I don’t think I’ll ever need to eat again.

But I should really speak to the NLII annual meeting, and not just to the New Orleans milieu, although, well, whew, what a town. Appetite city.

As wonderful as the food has been, though, the intellectual feast has already topped it. The session on Croquet yesterday morning left me rubbing my eyes in near-disbelief as I witnessed a demonstration of a 3D recursive meta-environment in which people, places, and things can be placed in rich contexts that are themselves meaningful creations, often collaborative creations. I saw a landscape in which one could carry around a 3D “snapshot” of a space that was dynamically updated even as one carried it around. In short, I saw a model of individual cognition externalized, cognition networked with other minds in a social context that was compelling, fun, piquant, and a little mysterious. Imagine a Magritte painting that first becomes “real,” and then becomes a prompt that asks students to reconceive their own conceptual work in a course–together. It’s very difficult to explain, but once you see it in action, impossible to forget. I’ll never be satisfied with the desktop metaphor for computing again.

I do believe that Croquet is a way to bootstrap the Secret Society for Real School into the next key stage of its development. The first stage, an increasing dissatisfaction with a status quo in which education scales by means of an industrial model, is already upon us. That stage will end, I think, with some kind of popular revolt in which traditional schooling (traditional in the sense of what we’ve had for the last 100 years, not in the sense of, say, the Platonic Academy) will face crippling competition with other more compelling and convenient providers. I hope before we get to the end of that stage that the social and expertise contexts of real school will be freed from deadening 50-75 minute periods to explore its real potential as an ongoing conference devoted to, as Jerome Bruner put it, raising consciousness about the possibilities of communal mental experience. Subject areas, specific knowledge, even quizzes will still be part of the experience. But as with a good conference, the narrative that threads through the individual courses will continually inspire fresh perspectives–and a powerful sense of shared mission. A sense, finally, of occasion. Which brings Croquet back into the picture: the sense of occasion provided by that 3d object-oriented landscape, both dreamy and a little edgy, makes explicit the mental landscape we want our students to inhabit and, at last, build with us.

Now for two New Orleans soundscapes. One is part of a walk down Bourbon Street I took yesterday afternoon. The other is part of the opening reception of the annual meeting. (These were “stealth” recordings I made with my Sony Clie’s voice-recording feature, so the quality is listenable but rough.) T. S. Eliot said the poet is always amalgamating new wholes: he or she smells cooking, and reads Spinoza, and finds or creates the connection. Here’s a chance for you to create some poetry of your own.

I’m in New Orleans for the annual meeting of the National Learning Infrastructure Initiative. This travel day has been odd and more than a little nerve-wracking, with a surprise ending. Snow threatened to cancel the travel–a flight out of Dulles at 4:45 p.m. just when the snow was predicted to be coming down at 2 inches per hour–but suddenly the snow stopped, visibility improved pretty dramatically, and the flight left and arrived on time.

Then the cab driver took me to the wrong Holiday Inn in the French Quarter. Fully luggage laden, I walked four blocks, one of them across Bourbon St., to get to the right Holiday Inn, the “Chateau Le Moyne.” There I learned that they had run out of rooms, so they had to upgrade me to a suite.

I figured it would be a double room with some nice furnishings. It’s not. It’s a suite. The ceilings are at least ten or eleven feet high. There’s a huge sitting room, a huge bedroom, a little pre-bath closet area, and an undistinguished bathroom. The bathroom is a relief, actually, since the rest of the decor, though undeniably sumptuous, makes me feel I’m cheating if I don’t expire of absinthe poisoning on the bed. Were this to occur, I would already be lying in state, I assure you.

I’m here only one night, then over to the conference hotel, where the accommodations will be dismal after this exotica. That’s eXotica. The other was outside my window shortly after I got here: the Krewe du Vieux, q.v. Welcome to the Big Easy.

How will they keep me on the farm after this?

EDIT: One small but vital clarification–this suite cost the same as a standard room. The hotel gave it to me as a free “upgrade” because they had run out of other rooms by the time I arrived and checked in. That’s the first time that’s ever happened to me, but apparently it’s not uncommon.

Sometimes students think literature written during the English Renaissance was written in “old English,” a natural mistake for beginners given the sometimes daunting difficulties of making sense of the language. In fact, Renaissance English is early modern English. Our contemporary English is much more like Shakespeare’s English than Shakespeare’s English is like Chaucer’s, and way closer than Shakespeare is to, say, Beowulf. But that’s not much comfort to a student struggling with unfamiliar idioms, odd-looking syntax, unexpected and often loose punctuation, and our old friend irregular orthography.

I tell my students that even scholars read the glosses in the notes, but my students still get that panicky look when they have to confront Milton’s prose, or almost anything in poetry. The only thing that reliably helps get them over that first “augh,” as they say in Peanuts, is to hear me read the passage aloud. I like to think I read pretty well–all professors like to think that, and who can blame them?–but I think the real key is reading aloud with comprehension. Which raises a paradox: if the students don’t understand the work, how are they helped by the fact I do? How can they even tell that I do? Why is my reading the passage aloud sometimes (not always) worth an hour of patient work on choosing interpretive strategies, mining the Oxford English Dictionary, and teasing the meaning out themselves in a close reading?

There’s something about the explaining voice, the voice that performs understanding, that doesn’t just convey information or narrate hermeneutics, but shapes out of a shared atmosphere an intimate drama of cognitive action in time. I’m reminded of Longinus on the sublime: for an instant, we believe that we have created what we have only heard. When we hear someone read with understanding, we participate in that understanding, almost as if the voice is enacting our own comprehension. We hear the shape of the emerging meaning, and intuit the mind that experiences that meaning even as it expresses it, and it’s all ours.

So this one’s going out to all you Miltonauts out there. You’ve heard L’Allegro on Podcast 1. Now here’s the other side. Contest or complement or lingering self-temptation? Let’s talk. (Special prize to those who catch my mistakes in what follows.)

Il Penseroso, by John Milton.

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It looked like an article on military failure in Iraq, and I didn’t have the heart for it, so I went right past it the first time. But Bryan Alexander’s blog persuaded me to take a look. I found I was wrong. (Excellent demonstration of the usefulness of critics and commentators.) The article is just what Bryan says it is. I look forward to his extended treatment, because the article’s riches are so many and so diverse–and almost all of them about education.

The thought of hanging on the morrow concentrates the mind wonderfully, wrote Johnson. Obviously, combat supplies plenty of motivation for that mental concentration. So moved, the soldiers make their school out of themselves, shared on a virtual front porch, outside the dulling standardization of official training, but not outside wisdom, thoughtfulness, and the need to synthesize varying advice, experience, and knowledge into judgment when there’s no time for anything but a realist epistemology–“thus, thus I refute thee,” as the tracers whistle overhead–and a Platonic faith in the value of community.

An extraordinary article. Every teacher and school administrator should read it. Thanks to Bryan for blogging on it.

Brian Lamb may have found an eportfolio system (or paradigm?) he can love, one as fast, cheap, and out of control as its creator. I’ve been reading a lot lately about blogs as front ends for eportfolios, and my first response to the “blogfolio” is that it feels right.

Next stop, perusal.

Monya Baker at Technology Review has an interesting article on three significant IT developments: algorithms that detect alterations in digitized images, 3-D virtual reality displays that don’t require glasses and that have objects one can “grab,” and new statistical methods for making “sensor motes” more effective.

An interview with Anthony LaMarca in CPU Magazine, well worth reading and a blog in its own right (alas, you’ll just get a teaser excerpt unless you subscribe to the magazine), led me to what is obviously a founding document of cyberthink, Mark Weiser’s 1991 Scientific American essay on “The Computer for the 21st Century.” Weiser’s essay envisions “a world in which computer interaction casually enhances every room,” one in which computers don’t take us out of reality into a computer-generated space (virtual reality) but augment the spaces we physically inhabit by deploying hundreds of computers–many of them tiny and tailored to specific tasks, and all of them connected via high-speed networks both wired and wireless–into the places we move through during our lives. Weiser terms this vision “embodied virtuality.” The computers don’t take us into their world, but enter ours. For Weiser, the goal is invisibility: “The most profound technologies are those that disappear. They weave themselves into the fabric of everyday life until they are indistinguishable from it.”

I’m fascinated by this essay, especially by the futurist scenario that begins with “Sal’s” clock-radio asking if she wants coffee and then takes her and us into an office enhanced by everything from time-zone customization (a window view that can be “set”) to collaborative editing with a colleague who’s sharing a virtual office with her. Weiser’s vision and argument are compelling.

Yet the English professor in me wants to argue back, especially because Weiser’s exhibit “A” of a successful, ubiquitous, invisible technology is writing. I agree that writing is a successful, ubiquitous, invisible technology, but I’ve spent a large part of my adult life trying, sometimes desperately, to make writing a visible technology for my students. (I do the same thing with the movies in my film studies classes.) I do this, of course, because I want to help them become more deliberate, reflective, and effective writers: not just consumers of verbally-delivered information, but thoughtful creators who can not only enter into dense, long-term conversations but decisively intervene in those conversations. Otherwise, it seems to me, their capacity for agency is stunted. Or to put it plainly, they’re less free. (“No easy way to be free,” as Pete Townshend observed.)

My efforts make my students unhappy at first. (Truth to tell, a few remain unhappy, but that may be my fault, not theirs.) When the technology of writing becomes visible to them, they write more slowly, and for a time many of them write less well. The process is no less maddening than if I had asked them to pay scrupulous attention to their breathing. And yet I am convinced that if writing does not become a visible technology for my students, their potential freedom is compromised.

Is there an analogy with computers? Does computing deserve to be as visible, as reflected upon as writing? There’s a continuum here, I think. Not all writing needs to be visible. I don’t need to be deeply reflective about every sentence in a short business email, or about the instructions I read on how to put together knock-down O’Sullivan “furniture.” But some writing needs to be visible, and I have to know how to make it visible to myself, and how to craft writing that not only conveys information but stimulates thinking, for me and my readers as well. Similarly, I think there are times when computing should be boldly visible, when the task should include not only the work and the outcome but also deep reflection about the tools used on the way.

Weiser’s essay ends on a seductively idyllic note:

Most important, ubiquitous computers will help overcome the problem of information overload. There is more information available at our fingertips during a walk in the woods than in any computer system, yet people find a walk among trees relaxing and computers frustrating. Machines that fit the human environment, instead of forcing humans to enter theirs, will make using a computer as refreshing as taking a walk in the woods.

Sometimes that walk should cleanse the mind. Sometimes that walk should focus the mind. Sometimes that walk should be hyper-visible and stimulate the mind in all her powers to acts of creation, preservation, and deep reflection.

We must learn to awaken and keep ourselves awake, not by mechanical aids, but by an infinite expectation of the dawn, which does not forsake us in our soundest sleep. I know of no more encouraging fact than the unquestionable ability of man to elevate his life by a conscious endeavor. It is something to be able to paint a particular picture, or to carve a statue, and so to make a few objects beautiful; but it is far more glorious to carve and paint the very atmosphere and medium through which we look, which morally we can do. To affect the quality of the day, that is the highest of arts. Every man is tasked to make his life, even in its details, worthy of the contemplation of his most elevated and critical hour.

Thoreau advocates visibility, even for “the very atmosphere and medium through which we look.” In many respects, Walden heroically attempts to drag ubiquity and invisibility into the strong light of moral awareness.

This is a vexing and stimulating dilemma for me.

After reading Bryan Alexander’s blog on dental horrors and Poe’s uber-creepy story “Berenice,”
I was seized by the imp of the perverse and decided to do something really out there for my third podcast. That’s why I’ve read section 11 from Part 2 of Sir Thomas Browne’s Religio Medici (“The Religion of a Physician”). This book, written in the 1630s and first published in an authorized edition in 1643, is one of my favorites. Strange, long sentences roll by, stuffed with allusions and paradoxes and circular singularities but ending more often than not with either a joke or a moment of poetic wonder. The book was intended as a private amusement, Browne tells us, and circulated among some friends, but in 1642 it appeared as a bootleg. (Sound familiar?) The authorized edition appeared the next year, with Browne’s corrections.

In the introductory letter to the reader, Browne warns us that his musings in this book are “the sense of my conceptions at the time, not an immutable law unto my advancing judgment at all times,” and further cautions us that “there are many things to be taken in a soft and flexible sense, and not to be called unto the rigid test of reason.” Something like a song, or a poem, or even a soft and flexible blog?

The passage I read stands on its own pretty well and needs fewer footnotes than some of the other sections. It has some good jokes. It has some sublimity. I’m not sure I made enough sense of it in my reading, but I am sure that no one writes like Browne, even though some of us are content to try and fail.

“But why fly in the face of facts? Few people love the writings of Sir Thomas Browne, but those who do are of the salt of the Earth.” Virginia Woolf

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Ernie at Webliminal blogged Monday about the Pew report released this week. The document is essential reading, I think, but the Predictions Database at Elon University is the real cabinet of wonders: a beautifully arranged database that not only maps the development of thought concerning networked computing but does it in a way that can’t help being inspiring and provocative. Think of it as a facebook for Internet intellectuals. I add my congratulations on the great work Janna Quitney Anderson, assistant professor of communications, and students in Elon’s School of Communications have done on this project. I’ll be looking forward to Professor Anderson’s forthcoming Imagining the Internet, a book based on the the Predictions project.

You’ll find a bunch of interesting pull quotes from the Pew Report in Ernie’s blog. Here are a couple of my own favorites from the Report:

“The next decade should see the development of a more thoughtful internet. We’ve had the blood rush to the head, we’ve had the hangover from that blood rush; this next decade is the rethink” (Rose Vines. technology journalist).

Unpleasant surprises: The experts are startled that educational institutions have changed so little, despite widespread expectation a decade ago that schools would be quick to embrace change.

Startled indeed. Along those lines, it’s worth quoting some of Part 8 of the Pew Report, on “Formal Education”:

Prediction: Enabled by information technologies, the pace of learning in the next decade will increasingly be set by student choices. In ten years,
most students will spend at least part of their “school days” in virtual classes, grouped online with others who share their interests, mastery, and skills….

Many of the respondents who have had experience with teaching online said only highly motivated, mature students exhibit the ability to be successful in a learning environment in which so much responsibility is placed upon a student. Moira K. Gunn, host of public broadcasting’s Tech Nation, wrote, “I do not now, and have never, witnessed successful benefits in virtual classrooms. While the role of the teacher will change from authority figure with all the information to one-on-one educational coach, the one-teacher-one-student paradigm will remain the most effective.” Indeed, children in elementary school “still need a watchful eye and human attention,” according to one expert.

I’m not quite so pessimistic as Gunn, but I agree wholeheartedly that there’s no substitute for an attentive teacher in close contact with a student, which is why I think the idea of scalability in online learning needs careful consideration. Gains in “productivity” with commodified forms of online learning are in my view chimerical. A cognitive apprenticeship is much more than delivery and mastery of content, though they are important. Real school can’t happen unless one mind is inspired by the workings of another mind as it observes that working in process. There’s nothing like having an expert think aloud when you and the expert are in real-space together and all the channels of communication are open and ready. We need to work together to ensure that benefit is available to all citizens, not just to those who can afford it.

I’m still mulling over the idea of “student-centered learning.” At this point, I’m thinking student-centered learning is not so much about student choices as it is about genuine dialogue in which both student and teacher are invited to learn from their mutual thinking aloud. Information technologies can broaden and amplify the opportunities for mutual thinking aloud by giving us richer access to multiple modes of shared cognition. I guess.

In the spring of 1990 my wife and I were childless and living in Richmond, Virginia. I was a little over halfway through writing my dissertation. I craved a diversion. The warming weather brought just the escape I needed: XL-102, the local FM rock station, sponsored a contest called “A Song For Richmond.” The idea was that listeners would write and record songs featuring Richmond, and then enter those songs in this contest. The prizes were modest but attractive. There was an initial airing of your song if the DJs, Jeff and Jeff, thought it was good enough to play on the radio, a second airing with an on-air interview if you made the finals, and a third airing if you were one of the twenty-four winners who made it onto the official “Songs for Richmond” tape (all proceeds to support Oasis House).

After years of fooling around with my home studio, I decided to put down the diss for a bit, write and record a song, and try my luck in the contest. So I retreated to a back bedroom (it would be the baby’s room less than six months later), set up the equipment, and began to put the tracks together.

This is the result. It’s the first airing, edited to cut out some of the patter, and it includes all the lovely smooshing and pumping that the radio station’s compressor contributed to the sound. The extra compression hides a multitude of sins in the recording and (cough) performance, though I’m sure the ones that remain will be clearly audible (and, I hope, forgiveable).

I did okay in the contest. There were 350 entries and I came in 18th, so I’m on the final tape. Along the way they played my song three times on the radio. (Maybe that used up all my fifteen minutes.) This was the last time I really did anything with that recording rig, the last time I wrote a song–now, a song from the attic.

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