set this down as a reminder of the answer I received:

I believe real school is possible.

I believe I am discovering a community, here and at home and elsewhere on this planet, that can preserve, renew, and re-imagine real school in higher education.

I believe I can help these efforts, both as myself and as part of this community.

I believe I must help. This is my vocation.

I will hope, with “a heart full of grace” and “a soul generated by love.” This too is my vocation.

Remember this.

It’s been quite a week.

We’re on break now; classes resume Monday morning. Some of us have gone home, some have had their families join them here, some are staying through the weekend and doing work or sightseeing or combinations of both. If it doesn’t get rained out, I’m going to a Braves game this afternoon with some Frye folk. This morning I hope to get some more work done on a podcasting article I’m writing.

The break allows me to begin to take stock of what I’ve learned, whom I’ve met, and the new horizons that are becoming visible. The break is also a free-form serendipity field. This morning’s breakfast, for example: I went to the dining room with an article to read, not expecting to find anyone there from Frye, or at least not the critical mass that instantly forms after each session as we proceed from a mind-bending class to refresh ourselves at the buffet. But then serendipity struck. A small group of seminarians formed quite casually. The talk began. By the time it ended about two hours later, we had covered Plato, AI, the Book of Kells, kennings, Gothic, the military and war-gaming, organizational experiences, the uses of analogy in education and understanding generally, Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass, video art, manuscripts of silver ink on purple parchment, spell-checkers across variants of English usage (specifically Australian and U.S.) and the subtly enforced convergences of orthography that can result, tablet computers, Bonnie Raitt, Fredo Viola, schools of education, mind-mapping, haptic and ergonomic considerations in hardware, software, and fountain pens, gluggy rissoto, note-taking in journals, mind-mapping both free-form and software-enabled, settling in one spot vs. moving around, conceding vs. considering, microcues in film directors and in contextual learning generally, Stanley Kubrick, the Zone of Proximal Development, IT Conversations, prisoner dilemmas, the way medieval monks would describe good light by saying one could see to crack lice even at midnight, first contact stories, human beings considered as a species, cats and curiosity, cats that are more like dogs than cats (including a Burmese that would play fetch), leaded glass eggs and the trouble they cause going through airport security, rearranging furniture, tolerant spouses, karaoke, low-tech tech, OS X, and I’m positive I’ve left a great deal out.

All that and a Belgian waffle too. A good morning and a fine example of what Bruner calls consciousness-raising about the possibilities of communal mental activity. Part of me wishes I could record these moments more fully, in words or video or audio. Part of me understands that I myself will be the record of the moment, in the sense that these interactions are writing (or revising) parts of me into being, and in very interesting ways. I suppose I am the notes I’m taking. That’s one way to think about real school.

My blogging (not to mention my podcasts) is likely to be irregular over the next two weeks as I attend the Frye Leadership Institute in Atlanta, Georgia. By “irregular” I mean, of course, in terms of schedule, not in terms of my famously loose editorial control, which is “regular then most, when most irregular it seems,” to crib without scruple from John Milton.

I have a wonky wireless connection in my otherwise most comfortable room, but here’s a photo anyway of the lovely oaken view from my big window. The view might elicit some chiding. I’m hoping it also elicits some inspiration.

Donne fully indulges his love of paradox in this poem. At his best, though, Donne lights on a paradox he seems to have invented, but in reality has only discovered. Listen carefully to this poem, several times, and if my reading holds up you’ll gradually become aware that a fundamental question of identity, commitment, and fidelity underlies Donne’s verbal gymnastics. This one sneaks up on you: “Lovers’ Infiniteness,” by John Donne.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (3.3MB)

Congratulations to Pedablogy guru Steve Greenlaw, whose book Doing Economics will be published soon by Houghton Mifflin. I saw Steve’s advance copy at lunch today and it’s a winner. Steve’s systematic, thoughtful advice on crafting effective research in economics will be useful in many disciplines. There’s a placeholder at Amazon with more information coming soon.

Go Steve!

Today NITLE, tomorrow the world.

Actually, already the world.

The Secret Society for Real School salutes you. Congratulations!

OneNote has fallen off my screen for awhile, but a recent set of links led me to Chris Pratley’s OneNote Weblog and to this extremely interesting blog entry on “Shared Sessions.” Fascinating stuff.

Time to dive back in.

I love the Internet, but only because beings from my species (go team!) are always leaving items of wonder and interest lying about.

A link from a nifty entry in Andy’s text blog led me to the amazing and very beautiful “Sad Song” video, which led me to the amazing and very beautiful website crafted by the “Sad Song” artist and musician Fredo Viola. See the video, marvel at the information on the making of the video, browse the site, admire Fredo’s list of faves: “Shostakovich, Britten, Bartok, Harry Nilsson, Stravinsky, Schnittke, BOC, Belle & Sebastian and Bach!”

Extraordinary. Thanks, Andy. Thanks, Fredo.

Here’s the idea. Comments are not only welcome but coveted.

The sequence of learn one, do one, teach one is well known. The process seeks to shorten the path between study, practice, and understanding, if understanding is demonstrated at least in part by the ability to master an explanation and customize it (and a demonstration) to address new learners in an unpredictable learning situation. The process also propagates learning very rapidly, as each teacher helps to build many more teachers.

I’m thinking that learn one, do one, teach one describes not only three steps in a process, or even three modes of learning, but one high-level activity in which each mode or step must be present at every other step. The activity is characterized by attention and articulation (these concepts may also be distinct but not separate). The steps are distinguished by the relative proportion of attention and articulation vectors: what things am I attending to, and in what mixture? what is the nature of my articulation, and what is my audience?

Learning involves a proportionally more intense vector of other-directed attention, but at the same time the learner’s attention must be self-directed enough to engage in an ongoing re-articulation that responds to the teacher. The learner must “follow along,” and that involves at least in part a kind of auto-hypnosis that makes the lesson appear to be created by the attending self.

Doing involves a proportionally more intense vector of self-directed attention, along with an ongoing self-directed articulation that serves as a feedback loop monitoring progress toward the goal. At the same time, the doer’s attention must be other-directed enough to make that feedback loop truly critical and useful. That is, the doer must be ruthless in his or her self-critique, making the I into an other.

Teaching involves a proportionally more intense vector of other-directed attention in which the work is narrated. This narration also bootstraps the process into metacognitive areas in which students witness the teacher engaging his or her own zone of proximal development (acting as one’s own coach) and thus can learn how to access their own ZPDs themselves. This phase involves the most dynamic cognitive apprenticeship, on the part of teacher and learner.

All of that said, each of the steps must include some measure of the other to be effective. The learner must engage in a kind of self-education and re-articulation for the experience to be active and useful instead of passive and illusory. The doer, however much flow and automaticity he or she enjoys in the work, must have a feedback loop in there somewhere, and that loop is made out of attention vectors that are not obviously part of the doing. The teacher must have elements of self-directed learning and doing that are active during the other-directed articulation and narration.

If I haven’t vexed him beyond his patience, Bakhtin is hovering here somewhere.