I’ve got a special volunteer teaching assignment tonight, an Honors Program event called “Colloquium” in which students enroll in a series of evening seminars, five all told, each led by a different professor, and each of them centered on a particular book or set of readings. This one’s my first (the second of the term for the students), so of course I decided on something a bit over-ambitious and assigned a long, rambling, urgent, personal, repetitive, provocative book called The Black Swan. It’s exhilarating stuff but who knows what the students will make of it. I’m not sure what I make of it all.

Actually, I think I’ve just described the makings of a potentially great discussion. But I digress….

I’m going through the book a second time in preparation for the seminar. As any teacher can tell you, reading a book with an eye to teaching it is a much deeper and more fraught experience than simply reading it. I guess the simplest way to say it is that I find I have to have at least three voices in my head as I go along: the author’s, my own, and the student voice I anticipate moment to moment as I think about how the discussion might–and sometimes I hope will–go. That’s an impressive number of voices in my head, one channel past stereo. Cognitive surround sound. Immersive, yes, and busy.

Then I’ll hit a statement like this one and suddenly the entire metaframe begins to glow: Taleb’s writing, my reading, my imagined colloquy, even the way I anticipate the room will look and feel:

Assuming there is something desirable in being an average man, he must have an unspecified specialty in which he would be more gifted than other people–he cannot be average in everything.A pianist would be better on average at playing the piano, but worse than the norm at, say, horseback riding. A draftsman would have better drafting skills, and so on. The notion of  a man deemed average is different from that of a man who is average in everything he does…. Quetelet completely missed that point. (242)

Taleb’s words resonate for me through many chords and along many soundboards. I think of David Berliner’s tremendous call-to-arms here at Baylor just a couple of weeks ago as he presented the research he and Susan Nichols have done on the damage caused by the current fashion for high-stakes testing, work recently published in Collateral Damage: How High-Stakes Testing Corrupts America’s Schools. Among the many tragic and nonsensical outcomes of this drill-and-kill approach  (many predicted with great accuracy for over thirty years by “Campbell’s Law,” one of the most astounding things I learned at Berliner’s talk) is a monomaniacal focus on the “bubble,” that is, the students who are just below passing and are brought up to just over passing by these tests. These success stories are touted by many advocates of these programs, none of whom seem to know about “Campbell’s Law,” and none of whom seem to have thought hard about what definition of “success” is content with getting students from just-under-mediocre to just-above-mediocre, if in fact the tests and the passing have even that much meaning. And then I think of the truly mournful set of comments on Cole Camplese’s justifiably outraged post about Pennsylvania’s “adequate progress” awards. 

I can’t stop dreaming of the day we educators turn the paradigm around. What if we had an education focused on the above-average in everyone, the place of the inner outlier? What if education, inescapably difficult and dispiriting in the parts that don’t come naturally, had as its clear and beckoning aim the hard work of setting up empowering contexts for each person’s excellence to attain its true force and maturity? We say words to this effect at the inspirational moments, at the great matriculation and graduation gatherings. What of the in-betweens? What of the walk we walk–or not?

Instead, we continue to generate models of “assessment” that consume themselves in a feast of invalidity. We generate models of education that boast of adequacy. We go for bell curves and standard deviations, not outliers and positive deviation. We push out the underperforming, ignore the top achievers, and do no justice to the inner outliers in every student, no matter what his or her general aptitude.

And we say we’ve done something worth doing.

Baylor University welcomed to its campus yesterday the CogDog himself, Alan Levine,  for conversation, tours, and an afternoon presentation titled “NMC 101, An Introduction to the New Media Consortium.” Baylor joined the New Media Consortium last fall, and yesterday Alan gave us a great overview of what the NMC offers. We learned how Baylor can not only participate in the work but be a vital contributor to it as well. Folks in the audience included deans, department chairs, faculty from Environmental Studies, English, Business, Social Work, Film & Digital Media, and other departments I’ve no doubt overlooked, There were grad students, as well as staff from IT and the Baylor Libraries, including many of my colleagues from the Electronic Library (which co-sponsored the event along with the Academy for Teaching and Learning). It was a great mix of people and a good turn-out for a Friday afternoon.

Alan’s presentation was comprehensive and engaging as always. We even got into Second Life for a bit, and talked with some folks who’d answered Alan’s call for help with a live demo. By the time the event ended, there was food for thought for many mental meals to come. There was also a sense in the room that our horizons had been expanded, with excellent opportunities awaiting for individual work and for fruitful collaboration.

 But was there ever a bonus round …

That bonus round was just having Alan here on the campus. We toured current digitization projects in the Baylor libraries. We toured computer labs, a neuroscience lab, and other sites where creativity and information technologies were melding in interesting and productive ways. (I learned a ton myself, seeing it all afresh through Alan’s eyes.) And during every moment, I could see Alan catalyzing conversation, putting people at their ease, showing genuine interest and a playful sense of expectancy in each encounter. I know it’ll embarrass Alan for me to say this, but I’ve got to do it: he’s got a tremendous gift (I’d call it both playful and soulful) for bringing out the best and happiest qualities in people. I listened carefully to the way Alan asked questions, to the way he made people feel good about their work and excited by the possibilities ahead. I could feel both energy and openness increase in every room.

I’m certainly feeling that way myself, and I’m also feeling very grateful to Alan for spending some time with us. 

When I think of the amazing people I’ve met over the last six years, I’m humbled. These are the people who’re heeding Doug Engelbart’s call to change the world. This is the caravan I want to be part of.

Blogging once a month isn’t exactly the frequency I want or imagine. I’ll try to step things up a bit. I’ve no lack of things to mull over here–perhaps the superflux is the problem–but the real answer, for me anyway, is just to do it.

So here’s today’s “just do it.”

January was an exceptionally full month for me, beginning with the trek back from Virginia, continuing with presentations at the University of Delaware, at Wheaton College (for NITLE) and two presentations at the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative annual meeting, and concluding with a big push to get some more programs (and a website–stay tuned) launched for the Academy for Teaching and Learning at Baylor. (Video from the Delaware presentation is online at the link above; podcasts are on the way for the other three presentations–again, stay tuned.) I’ve also begun teaching at Baylor: a first year seminar that continues my work in New Media Studies (course front-page blog here). Four intrepid souls who don’t know me from Adam signed up for the journey. It’s great to hear “Dr. C.” again–I always feel energized when I hear that call.

As I’ve carried on my work this month, I’ve returned again and again to the role of computers in learning. It’s not all I think about, but it’s a topic that grabbed me decades ago and never turned loose. I keep trying to understand not only the subject itself, but the sources of my own fascination. The presentation at Delaware was perhaps my fullest effort to date to get at the vexed question of what a computer is, or rather, what it symbolizes. The Delaware visit drew heavily from my experience late last year, when I was (and remain) captivated by the discussion at the Program for the Future, where I got to shake Doug Engelbart’s hand and tell him “thank you,” and where I saw visionary after visionary wrestle with their own fascinations and attempts at understanding.I saw yet again how passionate these visionaries are, not because they’re techno-utopians, but because they recognize the exhilarating, liberating potential of computers to represent ourselves and our world back to us in a way that will allow us to access the traces of our own engagement, to think about ourselves with both commitment and critical detachment. Most of all, these computers represent our own powers of representation, our endless curiosities, our troubling and hopeful attempts at communication and community. They are truly protean, as Seymour Papert observes in the wonderful collection Falling for Science: Objects in Mind. (Alice over at “Just Musing” blogs wonderfully about that book. It’s a magic book and I recommend it to everyone I talk to these days–but that’s another blog post from me.)

Protean. Yes, and in their protean nature, computers are proto-objects, meta-objects, emergence engines: not because they are intelligent, but because they are complex symbols of intelligence, of investigation, of making, of knowing. And when they are networked, either locally or via the Internet, they are communications devices that fold meta-layer after meta-layer onto our awareness of the very processes of communication, of “lending our minds out,” as the poet Robert Browning’s Fra Lippo Lippi says of art.

Why then are computers still used in education as document manipulation devices on steroids? They can be used for that, yes, of course they can. And often those uses are quite valuable. But that model only scratches the surface of their potential. Worse yet, that model diverts our attention, our resources, and our risky investigations away from the uses that most closely align with what we say we want for education: intellectual maturity; deeply considered interaction in words, images, sounds; innovation; invention; the joy of our communal mental processes; strategic leadership in a world that lives from one rushed tactic to another; a “capability infrastructure,” to use Doug Engelbart’s words.

As I taught J. C. R. Licklider’s foundational essay “Man-Computer Symbiosis” last week, it occurred to me that Licklider set us on the right course and the wrong course simultaneously. “Symbiosis” is right. His description of human cognition is pretty robust as well. But here’s his description of “computer,” one that is accurate for the time, perhaps, but not at all the generative paradigm he hoped for:

“It may be appropriate to acknowledge, at this point, that we are using the term ‘computer’ to cover a wide class of calculating, data-processing, and information-storage-and-retrieval machines. The capabilities of machines in this class are increasing almost daily. It is therefore hazardous to make general statements about capabilities of the class.”

The problem here, as I see it, is not Licklider’s confidence that the calculating, data-processing, and information-storage-and-retrieval machines will become ever more capable. History has certainly borne that confidence out. The problem is that Licklider’s classification downplays the role of computers as representation- or symbol-making devices, and ignores altogether the role of computers as a communications medium. The two deficits in his argument are closely related, and I’d say that the two deficits still characterize most of the way we think about computers. Yet if we think about symbols, representations, and the shared symbol-making, symbol-exchanging activities we call “communication” (and directed internally, “thought”), we open up a much richer, more complex, and more catalytic universe to explore.

This is where Engelbart diverges most profoundly from Licklider, I think. Engelbart understood that concepts are symbols, and also frameworks for those symbols. He envisioned computers as enabling more complex symbol-making and symbol-sharing. Engelbart maintains to this day that we will become more effective problem-solvers if we become more effective symbol-makers. I agree, though I’m not at all sure that the most powerful symbols emerge from hierarchical models of meaning and meaning-making. (Actually, I’m pretty sure they don’t.)

What’s most fascinating for me remains the ways in which computers allow us not only to make and share more powerful, complex, rich, and resonant symbols, but the ways in which the making and sharing become themselves the ghostly outline, visible most brightly when we like astronomers use our more-sensitive peripheral vision, of the consciousness and community we build together. That’s what I keep trying to get at, how humanity writes the poetry of its life into being, together. Now the question of whether we’re writing doggerel or an epic poem is another question altogether. Computers can augment our drivel as well as our most noble articulations. They’re a medium, not a silver bullet, panacea, or Miracle-Gro. But what’s important is the way they reveal yet another level, a proto-level and a macro-level, of what’s hidden in plain sight: our essential collaboration emerging from our lives together. You can see this in a library, in a gym, at a good meeting (they do happen), in a church or synagogue or mosque, in a fire-dance, even in a grocery store. What computers do is reveal the universes within a universe, the nested infinities, in the most complexly and dynamically symbolic medium we have yet invented (outside of poetry, that is).

And so back to education. Are our students not universes within a universe? Are our faculty and staff not likewise? Are we not a university? If so, why all the talk of management? Why not more talk of exploration, of representation, of communal mental activity, of the exciting and taxing co-labors of symbol-making and symbol-sharing? That’s the test of life, as Michael Wesch has poignantly observed. (By the way, I firmly believe we need to include “poignance” as an essential analytical and expressive skill, particularly for scholars.)  That’s what we all need to know for that test. Insofar as computers can represent those universes and help those universes map and travel through and share the universe they all inhabit, they are extraordinary proto- and meta-objects. Insofar as computers reinscribe the clerical only, allowing us to store and retrieve managed, measured, and boxed-in lives and days, they are of limited worth, and potentially quite dangerous as they empower our most impoverished imaginations, our most stubborn wrongheadedness.

In the meantime, I hope it’s not another month before I arm-wrestle myself in this space, and I am most grateful to those who’ve invited me to explore these issues with them in their own communities. I always learn a ton and leave with many more ideas than I came with. Sometimes I even leave with way-cool swag!

It seems like only yesterday we were all partying like it was 1999. Now it’s 2009 and there’s not much left but hangovers.

Yet I must in all candor report that I learned a ton in 2008, and not all of it was via cautionary tales, either. In fact, a lot of what I learned was serendipitous, arriving like unexpected good news, sometimes even like winning the lottery. When that learning occurred, it was, as Frankie sings, a very good year.

Case in point: in early November I presented on my favorite podcast, the BBC’s “In Our Time,” for a New Media Consortium online symposium called “Rock The Academy: Radical Teaching, Unbounded Learning.” I’d long wanted to do a presentation on this podcast. When I learned that the NMC symposium would take place in Second Life, I found the opportunity irresistible and just had to submit a proposal. Presenting on an intellectual history program by the venerable Auntie BBC that was delivered to me by the new media channel of the podcast and then made the topic of a talk inside a virtual world–well, the ironies, paradoxes, and juxtaposability of it all were mighty alluring. When I got the good news that my proposal had been accepted, I was elated and honored to be on the program. Just look at the range and ambition of my fellow presenters, culminating with Jim Groom and flamethrowers at the finale. Need I say more?

The experience was every bit what I had hoped for. The audience was great, the interaction was truly stimulating (and preserved in a chat), and NMC were amazing hosts. Among the splendors, though, two particular moments stand out. The first was when Alan Levine walked me through the Cooper Coliseum during a preparatory conversation. As we walked along and tried out the voice chat, Alan (or his avatar, or both?) turned to me and said, “We can make you props if you want them.” Ah. Props for a conference presentation. Suddenly it was clear to me that the very notion of argument in a virtual world was infinitely extensible, infinitely mediatable (if that’s even a word), and that the props NMC would make for me–a table, four chairs, four microphones, and a set of monuments with the titles of “In Our Time” episodes over the years–could serve as drama, as conceptual aids, as prompts for audience participation. 3D Concept PowerPoint. It’s difficult to explain the affective side of this sudden clarity, but the feeling that came over me was very powerful. I felt a little like Orpheus, or a real magician, able to make thoughts into objects and objects into thoughts. You might think that virtual objects would not cause such a feeling. But I tell you, walking around the set that day, giving my presentation and seeing the scale of my avatar against the props, felt like breathing mountain air. I could see my ideas, and I knew others could as well. And in that knowledge, I saw more of what I was thinking than I had before. Just as I (and most writers) discover what I want to say in the process of trying to say it, I could see much more clearly what I was thinking while speaking and walking through the realizations of my thoughts. I think you can hear some of my wonder in the video recording of the presentation. Truly, it was a lucid dream–and more, as I’ll try to explain below.

The second experience was even more powerful. Toward the end of the presentation (it may even have been in the Q&A), I was trying to articulate something about the way I had come upon the idea of “In Our Time” as both an example and an allegory of deep learning. I kept returning to the idea of a meta-layer of understanding, one in which the very topic of understanding itself becomes part of a complex experience of deep and satisfying learning. As usual, I found this idea, one that I keep returning to over and over, very difficult to articulate. I typically end up mouthing things that seem like tautologies, or sometimes like nonsense. I’m groping toward my own version of Derrida’s “exorbitant,” I think, but I’m not entirely sure even of that. Growing frustrated by my halting attempts, I reached for the analogy of altitude, the metaphor of going “up” a level and seeing things from an elevated perspective. Up, to where the over-all, the big picture, reveals itself in a new way. As I tried to get these ideas to form themselves into words, I impulsively hit “F” on my keyboard, the action that causes a Second Life avatar to spring into the air and hover, preparing to fly. That was the loose association: strategic view, gestalt, up a level, bigger picture, hit “F” for fly. I don’t remember analyzing the train of thought. I just remember going for the key. When I did, of course, my avatar sprang into the air and hovered there, giving my audience a dramatic (perhaps over-dramatic) portrayal of the kind of thing I was talking about. But here’s where things got *really* interesting. In that moment of dramatization, my own point of view changed. My avatar went up, and so my attached viewpoint went up as well, and what I saw on my screen as a result was a precise and startling instance of the very thing I was trying to articulate. In short, I had an idea, and words weren’t conveying it as well as I wanted, and the action my finger took before my conscious mind was aware of the motion was a revelation to me that gave me even more insight into the insight I was struggling to communicate.

Insight into the insight. Does that make sense? Can that make sense? It seems to me to be at the heart of what we want to encourage in education. Insight into the insight means we can prepare ourselves for the next revelation, and perhaps even construct for ourselves an environment and a set of strategies that will make it more likely such insights will emerge. Insight into the insight means we can understand our own powers of understanding–quirky, indirect, intuitive, labored, instant, unpredictable, whatever–and thus find our own strategies of augmentation and self-evaluation. Insight into the insight releases a beautiful fractal structure of extensibility, of scale and wonder.

Alan Kay likes to quote Doug Engelbart’s description of interactive networked computing as “thought vectors in concept space.” My experience at the NMC symposium let me see those vectors and inhabit that space. I could share (portray, enact) what I was seeing with others, and to some extent see it through their eyes as well. There’s something here I will be pondering for a long, long time. Virtual worlds are immersive not simply because they are convincing simulations of reality, though they can be, and not just because they are like lucid dreams, though they can be that too, and very powerfully. They’re immersive in particularly compelling ways because they are like comics, because they are like symbols or allegories in an animistic universe. And in this case, I found a way to think that I did not consider before I acted upon it. In the action, I found the insight. There was a physical change for me in the real world as I acted via an avatar in the virtual world, and the gesture I found was both idea and action, with insight the result.

It’s late and I don’t know how much any of the above will cohere, but it was such a powerful experience that I wanted to at least try to work through it as 2009 begins. My thanks to NMC for a great, mind-expanding symposium.

Here’s to insight into insight, and a Happy New Year to all.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (63.5MB)

Inspired by the season and by a wonderful day of reunion for our now-scattered families, I thought it would be good to say thanks to all of you who read, comment on, or otherwise interact with my writings here. When I began blogging over four years ago, I had no idea where the project would take me. All I knew was what I wanted to call my blog. Of that I was certain. I am grateful to all of you who’ve read what Gardner writes, and who’ve made my thinking clearer and my heart stronger with your responses.

As a Christmas present of sorts, I offer a podcast of the presentation Jim Groom and I did at EDUCAUSE 2008. The idea for the presentation was Jim’s. When he asked me to join him, I was honored to do so. I knew the collaboration would be something special: Jim’s an inspiring guy, and when he and I kick ideas around together, stuff happens. Jim’s the one who got me to try an alpha version of Lyceum back in the summer of 2006. When I returned to Mary Washington in the Spring, 2007 term, we had a hallway conversation in which I mentioned that WordPress Multiuser had gone to version 1, and I’d be interested in trying it out in one of my classes (as it turns out, my Film, Text, and Culture class). Jim installed it that night, I got going with it the next day, and within a few months our little experiment grew to several multiuser blogs in several of my colleagues’ classes in the department of English, Linguistics, and Speech. Over the summer, under the leadership of Martha Burtis the UMW Division of Teaching and Learning Technologies developed what became UMW Blogs, the initiative that continues today.

Doing the EDUCAUSE presentation with Jim took me back through all that history, and forward into the massive potential that still lies ahead for the whole UMW Blogs experiment. It also made me feel again the urgency of this effort to liberate students, faculty, and universities from the stultifying, even oppressive systems of “learning management” that continue to flourish in higher education, even when resources are disappearing and the prices keep going up.

For this presentation, fired up once again by Jim’s eloquence as he describes this oppression and the need for change, I hit upon the the idea of framing the Q&A in terms of an appeal to the audience, an “alter call” (pun and misspelling intended). Why not adopt an initiative like UMW Blogs? What’s stopping you? Why not abandon tired environments built around quiz builders and gradebooks and document delivery and find a way to bring the intellectual vitality of higher education, particularly as it is expressed in our students’ work, out into the world where it can find real audiences, spark real conversation, and serve as the foundation of a life’s work? Oh, and you can start the experiment for 6.95 a month, plus the cost of a domain name.

As you’ll hear, a set of concerns emerged from the audience: privacy, branding, risk, support, and so forth. These are legitimate concerns, every one of them. We must exercise due diligence in addressing them. Yet the larger concerns of authentic assessment, engaged learning, undergraduate publication, media fluency, and the like must not be overlooked. Indeed, these positive concerns–positive? essential concerns–should spur us to address and resolve the negative concerns. Instead, what happens all too often is that schools look for safety, scalability, sustainability (or at least that’s the logic) and try to fit the learning into the narrow spaces that remain between the circled wagons.

This can’t go on.

Whatever we do, whether it’s a campus-wide blogging initiative or something else equally ambitious, personal, and open, we must put learning at the center.  And that center must be designed to be shared. Easy to say, hard to do, and potentially glorious, as this season reminds us. 

Merry Christmas.

Photo by Bryan Alexander

Some scattered thoughts in response to Britt Watwood’s very thoughtful post summarizing and reflecting on the recent Electronic Campus of Virginia retreat:

Glad my tweets gave you a shiver! I miss all my Virginia friends and colleagues and I was certainly there with you in spirit.

Several near-overwhelming things emerged for me at the Engelbart fest (http://www.programforthefuture.org). I hope I can blog about them over the next few days. For now, I’ll just say that I’m more convinced than ever that education can fruitfully be considered as an Engelbartian “augmentation” / bootstrap experience in which innovation broadly considered–let’s call it the effective, inspiring continuation of the human conversation by means of significant new contributions to that conversation–is at the heart of what we think of as learning. After all, deep learning always presents itself to the *learner* as an innovation: “hey, I didn’t know that before!” Maybe another word for innovation is “discovery,” which Jerome Bruner writes about very eloquently in his essay on “The Act of Discovery” in the collection _On Knowing_.

In short, there’s a drama to learning, and that drama is connected with both a comprehensive understanding of the conversation and a deep intuition of one’s own power to contribute to that conversation. The many emerging technologies in what we call Web 2.0, and in the sorts of things the Horizon Report identifies, at their best enable both the understanding and the intuition.

Photo by Shutterhack.

Jon Udell and I talk about conceptual leaps from time to time. For me, Jon is both a consistent source of conceptual leaps, and a consistent inspiration for discovering my own. When we talk, though, we sometimes disagree, not so much about what the conceptual leaps are, but about which ones are reasonable to expect of people. When we’re talking, Jon tends to advocate a more incremental approach that emphasizes easy-to-use tools. I’m less patient with the incremental approach, and I worry that the ease-of-use argument, which undeniably valid in many instances, can actually throttle real innovation and underestimate human potential–at least, when that potential is properly pushed.

What constitutes a “proper push” is a question at the very heart of teaching and learning. Jerome Bruner has some very interesting things to say about such pushing–I keep discovering absolute wonders in his essays–but more on that anon, and back to Jon.

Two of Jon’s recent “Interviews with Innovators” (his podcast series on IT Conversations) make me think, again, that Jon and I are closer than either of us might believe we are. One was Jon’s interview with Nova Spivack about Twine (podcast here, blog reflection here), a service that aims to be a next-generation cross between social bookmarking and the semantic web. The interesting moment for me was this bit in the middle of the podcast (the excerpt is about four minutes long):

The exchange offers a very satisfying exposition of one of the biggest challenges we face in this area: how can we inspire, cajole, or otherwise persuade people to understand the value of sharing and the network effects sharing enables? This question, much more so than the question of complexity or difficulty of use, is at the heart of what’s most challenging as we try to urge adoption of these tools in higher education and elsewhere. A narrowly personal paradigm of computing means that for many people, perhaps most adults, computing is about individual affordances, and new Web 2.0 services simply add to the blades on an already comically jumbo Swiss Army Knife–for the individual. The idea of network effects is, as Jon points out, nearly impossible to describe, though relatively easy to grasp once one has experienced network effects for oneself. (This latter idea is one Alan Levine has explored many times in his talks about “being there.”)

But then my thoughts turned around on themselves again. Is it really so easy to experience network effects by being there? I suppose it depends on what one means by “being.” I think we’re really talking about a commitment here, a mode of being that is much more than a visit, or an anthropological study. The network effects have a strong effect on one’s very being, after all. Once I learned to speak (I was apparently a late talker, something most of you will find impossible to believe), and especially once I learned to read, I wasn’t simply the same person with another affordance. The very way I thought of “self,” and especially my own self and its horizon of possibilities, changed utterly. Forever.

I think RSS isn’t all that hard to learn or understand. I think network effects are indeed harder to grasp, perhaps impossible without direct experience. But most of all, I think it’s very hard to accept or embrace the transformative power of network effects because of the way those effects complicate our settled experience of identity. Not ideas of identity, but the experience of identity.

I think this is what people really fear most when they talk about information overload. They fear they will disappear, or that at the very least their experience of identity will be profoundly unsettled. Forever.

Sure, it’s scary to think about all the stuff people say, do, and know out there, and how much of it is available, hypnotically and perhaps damagingly, to anyone willing to spend their days hooked to a screen on a desk, or in a pocket, or wherever. But what’s really frightening is the experience of scale. It’s the fear of losing one’s voice permanently amid the din of all the competing voices.

I may not have this all right, just now. (I keep forgetting my blog is about the mistakes, not just the realizations–I should know much, much better. Witness the intractability of the problem!)  But I think I’m at least partially right. Because the more I thought about what Jon and Nova were saying in this little exchange, the more I realized that Jon was outlining the very process of education itself, especially higher education. What’s different about college? The experience of scale. Not just difficulty, though there’s that too, but extent. Think about a first-year writer going into a library and thinking about her or his own voice, competing with centuries of other voices, most of them more sophisticated and knowledgeable to boot.

Yet once that learner begins to understand network effects–let’s call them the ongoing intertwined records of human discourse–and that the scale actually makes his or her voice more rich, supple, and powerful, in fact acts as a kind of amplifier for that voice, the learner then turns what I’d argue is the most important corner in any educational experience, the one that shows that learner both the need and the possibility for making his or her own mark on that great tablet of civilization. What we see when timid freshmen at the end of four years transform themselves into uncertain but intent and brave seniors is not only the mastery of content (though some of that happens too, and should). It’s the dawning conviction that network effects are their allies, not their enemies. That it’s their civilization, too.

For this reason, Jerome Bruner’s observation continues to resonate with me: school is, to some crucial extent, always “consciousness-raising about the possibilities of communal mental activity.” The word “collaboration” is far too weak for what I’m trying to describe here. It’s more the moment one realizes a calling, within community, to be oneself most deeply by joining in the conversation.

That idea is obviously counterintuitive on one level, since college is a daunting experience for almost everyone at one time or another. Yet the idea is also utterly intuitive for anyone who’s ever stayed up late, drunk on the wine of a marvelous conversation.

Too many of our current educational paradigms focus on individual affordances. I’ll get a better job. I’ll get a degree. I’ll get tenure. I’ll get promoted. I’m not saying these aren’t important goals. Of course they are. But education is most deeply personal when it’s inter- and trans-personal, just as high-speed computing becomes truly transformative only when those machines are networked and the network’s platform (where would we be without the World Wide Web?) supports robust development.

So tonight I’m thinking that education is the platform for the human network, and the World Wide Web gives us a very powerful way to demonstrate and understand that fact.

One of Jon’s subsequent interviews takes the analogy to an even higher level, as Jon demonstrates wonderfully. But that’s material for another post (especially because I’m not sure what to do with the Wikipedia argument there).

The tourist who carves his initials in a public place, which is theoretically “his” in the first place, has good reasons for doing so, reasons which the exhibitor and planner know nothing about. He does so because in his role of consumer of an experience (a “recreational experience” to satisfy a “recreational need”) he knows that he is disinherited. He is deprived of his title over being. He knows very well that he is in a very special sort of zone in which his only rights are the rights of a consumer. He moves like a ghost through schoolroom, city streets, trains, parks, movies. He carves his initials as a last desperate measure to escape his ghostly role of consumer. He is saying in effect: I am not a ghost after all; I am a sovereign person. And he establishes title the only way remaining to him, by staking his claim over one square inch of wood or stone. Walker Percy, “The Loss of the Creature,” from The Message in the Bottle.

Since I first read it eighteen years ago, Walker Percy’s “The Loss of the Creature” has so occupied my spirit that I find my work circling back to it in ways that both surprise and instruct me. Case in point: I recently gave a presentation at the SUNY-Oswego “Celebration of Meaningful Learning,” sponsored by the Center for Excellence in Learning and Teaching (and ably led by the redoubtable economist John Kane). As I prepared my talk, I kept thinking about the ways in which Web 2.0 can restore the “title over being” Percy imagines in the essay I’ve quoted from. Not on its own, of course: Web 2.0 is that perfect learning environment that is only as good as one makes it. Yet there is a good, or many good things, into which Web 2.0 can be made, and which can be made by means of Web 2.0. By contrast, LMS’s like Blackboard make it difficult, at times even impossible, for the learner to leave any lasting imprint on the learning environment of his or her sovereign personhood.

Percy’s alienated tourists (not a bad description for a lot of our students) leave their marks as graffiti. Though I didn’t think of it in these terms until the Percy essay re-emerged in my memory days afterward, I wanted to take the idea of alienation and turn it around to the teacher as well. If the teacher can’t see the traces of the learners’ sovereign personhood in the learning environment, the teacher is every bit as alienated and deprived as the student. Even worse, the teacher cannot see the very thing upon which she or he must meditate and with which he or she must commune for authentic learning to happen. It’s almost as if we’ve constructed avatars of ourselves and activated scripts that move them, herky-jerky, through the environments we’ve created, while we look on, mourn, and grow increasingly frustrated as our agency (and thus any hope for real change) vanishes.

The metaphor I chose was not that of graffiti but of fingerprints, and I tried to frame the argument by analyzing how traces of the learners’ attention and addressivity could be of use to the teacher. What learning environments have textures that retain cognition prints? How do we “dust” for such prints when we try to infer the learners’ minds? I told some stories, and tried to establish a small but precise set of terms that would help us understand why and how cognition prints (if the metaphor was helpful) might matter.

I kept returning to three main ideas: attention, addressivity, and intimacy. I’ve been working on them for awhile now, and I find they’ll work (for me, anyway) in a number of different contexts. Attention is the foundation (there’s obviously some phenomenology at work here, though I don’t invoke philosophy–rather, commentary tracks on LDs and DVDs). Addressivity is the social and ethical dimension. Intimacy takes the social and ethical and brings in the idea of personal change, as well as the ways in which our tightest bonds actually constitute our personhood (a shared sovereignty implicit in Percy’s oblique strategies in even writing and publishing “The Loss of the Creature”).

My talk on that October afternoon was followed by an extraordinary dinner in which several teachers were recognized for their outstanding work in the classroom and as advisers. They were young and old. They were well and ill. They were from varied disciplines. They all had a chance to speak, at length, about who they are as teachers and why they do what they do. (It struck me that this should happen at all awards dinners for teachers.) They all spoke of their passion, their curiosity, the strong (I would say intimate) bonds they felt with their students. I have never felt prouder to be a teacher than I did at that dinner on that night. What a noble, humbling, and needful calling we share. I felt myself missing my students, thinking with a pang of those I’d left behind at the University of Mary Washington, and also looking forward to the students I’ll meet at Baylor next term in a freshman seminar. Mostly I felt honored, thrilled in fact, to be in the room and learning from these teachers.

Earlier in the evening, the provost had come up to me with kind and warm words about my afternoon’s presentation. She said the folks who’d attended had enjoyed it and were still arguing over some of its main points. Which ones? I asked. She replied that the word “intimacy” had given them some pause. It’s a loaded word, I thought to myself, especially for those in professions like teaching–presumably because learning is such an intimate activity, but that gets us back to the initial topic, doesn’t it? But I didn’t say that aloud. I just mulled over the provost’s remark, and thanked her cordially and sincerely. As the provost walked away, I turned to the professor with whom I’d walked to the banquet hall through a brisk Lake Erie evening. She’d listened to my conversation with the provost, and now she leaned toward me as we continued to move in the food line. “I think intimacy is what we most crave, and what we’re most afraid of,” she said to me. Then she said, “I think you should write about intimacy in that book you’re going to write.”

And then came the meal, and the marvelous testimonials from the honored teachers.

A remarkable day.

John Kane and his crew made a DVD of my talk. I had it in my bag about three hours after I finished speaking–truly amazing turnaround. Within a day it was on the web, the source from which I uploaded the talk, in seven parts, to YouTube. Here’s part 1:

The entire talk in one part is on blip.tv. The slides for my talk are in Google Presentations, and embedded in a page on my blog here. I’ve put the audio-only version (with audio from my trusty Edirol R1 and essential Giant Squid external clip-on mike) up here as a podcast.

My thanks to John Kane and all at CELT and SUNY-Oswego who made my stay so pleasant and gave me the opportunity to think about these topics. I hope my remarks are useful.

Today at 1 p.m. CDT, the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching (actually, the Carnegie Commons branch) sponsored a WebEvent featuring Toru Iiyoshi and Vijay Kumar, the editors of the new MIT Press book Opening Up Education: The Collective Advancement of Education through Open Technology, Open Content, and Open Knowledge, as well as John Seely Brown, who wrote the foreword. The webcast, which I mistakenly thought would be live, is available on the WebEvent’s home page. You can also find the webcast in three parts on YouTube:

Part 1: Toru Iiyoshi

Part 2: John Seely Brown

Part 3: Vijay Kumar

The book promises to be a great resource for this urgently needed conversation. It’s available in several formats. You can buy the print version from MIT Press. Other versions are free. The 18-page executive summary is here. The full download is here. The page with chapter-by-chapter downloads is here.The contributors are heavy hitters indeed who’ve been tireless and highly influential in their devotion to the cause of educational transformation for the 21st century. I hope the book reaches a wide audience, and I applaud the Carnegie Foundation, the authors, and MIT Press for putting out a pdf version with a Creative Commons license for free download. That’s walking the walk!

I confess that I was a little disappointed by the “WebEvent” today. The webcast was not live. The “chat” was really a discussion forum, and participants couldn’t start new topics (or at least I couldn’t–perhaps we were supposed to register for an account). It was great to see an international audience on the forum more-or-less synchronously, but it was in my view not a good decision to use a discussion forum, as its strengths are largely in asynchronous participation. Given that the webcast itself was not live, perhaps Carnegie figured a synchronous chat room was not appropriate, but given that many folks including myself logged onto the chat at the same time, I think there was a missed opportunity here of significant proportions. (It was also misleading on the event page to describe the e-discussion as a “chat.”) I am pleased to see that Toru and Vijay have addressed many of the participants’ suggestions along these lines in some of the later posts in the forum–though I note that full openness, here in the sense of full opportunities for the participants themselves to organize the discussion, still presents some imaginative challenges to the organizers. My hunch is that the organizers were concerned that a chat would be too disorderly, and that it would not allow for a persistent conversation. The solution, surely, is to put together a page that mingles a live chat, the archive of that live chat, and an ongoing forum for asynchronous discussion.

But in a stunning example of what Web 2.0 affords, and what those affordances inspire in its most passionate and expert users, here’s the del.icio.us feed created by forum participant Michelle A. Hoyle, a tutor in the UK’s Open University. Actually, I’ll copy in her entire post:

I have finished posting all Twitter, blog, and web links that I saw, including to the YouTube videos, to my Del.icio.us feed tagged as “openuped”: http://delicious.com/Eingang/openuped I did not include e-mail addresses.

I attempted to add some useful (but quickly done!) annotations to the “notes” field for each one to help provide some context.

Michelle

To which all I can say is “wow” and “thanks!” Show me something in a so-called LMS that can allow a smart, creative, willing participant to step in and render such a great service so quickly and easily, and I’ll eat my trackpad. She’s even smart about the tag: “openuped” is perfect. Oh, and don’t miss Michelle’s own personal links on the del.icio.us feed, particularly her blogs: H810: Accessibility Ahead and E1N1VERSE.

As we move forward into a world augmented by these telecommunications technologies (and I was *very* pleased to hear John Seely Brown use the word “augmented” on several occasions), we will, I suspect, continue to see uneven distribution of these technologies and especially their most effective application, even at events like today’s. To be fair, the editors and at least one of the chapter authors were present in the forum, but the forum was still an awkward place for synchronous communication. I also can’t help contrasting today’s event with the launch of the MacArthur/HASTAC Digital Media and Learning event, which had a huge sense of occasion in its simulcast between the NYC press conference and the New Media Consortium amphitheatre experience in Second Life. Not every launch needs to be of that Woodstock proportion, but the more we can get to that level, the more influential our work is likely to be.

For what it’s worth, and for the record as I pursue Jon Udell’s goal of “conservation of keystrokes,” here’s the response I posted to one of Toru Iiyoshi’s forum questions today.

——————————————————-
> I believe we have a number of teachers, faculty,
> teacher educators, faculty developers here. Do
> any of you see open education as a change agent to
> transform teacher education/faculty development as
> now educators start seeing how others teach and
> learn?

Hi Toru,

Gardner Campbell here, formerly at the University of Mary Washington, and now at Baylor University as Director of the Academy for Teaching and Learning and an Assoc. Prof. of Literature and Media at the Honors College. My answer to your question is yes, but I’d want to amplify the word “seeing” to get at what I mean. I think that “seeing how others teach and learn” is a difficult and complex task that involves many factors: being there in person during a class meeting to pick up on all the nuances of personal interaction, having access to materials used in preparation and execution and assessment of the learning experience, tracking both teacher and learner over time to have some idea of the longitudinal effects of the experience, and especially having the opportunity for teacher and learner to “narrate the process” by blogging, etc. And these are just a few examples. Anything that leaves a “cognitive fingerprint” in the processes of teaching and learning should be available for thoughtful reflection–assuming any necessary privacy is preserved, of course. As Jerome Bruner observes, education is also a process of intimate change.

For me, the idea of openness means that more of these things will indeed be out in the open and available to us to study and reflect on. I don’t mean to downplay issues of access–these are crucial too. But your question asks about transforming faculty development and teacher education–two transformations that must be accompanied by transformation in the way we think about educational experience and educational resources.

Thanks for putting this book together, and for the interview with John Seely Brown. I wish the event were live and this forum a true chat, as I think that would add to a sense of occasion and greater opportunities for emergence (and perhaps even transformation). But I know these things are difficult to arrange, and I very much appreciate your efforts on behalf of this crucial initiative.

One of the lovely and somewhat daunting aspects of a new job is all the new “first times” in what is inescapably a rookie year. Thank goodness for beginner’s luck, which I certainly had when Steve Davis, winner of Baylor’s 2008 Robert Foster Cherry Award for Great Teaching, invited me to visit his seminar in science education. This group of undergraduates and graduate students is spending the semester thinking about improving science education in higher ed. and in K-12. They’re also thinking about the exciting possibilities opened up by undergraduate research, an area in which Steve has accomplished great results at his home university, Pepperdine. I saw Steve’s presentation on his SURB (Summer Undergraduate Research in Biology program earlier this month, roughly ten days into my new job, and I was deeply impressed by the program and by Steve’s wise and passionate presentation. (More on both of those in a future post.) So I was excited and honored by the chance to be in his class and lead a discussion among his students.

The primary purpose of my visit was to tell the students about the new Baylor Academy for Teaching and Learning that I’m directing, and to field their questions and lead a discussion. As I often do, I decided to start with a provocative prompt and proceed from there. The prompt was Mike Wesch’s “A Vision of Students Today.” A couple of the students had seen the video before, but most hadn’t, and even the ones who’d seen it before seemed to find its energy and vision compelling. When the video was finished, I asked them to take out a piece of paper and spend just a few minutes jotting down what they would like their teachers to know about them as learners. You can see the results, just as they wrote them, here.

I found the class and the discussion very stimulating, very thought-provoking. I loved the students’ energy and openness. (Can you tell I’m pining for the classroom? Next term!) We spent a little time talking about the Academy directly, but most of the time we talked about the Academy by talking about their experience as learners (and for the grad students, as teachers) in higher education. I articulated the connection as best I could by explaining that my vision for the Academy was of a place that brought together many stories: from students, from faculty, from staff, all of us learners, all of us in some sense teachers as well. I told them I would tell their story on my blog. (I would have done this anyway, but the theme of telling the story has been much on my mind lately as I finish Orson Scott Card’s truly remarkable Speaker For The Dead.) I told them that I hoped their story would be only the first of a long series of stories that we would tell each other at Baylor, thereby knitting ourselves together into an ever closer, ever more effective learning community.

For the record, I think that if we get that part right at the Academy, the rest will follow–though that’s not to say there’s not a lot of work involved in getting “the rest” up and running, for there surely is.

A few highlights from the session:

One student had Googled me and found my blog. Another told me about how cell phones had become education tools in India. Another student talked passionately and knowledgeably about the need for authentic assessment. And these were only three of many memorable moments–memorable moments to follow up.

We spent a good while discussing the price, role, and effectiveness of textbooks–no surprise, given how central they are to science education. In the Wesch video, one student holds up a sign about an expensive textbook that she’s never read, and her statement resonated with the group in a big way. Their questions spilled out. Why do we have textbooks? Why do we need textbooks? What kind of textbook is best? Can teachers not assign textbooks if they don’t want to? (One student noted that teachers at Central Michigan are required to assign textbooks.) Why are they so expensive? Why does one get so little money on buyback? And so forth. I tried to talk about textbooks as a technology, one embedded with a curricular, financial, and teaching system, and one that embodied a great many assumptions about all of those systems that might well be challenged, or at least rethought. I was also mindful of the fascinating conversation on K-12 textbooks Mike Wesch had recently opened up on his blog.

The textbook discussion was merely one aspect of our larger discussion, however. That larger discussion was of course about learning: what constitutes real learning? how do we know when it’s happened? how do we foster understanding and insight and what Steve Davis so forcefully calls “transformative ideas” instead of concentrating almost all our efforts on “coverage” and factual memorization? Not that facts are unimportant–far from it. These are scientists, after all. But facts alone do not lead to transformative ideas. Steve Davis insists that other qualities matter as much or more than the ability to memorize facts: careful observation, fresh perspectives, “the eyes of an 18-year-old.” Steve also insists that data aren’t real unless they’re shared, presented, even published. He tells them that if the data aren’t shared, it’s as if the research never happened. Hence the writing assignment for the term is a grant proposal. He tells his students that some of those proposals could well be funded. In other words, he asks his students to write for a real audience, to work hard, and (this is the truly inspiring part) to prepare themselves for results far beyond their expectations.

I’ll be following the class’s progress for the rest of the semester. I am convinced that their energy and insights will lead to some of those transformative ideas, and I’ll be cheering for them when that day comes. I have a stake in their success. Actually, we all do–but my visit made my investment more visible to me, as I hope this brief report has done for you.

My heartfelt thanks to Steve for inviting me, and to the class for making my first time in the classroom at Baylor so rewarding.