2017: Quarks, Love, and Insight

Posted on January 1, 2017 by Gardo

Two ups, a down, and some gluons. A hadron; later, perhaps, an atom.

I used to do a little warm-up exercise in faculty development workshops. I called it “Quarks of Learning.” The question was simple: what are the elementary particles and fundamental constituents of learning? The responses were always interesting, and revealed a surprising amount of agreement among faculty from different disciplines. The adventure, then, was to discuss how one might build learning experiences out of those fundamental constituents.

I liked the warm-up for a lot of reasons. There were not any obviously wrong answers. The agreement was surprising. We weren’t getting waylaid by typical categories of “skills” and “content,” a false and pernicious and very damaging dichotomy. And the exercise seemed to be self-dramatizing, in a way, as the pleasure of listing these fundamental constituents, and the engagement that pleasure empowered, seemed itself to be a fundamental constituent. We found ourselves in productive community, aligned yet varied, thoughtful and creative, having a good time building something together out of ideas that didn’t usually emerge in “faculty development”–and certainly not in “training.”

Over time, and in varying roles within institutions of higher education, I’ve thought a lot about these quarks of learning. I’ve tried to support curricula within the English major that would keep those quarks embedded in the design of the major. I’ve tried to do similar work with faculty development in pedagogy, in teaching and learning technologies involving networked personal computing, and in the large and comprehensive structures involving colleges, faculty, and academic programs (including a degree program) across an entire university. All along, I’ve wanted those quarks to be more powerfully present, in all the discussions and planning, than talk about “operationalizing” and “branding” and so forth, as I have many times seen how the fundamental constituents vanish–or are erased–in favor of talk about process that serves the institution much more than the learner.

For a long while, I advocated for “interest” as the fundamental constituent of learning, the quark of all quarks. I still believe that interest, and the psychology of interest, are fundamentally empowering elements of all learning. As time has gone on, however, I can see that interest doesn’t quite resonate with my audiences the way it does with me. As the psychology of interest and curiosity becomes more sophisticated and pervasive, that may change. As I become better at explaining myself, ditto. To this point, however, it has been difficult to make the case that the kind of interest and curiosity I care about is fundamentally different from the “look, a squirrel!” varieties of endless superficial distractions.

The two quarks I’m working on now, therefore, are love and insight.

I’ve had something to say about love elsewhere, and I’ll have more to say about that in future posts. Tonight, at the start of a new calendar year, I will write a few things about insight.

I presented my first talk on an insight-oriented education in November, when I was honored to be the opening keynote for OpenEd 2016. I wanted the talk to be about insight, to be itself insightful, and to help to stimulate insight in others (in this case, the audience for the talk). You can see the opening video montage I created here. And you can see a Periscope recording of the talk made by the redoubtable Robin DeRosa here. I’ll have more to say about that OpenEd keynote in subsequent posts. At this point, I’ll simply say that I was working from Jonah Lehrer’s account (in “The Eureka Hunt”) of the neuropsychology of insight, as well as from ideas regarding sustainable psychotherapeutic improvements stemming not from medication but from what we used to call the “talking cure,” and which now seems to be about the power of language and story in particular to re-wire the brain by means of patients’ insights into their own circumstances, histories, and personalities.

Those areas alone merit and require a great deal of work. Little did I know that another enormous journey of discovery in this area was about to begin as well.

One of the more remarkable things that emerged from my talk was a tweet I received from an indispensable member of my personal learning network, Morris (Mo) Pelzel. Mo’s first tweet to me about Bernard Lonergan, the one that alerted me to Lonergan’s Insight: A Study of Human Understanding, is just out of Twitter-reach tonight. I’ll need to download a new version of my Twitter archive soon so I don’t lose that tweet! It was a vital moment. But at least I have the follow-up for you below.

The most profound and transformative book I have ever read…I hope you enjoy, @GardnerCampbell 🙂 https://t.co/julTzzf7dO

— Mo Pelzel (@MorrisPelzel) November 19, 2016

Mo opened to me an exhilarating, difficult, yet utterly direct and moving text that took everything I had said about insight to the next level, and helped me understand that I was right: insight was indeed one of the quarks I sought. The word, the idea, the core reality of insight bridged the affective and cognitive realms more effectively than interest had. It connected with deep self-awareness. It was strongly aligned with ideas of creativity and imagination, but resisted being limited to only the arts, or only the humanities.

Most of all, it was a quark that met one of the prime requirements for quarkdom: it would be difficult for anyone in higher education to say, out loud, that insight was dispensable and played no necessary role in education. Or so I hope. And: once insight is in there, I reason, it becomes very difficult to retreat to reductive views of anything regarding learning, assessment of learning, expertise, pedagogy, etc. Like love, but with a more powerfully cognitive presence in most conversations about learning (alas, but I’ll take what I can get), insight would be the quark that was not only a fundamental constituent of learning and thus of school, but also a quark whose presence would liberate discussions about learning and schooling from the deadening technocracies that surround them.

So here and now, at the close of the first day of 2017, I offer a bit of Lonergan for you. His writing is extraordinarily ambitious, dense with meaning and implication. At the same time, his subject is so important, and the need for the thoughtful engagement he advocates and demonstrates is so urgent, that the book reads to me like a special edition of a newspaper written just before a crisis, not simply in response to it. I can’t pretend to grasp it all, yet. Parts of it may be beyond my reach. But the parts I do get thrill me. They help me think. They help me understand. And as I go along, Lonergan teaches me how to understand him better.

Here, then, now:

First, then, it is insight that makes the difference between the tantalizing problem and the evident solution…. Secondly, inasmuch as it is the act of organizing intelligence, insight is an apprehension of relations…. Thirdly, in a sense somewhat different from Kant’s, every insight is both a priori and synthetic. It is a priori, for it goes beyond what is merely given to sense or to empirical consciousness. It is synthetic, for it adds to the merely given an explanatory unification or organization…. Fourthly, a unification and organization of other departments of knowledge is a philosophy. But every insight unifies and organizes. Insight into insight [the project of the book, Lonergan tells us], then, will … yield a philosophy…. (4-5)

[I’m skipping items five and six because a) they’re too difficult for this already lengthy post, and b) seven and eight are crucially important.]

Seventhly, besides insights there are oversights. Besides the dynamic context of detached and disinterested [i.e.: not self-interested] inquiry in which insights emerge with a notable frequency, there are the contrary dynamic contexts of the flight from understanding in which oversights occur regularly and one might almost say systematically. [Yes, indeed–one of the reasons I have been reading books about the 2008 financial meltdown as well as the tragedies of the space shuttles Challenger and Columbia–not to mention watching Titanic over and over.] Hence, if insight into insight is not to be an oversight of oversights [what can I say? the man has a sense of humor], it must include an insight into the principal devices of the flight from understanding. Eighthly, the flight from understanding will be seen to be anything but a peculiar aberration that afflicts only the unfortunate or the perverse. In its philosophic form, which is not to be confused with its psychiatric, moral, social, and cultural manifestations [rather large exceptions here, but let’s keep going], it appears to result simply from an incomplete development in the intelligent and reasonable use of one’s own intelligence and reasonableness…. [I’d say that such incomplete development is partly a failure of education, and that much contemporary schooling, especially at scale, not only neglects but indeed tends to block or thwart such development.] (5-6)

[Again, skipping two elements, for reasons as above.]

The present work, then, may be said to operate on three levels: it is a study of human understanding; it unfolds the philosophic implications of understanding; it is a campaign against the flight from understanding. The three levels are solidary. Without the first there would be no basis for the second and no precise meaning for the third. Without the second the first could not get beyond elementary statements, and there could be no punch to the third. Without the third the second would be regarded as incredible, and the first would be neglected. (6-7)

[And now Lonergan writes with even greater urgency.]

Probably I shall be told that I have tried to operate on too broad a front. But I was led to do so for two reasons. In constructing a ship or a philosophy one has to go the whole way: an effort that is in principle incomplete is equivalent to a failure. [A beautiful analogy and for me a home truth–as well as one of the principal failings of higher education’s approaches to “educational technology.”] Moreover, against the flight from understanding half measures are of no avail. Only a comprehensive strategy can be successful. To disregard any stronghold of the flight from understanding is to leave intact a base from which a counteroffensive promptly will be launched. (7)

I have used a more gruesome analogy for my own version of Lonergan’s last point when I say one cannot have a “pet cancer.” Very often it seems to me that bureaucracies and especially technocracies are pocked with strongholds of the flight from understanding, so much so that it becomes quite an adventure merely to identify the valiant and embattled strongholds of insight among them. And even when those strongholds of insight are acknowledged, there is usually a sense that they are rare and special, and thus not essential or fundamental. Therefore everything else can be defined as business as usual, “operational” in a very narrow definition of “operations.” When those “operational” elements become in fact more strongholds of the flight from understanding, they become malignant–and it is in the nature of malignancy that it strives to overtake and feed on, thus ultimately destroy, the good. And the shuttle explodes, or burns up on re-entry, metaphorically and historically speaking.

Lonergan’s final argument for my post tonight circles back to why his endeavor matters. He insists it’s practical to work through a complex and difficult philosophy of insight. It’s operationally relevant! Vitally so. “But to be practical is to do the intelligent thing, and to be unpractical is to keep blundering about. It follows that insight into both insight and oversight is the very key to practicality” (8).

I’ll come back to some of these points as I continue to work though Lonergan’s book. But now, here, then: we must build and offer our learners an insight-oriented education. Do you hear talk about an insight-oriented education when you hear “student success” discussed? If not, pull the emergency stop. Help to avoid a civilization-sized train wreck.

What I am discovering about my “quarks of learning” is not simply what must be included in all learning design, but the very ground I must stand on myself, those aspects of real school that are non-negotiable. In this way, I begin to have insight into insight, myself.

Much to explore. Thanks, Mo.

Happy New Year.

Lonergan, Bernard. Insight: A Study of Human Understanding. 5th edition. Ed. Frederick E. Crowe and Robert M. Doran. Volume 3 of the Collected works of Bernard Lonergan. University of Toronto Press, 1992.

Confessions of a Computer-Mediated Communications Addict

Posted on September 2, 2016 by Gardo

Yes, I’ve been going through the closets lately. Here’s something I caught that might be of interest: a closing keynote address I presented at the 2002 Mary Washington College Faculty Academy on Instructional Technology.

It was an interesting in-between time. Our Assistant VP for Instructional Technology, David Ayersman, had left MWC in 2001. Our first CIO, Chip German, would arrive and begin his work in the fall of 2002. I had led the Instructional Technology Advisory Committee for several years but had not yet become an administrator. That step occurred in the summer of 2003, at Chip’s instigation, and would change all that followed in my career.

And I had not yet read Doug Engelbart’s Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework, or Vannevar Bush’s As We May Think, or any of those writings. I had never even heard of those people. I had no clue whatsoever about the “resonant frequency” of this stream of thought. No blogging, no podcasting, no Bluehost Experiment, no domain of my own, nothing. As you’ll see from the talk, it was all listservs (surprisingly sturdy and useful then) and what turned out to be ugly, slow, and ultimately disappointing Blackboard discussion forums. (I don’t think I’d discovered the Steve Hoffman Music Forums at that point, either–a new moment in my experience of discussion forums that would eventually turn me away from Blackboard and its ilk for good.)

So this paper tumbles out of my closet, and I caught it. In this talk I see that nearly a decade of working with computer-mediated communication had brought me into the thought world of dreamers who’d imagined and helped to build my future–ironically, unmet dreamers whom I had yet to discover. I see that my discovery of those dreamers ended up radicalizing me, in a way, as what I would read just two years later awakened me to the scope of those dreams and their liberatory potential for teaching and learning. Those dreams, and those dreamers, seemed to me a secret history of shared yearning, flawed and stained as all human endeavors are, but one that asked the central questions about the most salient concerns. It was an intellectual rebirth for me, but also the beginning of a trial-by-fire in some respects.

I see how ready I was for my next teachers to appear. I see a discontinuous moment ahead that I could not have anticipated. (I see that I am already using the word “bootstrapping.”)

I am trying to draw some lessons from this moment that comes into a new focus, fourteen years later.

I also like the muddle-mull-meal idea, which I’ve never used since in any talk I’ve given or any paper I’ve written. Maybe you’ll like it too.

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cri de cœur

Posted on April 10, 2016 by Gardo

“Anguish” By August Friedrich Albrecht Schenck (1828 – 1901). Details of artist on Google Art Project [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.

I don’t really like polemic, most of the time. I think it often just feeds the beast, as Martha might say. I don’t like polarization or pointing fingers. I truly aspire to “generous questions … questions that invite honesty, dignity, and revelation.” But there are times when I must voice my outrage and sorrow.

I’ve spoken several times over the years about the abominations that are most online course registration systems. The example I typically use is a Nikki Giovanni seminar at Virginia Tech where the information in the course registration system is so vacantly unhelpful as to be, practically speaking, nihilistic. Such displays of casual disregard, in this context, move from irony into tragedy.

giovanni course 1 giovanni course 2

One may object that the point of the course registration system is simply to facilitate a transaction. That belief, of course, is precisely my point. A key moment of learner agency should not resemble online banking, or worse. C’mon people. Netflix does better. Amazon does better. Craigslist does better. Even the Division of Motor Vehicles does better, for crying out loud.

And I am crying, out loud.

But wait. It’s worse than that, as Jon Becker’s recent blog post demonstrates. (Go read it. I’ll be here when you get back.) Not only do we use Banner (or whatever) to strip out all the meaningful information from the moment when students actually choose to devote a substantial part of their lives and energies and financial resources to enroll in a course of study–meaningful information like a course website, a welcome from the prof, a syllabus, a full course description, heck, even a complete course title–but then we turn around and make these impoverished little information slivers nearly impossible to find.

This is probably the worst example in academia today of how decision-makers working on “business information systems,” in both universities and the vendor-land that supplies their habits, ruthlessly (and perhaps ignorantly, but that’s no excuse) pull up, by the roots, the values that could be strengthened and indeed amplified by the web-enabled affordances that could be bought or built. It reflects the destructive idea that the internet is a utility only, a set of super-fast announcement channels, a clutch of electronic four-color brochures, a warren of pneumatic content-delivery pipes, a non-network of isolated transactional sites for decisions about learning that are drained of meaning or discovery.

Unfortunately, it appears that most faculty have acquiesced to this destructive idea. It may be that most faculty actually agree with this destructive idea. This is where the anguish really starts.

If higher ed were not so stubbornly resistant to the open web, and if faculty acted more vigorously (or at all) to experience the greatness of the web for themselves, and insisted on web design for the entire university that functioned as effective learning environments fostering richly connected learning, we might yet be that fabled city on a hill. If higher ed truly believed that all of us have a stake in a digital commons, a commons we must contribute to and be nourished by, we might help build a future we’d want our children to live in. But we have insisted on our status and comforts, slandered the web we should be helping to build alongside our students, defined meaning too often as “those things we know and will tell you about in your courses,” and outsourced nearly every possible zone of online learning innovation, invention, and discovery to the vendors who peddle digital soma that will relieve us, gently and with peaceful slumbers, of the need to change our lives.

A taxonomy of student engagement

Posted on January 7, 2016 by Gardo

Last November I was honored to be the keynote speaker at the University of North Florida’s 3rd annual Academic Technology Innovation Symposium. The event brought me into contact with a number of talented faculty, grad students, and staff at UNF, and the sessions I was able to attend (I was on an unusually tight schedule) were fascinating. I learned a lot, and I tried to tweet out most of it. It was actually my first full-on conference tweeting in a while. It was good to get back to a practice I really enjoy. So I have UNF to thank for that, too. Special thanks go out to Deb Miller, Director of the Center for Instruction and Research Technology, who invited me and managed this fine event, as well as Yentl Dunbar and Justin Lerman, who very capably handled all of my travel logistics.

One of the greatest pleasures of the trip was a joyful reunion with a colleague and friend I’ve known for over fifteen years, the redoubtable Andy Rush. Andy’s working with some great folks, the job looks like a great fit for his talents and interests, and it’s hard to quarrel with the weather (at least in November), the seafood, or the beauty of that extraordinary campus. (Plus Danny Gottlieb works in the jazz program there–a program for which UNF is justly famous.)

And I’ll tell you something about Andy Rush: the man knows from bags of gold. An alum of the early days of the UMW-DTLT Dream Team, Andy is a powerful contributor to all things multimedia, multimodal, webby, and inventive. LIke we said, bags of gold.

So I saw Andy again, in action and in conversation, and I met cool smart people trying to bring all sorts of magic and collaborative inventiveness to teaching and learning … and I had the chance to try to work out some of my own ideas in the company of folks who’d help me think about them and make them stronger, better. Which they did. As you’ll see, a couple of the questions following my talk stopped me dead in my tracks, and usefully so.

Here’s what I was working on:

Blended Learning – A Taxonomy of Student Engagement

What do we mean by the words “student engagement”? My talk proposes that the answer is far from obvious. I will sketch out several possible meanings, describe what I take to be the character and outcomes of each variety, and suggest why school itself makes it particularly difficult to foster certain kinds of deep and sustained engagement. I will conclude with some thoughts about how hybrids of online and face-to-face learning experiences can best encourage such engagement.

That’s the abstract I submitted, and it’s fairly close to what I actually talked about. Along the way, however, I wove in some ideas the abstract only hinted at. In particular, I wanted to work the idea of taxonomy that I’ve had such trouble with in the case of poor Dr. Bloom. I wanted to keep the genre or framework, so to speak, but do something much wilder and messier and more passionate.

Part of my desire on the day of the talk was driven by events of just that week, including teaching I had done just two days before. The abstract indicates that I have thoughts to share with my colleagues at UNF, and that was certainly true. What I found, however, was that my life in the week had turned my abstract into a second-person query aimed at me: Gardner, what do you mean my student engagement? How would you map it? Why was that class two days ago so difficult and even painful for you? What had you hoped would happen?

Parker Palmer opens his magisterial The Courage To Teach with just such soul-searching. Although I didn’t think of it at the time, it occurred to me a few days later that I was following his example. I hope so. It’s a great one.

So here’s the video my friend and colleague Andy Rush made, on a day when layers of time and thought (as is clear from Andy’s blog as well) blended. A different kind of blended learning, perhaps, but no less important than any other.

And for the record, once again: I am so not kidding.

What I saw on Monday

Posted on September 21, 2015 by Gardo

Roaming the vicinity of Virginia Commonwealth University, I found a spot just across from Grace and Holy Trinity Episcopal Church where I could get a few action shots:

USA. New Zealand. France. Australia. It’s fascinating to me to watch the time trials, watch the bicycles and their riders in their caravans: motorcycle, bike, car following. Like the transit of a planet, the procession has a period, a rhythm, a time. Yet the photos reveal globe-spanning difference and subtle changes in expression. Joy, concentration, effort.

Later on, I was delighted to find students from the Anthropology of the Crowd course (part of the Great VCU Bike Race Book project) sitting in the library and debriefing each other on their day. They were excited by the experience of learning while participating in an event within a course that required them to make a kind of festive contact with strangers from around the world. That’s an interesting set of circles, both intersecting and concentric. The world in Richmond, themselves in Richmond, citizens whose accents enacted journeys from Broad Street sidewalks to lands far away.

The students were joyful.

Is this not study? Is this not study abroad?

Curriculum Cooking

Posted on June 2, 2015 by Gardo

I’m at the end of day two of VCU’s first annual University Seminar on General Education. There’s more to say than I can possibly articulate in this small space of time, but I do want to mark this phase of the experience with a metaphor. Metaphors are how I mark my experience. (I was going to qualify that sentence with various hedging “arguably” and “perhaps” locutions, but thought better of it.)

Thanks to a wonderful suggestion by Suzie Fairman, my division’s Coordinator of Operations, we closed day one of the seminar by adjourning to a kitchen-school and cooking together. Tapas! Team. Nourishment. Fellowship. Direct instruction (recipes, kitchen rules and etiquette) along with informal learning and a good deal of improvisation. Not a bad metaphor for the way we’re trying to imagine (and re-imagine, and design) a general education curriculum (or environment) cooking with connection.

Credit: Jeff South

Credit: Jeff South

Now for a little more weight on the metaphor: see how this context problematizes the often pernicious dichotomies between “sage on the stage” and “guide at the side,” or between “group work” and “individual reflection.” And I freely confess, and loudly celebrate, that it was hard to quarrel with the very tasty results.

Below, more cooking, in a setting that could benefit from the liberal application of that metaphor:

Here I leave the further elaboration as an exercise for the reader(s).

Tomorrow, our midpoint. What will be the feast we prepare together?

The 30,000 Foot Foundation

Posted on March 1, 2015 by Gardo

–It’s a bag of gold.

—What would I do with a bag of gold?

—What would you like to do with a bag of gold?

—I don’t have time for your philosophical questions.

The aim, therefore, of the philosophy of education must be to get at the meanings, the assumptions, the commitments which are implicit, but too often unacknowledged, within the educational practices already engaged in. Such an ‘uncovering of meaning,’ critically engaged in, inevitably reveals beliefs which are not sustainable or which require refining. They put the practitioners in touch with intellectual and moral traditions which give greater depth to what they are doing and which provide the basis of professional commitment, often against Government or others who wish to import a more impoverished language of educational purposes.
–Richard Pring, Philosophy of Educational Research, 3rd ed. (Bloomsbury Academic, 2015)

Time for a word-association game. Like Kafka and his companions as they read his writings together, we can laugh until we cry.

Takeaway
Measure
Target
Outcome
Metric
Dashboard
Timeline
Action Item
Practical (pedant alert: not parallel!)
Pragmatic
Operational (and operationalize)

Not one of these words is necessarily a bad thing (ok, maybe the concept of a “takeaway” is a bad thing and always already reductive). Yet how quickly these words enlarge to fill our entire field of view. How loud and near they become, so much so that anything outside their lexicon comes to sound like a lonely bell tolling from an ivory tower.

But send not to learn for whom the bell tolls! Here is Pring again:

Similarly with educational research. Here, as elsewhere, there is the constant danger of the ‘bewitchment of the intelligence by the use of language.’ It is easy to stipulate a straightforward statement of aims, broken down with a finite range of measurable objectives or targets. It is relatively easy then to identify the means which, empirically, can be shown to attain these targets. It would seem to be but a matter of administrative efficiency to ensure, through various ‘performance related awards’ or through relevant funding ‘drivers’ and ‘levers,’ that a compliant teaching force will adopt the right means to attain the right ends.
But the more philosophically minded have doubts.

Indeed. To take up yet another metaphor: trains are good things, and if we are to rely on them, we do well to run our trains on time. But we must not be too narrowly practical. Not too “grounded.” Without the 30,000 foot view as our foundation, we may find we have operationalized our timely trains thus:

Image: http://www.sevenoaksart.co.uk/trains.htm

Credential or Certificate

Posted on January 21, 2015 by Gardo

I continue to think about what we mean by a “degree.” Or rather, I think about what a degree might or should mean, and what we in higher ed increasingly act as if it means, and how that disjunction (if it is one, which I think it is) plays out across our practices, our assumptions, our mission statements, and our civic life. (I’m sure I’ve left out several crucial areas there.)

My thoughts are spurred by a conversation I had several days ago with a colleague who wanted to know what kind of certificate we might offer as an incentive for open participants to complete a cMOOC. I started thinking about the difference between a certificate and a credential. I talked about credentials many years ago in a presentation I podcast here. At the time, though, I simply urged we recall the root meaning of credential, a word that derives from credence, the mark of believability and the grounds for trust we stipulate as a result of some experience or, perhaps, a formation of character we have collectively witnessed.

I didn’t then have the contrast, though, that would drive the point home. I think now the contrast is between “credential,” a condition of being, and “certificate,” something that is not of a person so much as about some specific competency the person has demonstrated. I grant that I am skeptical of any education that focuses narrowly on “competency,” as if skills could be divorced from contexts, or ideas, or personhood. I grant that my skepticism may lead me to exaggerate the distinction I’m trying to make. Yet the distinction may prove useful in articulating how two views might diverge, an what the consequences might be.

Incorrigible and largely unrepentant English professor that I am, I went on an etymology hunt. R. W. Emerson observed that language is fossil poetry, so it was time for some paleontology. I usually go to the Oxford English Dictionary for my etymologies, for there I will also find a useful set of historical definitions that help chart how early usage changes over time. Tonight, though, I had only my iPad with me at dinner. (I try to travel lighter at conferences when possible–I’m writing this post from the annual meeting of the AAC&U.) I have long known how to use Google to define a word: simply type in the search box “define x” (without quotation marks and with a word where the x goes, of course), and away you go. On a lark, and because Google is always introducing cool new things on the sly (aside from tracking its users, that is), I typed “etymology credential” — and here’s what came up!

Ah. The word was first an adjective, and only later became a noun. First a descriptor, then the thing it described. Alas, the thing described, a credential document, seems to have skipped the possible middle sense of a quality or virtue. Instead, a credential, a trustworthiness or recommendation, is typically reduced to that piece of paper we call a diploma–in other words, a certificate.

As “credential” moves toward “certficate,” “recommendation” becomes “document,” indeed an “official document” attesting to facts, records, achievements, ownership. I’m not arguing that facts, records, achielvement, and ownership are unimportant. Not at all. They’re vital. But taken outside the context of trust, of personhood, of recommendation, credentials edge toward a kind of “guarantee,” or a license. Something transformative becomes instead flat and transactional. Get a certificate, get a raise, get a job. Yes, and those are important, But what of the person?

I continue to mull these things over. A small shift in meaning may lead to a large and potentially regrettable shift in civic and cultural practice. I am especially struck by this possibility in the aftermath of the challenging and fascinating opening forum tonight at the AAC&U meeting.

And I think of the words we say at our higher education commencement ceremonies when it comes time to award to–or is it confer upon?–our students their degrees: we deans present our degree candidates to the President, and say that we are doing so upon the “recommendation of the faculty.” In that moment, deep within that phrase and yet still visible if one knows to look, we may still find what is most valuable about a truly credential education.

Loving the Engineers

Posted on January 20, 2015 by Gardo

Note: the title suggested itself when a melody from a certain song by the Roches popped into my head. That’s exactly the kind of thing that engineers might find puzzling or irrelevant, at least within an academic context, but it may tickle the funny bone of anyone who knows the Roches song I’m talking about.

A couple of weeks ago, Tom Woodward and I had the privilege and pleasure of presenting the new Academic Learning Transformation Laboratory, ALT Lab, to the VCU School of Engineering at their undergraduate studies retreat. We were on a high platform, and our good friends and colleagues from Engineering were arrayed below us at circular tables, waiting respectfully for the cookies that would follow our talk. (The cookies were on the schedule already; we didn’t bring them, though in retrospect we should have offered.)

We came to the task with a little trepidation. As one of my Virginia Tech colleagues once said, “Gardner, you have to understand: these folks really are rocket scientists.” Just what a Miltonist wants to hear, though perhaps Miltonists are the engineers of those who study literature (I did hear of a senior Miltonist shouting out the correct date when a grad student got it wrong at a conference, so obviously we don’t make it all up as we go along). My VT colleague did have a point, however: engineers are smart, math-savvy, and makers of high precision and (sometimes) no small degree of monetizability. Engineers have to get the answers as right as possible, lest the bridge fall down or the pacemaker short out. Precision is an ethical imperative of the discipline. Not much talk about epistemology within engineering circles. A realist epistemology underpins the discipline’s work. So here we were, a history major (Tom) and an English major (me), talking about concepts and pedagogy and doing our best to demonstrate some core questions about understanding and some pretty nifty examples of new ways to represent and do math. And of course I led with the patron saint of ALT Lab, an electrical engineer (with patents!) named Doug Engelbart, and I shared with them Engelbart’s abiding vision of human capability, as well as the conceptual framework that supported and represented that vision.

I also worked in two film clips from The Right Stuff. I was very excited to do so, as you can imagine.

Time flew by, we fielded some questions about learning and digital technologies, and then we packed up our sample cases, so to speak, and left the platform. I found, as always, that my trepidation had turned to excitement. Don’t let this get around, but engineers are some of the coolest folks on the planet, even though some of them pronounce “blogging” as if it rhymes with [redacted]. Not to worry: I’ve known a couple of champion engineer-bloggers in my day. I know it’s possible.

My one regret is that there wasn’t enough time to get to the last three slides in our deck. These were slides that I thought might stimulate some interesting conversation, if not controversy. They also represented a little conceptual framework I was eager to try out, to hear what they might say in response.

Here’s the first slide:

The idea here was to identify four stages of engineering process. No doubt Montessori or Papert covered a similar idea somewhere. Nevertheless, I wanted to try out the idea that both unstructured and ultra-focused stages informed the particular kind of making that characterizes engineering. As I put the slide together, I realized the stages probably informed many other disciplines as well–perhaps all of them.

Play is pretty obvious. Both Huizinga and Bateson have written eloquently about the way play pervades culture, as well as about the way in which play is liberatory in terms of thinking. Some kinds of play involve very elaborate if-this-then-that modes of thinking, all counterfactual, and all on the edge of a dreamworld where everything can turn to metaphor. Here new ideas first emerge. I thought the idea of “play” might be challenging within an engineering context, so I wanted to see what they’d say.

Tinkering is playing with what emerges from play. Tinkering is a more focused and experimental version of play. I’m particularly drawn to the idea of “stochastic tinkering” much loved by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. And here I thought I’d have a slam dunk with my colleagues, since many of the engineers I’ve talked to are quite comfortable with the idea of tinkering. Indeed, many of them became engineers precisely because they love to tinker. Our station engineer at WFDD-FM was nicknamed “Tink,” and it was always a treat to visit him in his office and see all the pieces and parts carefully hanging on the wall or gathered into small plastic drawers in apparently endless organizers.

Practice comes in from music, for me, but stands for the deliberate repetition of any task until one can do it without thinking. Many learning theorists (and others) call this quality “automaticity,” and while human beings are not automatons (at least, not yet), it is still very useful to be able to perform precise motions repeatedly, and to focus on getting it right, whatever “it” is.

Make is as obvious as play, though I figured it would be the most obviously resonant and relevant element for this audience.

Then the next two slides were to explore more complex and, I believe, more accurate representations of the linear process, which even in its more radical moments (“play”) still resembles a standard design model, what project managers would now call a “waterfall” model.

Iterating upward in complexity, I had this slide for us to consider:

Now the line has become a circle, with the implied argument that the cycle cannot be considered complete when the make occurs. Whether one calls this iterative development, rapid prototyping, or the like, the idea is that “make” is more or less perpetual beta. I don’t think we can say that a bridge or a jet engine is itself in perpetual beta, in terms of the engineering that keeps the bridge intact and the jet aloft, but of course we can always iterate toward better bridges, better engines. I am especially interested in the notion that one should play as the next step of iterative development, not simply refine or troubleshoot what’s been made. This is a challenging notion and I could be wrong, but it seems to me that one danger of a thoughtless. automatic model of iterative development is that one can be confined within confirmation biases, iterating away on the polishing of the thing that cannot be polished without revisiting the essential question of “what are we assuming?” (In the article I linked to above, the dangers of too much automaticity are illustrated beautifully by the ham-in-pan story.) I should also say that I am continually saddened by how much “educational technology” is pretty much ham-in-pan thinking. But I digress.

Finally, the most complex of the slides I’d prepared:

The implicit argument here has to do with resemblances and analogies. How are play and practice related–indeed, how might they be versions of each other? Similarly, in what way do making and tinkering represent similar activities?

I’ll leave those questions as exercises for the reader.

And yes, I confess: still loving the engineers.

The Sweet Spots

Posted on January 19, 2015 by Gardo

I have been thinking very hard lately about the nature and value of focused learning, and especially the kinds of focused learning experiences we might explore and craft within school. I greatly admire the DALMOOC George Siemens and his research group at UT-Arlington crafted last fall, but I also worry a little about the binary structure. As a practical matter, the dichotomy makes a great deal of sense. Those of us who are trying to work on modes of openly networked learning continually struggle with the question of how to define, recognize, and reward multiple modes of engagement–or to speak even more precisely, multiple ranges of commitment. Yet I wonder if one can truly read a book, hear a symphony, or watch a movie without being all in. I wonder if being led and being leaders are necessarily always mutually exclusive. That’s not to say that what Tom Woodward calls the “energy inputs” of open participants who come and go during a course of study are of no benefit to the class. Quite the contrary. But I do worry. Are formal structures of what may amount to lesser commitment really a way forward? The opposite extreme, of course, is a formal structure of pedantic insistence–i.e., much or most of what constitutes school-based learning– that can bleach away all the energy of self-directed learning. But these are sad realities of misguided practice, not necessities. I just don’t think that “instructor-led” or “learner-centered” set up the deeper conceptual framework very well. And if I never again hear the grinding binary of “guide at the side / sage on the stage,” I will weep tears of joy. Even Ivan Illich, the great prophet of deschooling, recognized the role and importance of the genuine pedagogue.

For me the positive vectors are commitment, openness; a willingness to dwell in conjectures and dilemmas and to insist on precision (or the nearest aspirational approximation) when precise information and precise execution are needed to keep the spacecraft from disintegrating. I must also testify that experts lead in many different ways, and many of those different ways are not only important and eminently cherishable but have in fact changed my life. When I watch The Godfather, or read A. S. Byatt, or talk with a gifted and humane practitioner of the healing arts and sciences, I give myself over to the experts, not uncritically, but with commitment and a desire to open myself toward those talents, so long as they are not exercised with cruelty or in mere self-interest.

I too keep looking for the sweet spots.

Oddly, that search has also characterized much of my scholarly work as a Miltonist. How could it not, when one of Milton’s choicest lines is “the sober certainty of waking bliss”?

Here’s an anthology of sweet-spot readings, placed together with minimal commentary: bread crumbs along my wandering way.

[Jimmy Henderson] has been compared to Miller as a strict disciplinarian. Certainly he is an excellent leader. Jimmy sees the band as self-disciplined out of pride in themselves as artists and pride in being associated with the Glenn Miller Orchestra. “Discipline we do have,” he affirms, “but regimentation we do not. There is an enormous difference. Regimentation has no place in music.”

Patricia Willard, from her liner notes to The Direct Disc Sound of The Glenn Miller Orchestra, directed by Jimmy Henderson (The Great American Gramophone Company, 1977. GADD-1020).

Orbiting is responsible creativity: vigorously exploring and operating beyond the Hairball of the corporate mind set, beyond accepted models, patterns, or standards” — all the while remaining connected to the spirit of the corporate mission.

To find Orbit around a corporate Hairball is to find a place of balance where you benefit. from the physical, intellectual and philosophical resources of the organization without becoming entombed it eh bureaucracy of the institution.

If you are interested (and it is not for everyone), you can achieve Orbit by finding the personal courage to be genuine and to take the best course of action to get the job done rather than following the pallid path of corporate appropriateness.

To be of optimum value to the corporate endeavor, you must invest enough individuality to counteract the pull of Corporate Gravity, but not so much that you escape that pull altogether. Just enough to stay out of the Hairball.

Through this measured assertion of your own uniqueness, it is possible to establish a dynamic relationship with the Hairball–to Orbit around the institutional mass. If you do this, you make an asset of the gravity in that it becomes a force that keeps you from flying out into the overwhelming nothingness of deep space.

But if you allow that same gravity to suck you into the bureaucratic Hairball, you will find yourself in a different kind of nothingness. The nothingness of a normalcy made stagnant by a compulsion to cling to past successes. The nothingness of the Hairball.

Gordon Mackenzie, Orbiting The Giant Hairball: A Corporate Fool’s Guide to Surviving with Grace (Viking, 1996), p. 33. H/t @marianafunes. NB: I question that “it is not for everyone.” I believe Mackenzie is delivering a strong caution there, not a statement about eligibility or desirability. Or he may simply be trying to forestall objections.

By virtue of a privilege which he shared with the greatest creative artists, the composer [Maurice Ravel] never lost, in his obstinate determination to acquire technical mastery, that fresh sensibility which is the privilege of childhood and is normally lost with advancing years.

Alexis Roland-Manuel, quoted in Richard Freed’s liner notes to the original 1975 Vox Quad recording of Daphnis et Chloe (Ballet Suites Nos. 1&2) and Ma Mere l’Oye, as reproduced in the Mobile Fidelity SACD reissue of that recording in 2005. Ravel is one of my favorite composers, and I cannot imagine a sweeter spot than at the intersection of an “obstinate determination to acquire technical mastery” and “that fresh sensibility which is the privilege of childhood….” How to keep that intersection always in view and always yielding energy? Great teachers have a feel for those tasks.

And yes, such commitments are difficult to manage, especially when they take vastly different forms, experiences, and methodologies. Ironically, an obsession with standardization built out of superficial outputs, outcomes, and analytics will appear to ease the learner’s path, only to rob the learner of the very many-mindedness that leads to the deepest, most transferable, most enduring learning of all.

The changing values of the 1960s influenced the CMU [Carnegie Mellon University] drama department’s instructional program. A few faculty members explored innovative techniques, while others adhered to the acting methods they had learned, or passed along specialized skills like mime, dance, and diction. The diversity of their approaches was both helpful and challenging for the undergraduates. Leon Katz remembers, “There was no uniform attitude to the faculty. We had five acting teachers. All of them were tremendously good and they loathed what one another was doing. Each one had a totally different conceptual training. The students were confused. They would go to [department chairman] Earle Gister and say, “What are we supposed to believe? We’re totally confused!” He said, “Good, that’s your training. You sort it out and find the thing that’s right for you.”

Carol De Giere, The Godspell Experience: Inside a Transformative Musical (Bethel, CT: Scene 1 Publishing, 2014, pp. 21-22)

Gardner Writes

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