Good evening.

In its way, this is a blog post about blogging–and perhaps about learning and creating, generally.

Dan Aulier has compiled one of those bedtable books that one can read for months, an anthology called Hitchcock’s Notebooks: An Authorized and Illustrated Look Inside the Creative Mind of Alfred Hitchcock. It’s a great big festival of a book, a delight to roam through. It also has plenty of food for thought to carry into the new academic term that begins very soon. Here’s one table of the banquet, an excerpt from writer and actor Hume Cronyn’s memoirs as republished in Aulier’s omnibus. Cronyn writes,

“Early on in our working relationship, I discovered a curious trick of [Hitchcock’s]. We would be discussing some story point with great intensity, trembling on the edge of a solution to the problem at hand, when Hitch would suddenly lean back in his chair and say, ‘Hume, have you heard the story of the traveling salesman and the farmer’s daughter?’ I would look at him blankly and he would proceed to tell it with great relish, frequently commenting on the story’s characters, the nature of the humor involved, and the philosophical demonstration implied. That makes it sound as though the stories might be profound or at least witty. They were neither. They were generally seventh-grade jokes of the sniggery school, and frequently infantile.

“After several days’ work together, punctuated by such stories, I challenged him–politely.

‘Why do you do that?’

‘Do what?’

‘Stop to tell jokes at a critical juncture.’

‘It’s not critical–it’s only a film.’

‘But we were just about to find a solution to the problem. I can’t even remember what it was now.’

‘Good. We were pressing….. You never get it when you press.’

Cronyn concludes:  “And while I may have failed to appreciate Hitch’s jokes, I’ve never forgotten that little piece of philosophy, either as an actor or as a sometime writer.”

Compare Walker Percy’s endorsement of the “indirect approach,” as well as the phenomenon known to astronomers as averted vision. I’m particularly intrigued by a deeply paradoxical notion that emerges in every case, a notion that certainly rings true to my own experience: it takes practice to “not press” successfully. It’s not at all the same as slacking or snacking. Sometimes it seems that the art of “not pressing” is the hardest art of all to master, and also the most necessary to move from one level of expertise to another. And in another paradox, once one has a feel for not pressing, for the indirect approach, for averted vision, one can go to that zone almost immediately when a novel situation or a new level of learning appears.

These ideas form a constellation in my mind with several others. “Beginner’s mind” (shoshin). The third stage of learning that brings back wonder and self-motivated learning, a progression that Paulo Friere and Seymour Papert discuss.  Poincare and creativity.  I am struck by how often similar ideas recur in various guises. Knowing how to know to not-know. The vanishing light around the rim of the unknown unknown can be seen only through such practices, I think.

Brian Mathews’ latest Ubiquitous Librarian blog poses a question that may be obliquely related to some or all of the above (and fittingly so). I don’t know that early adopters who move through change more quickly and with greater joy have mastered the arts of not pressing, along with the arts of averted vision and the indirect approach, but it’s interesting to consider. Certainly those arts can keep us from falling into the trap of substituting elevator pitches for voyages of discovery.

Postscript: I have had to train myself over many years to answer direct questions (typically from administrators and other gatekeepers) about the character and value of a project, the specific plan for an exploration, the criteria for successful “outcomes” (and all the assessment apparatus that entails) (and I’ve learned it may be bad form to confuse “learning objectives” and “learning outcomes”), and so forth. One wants to be responsible, to be granted resources for action, to exercise due diligence, to act like a grown-up. Indeed, and no question. Yet I always hope, and in my own practice strive, to find a moment or two, or more, for the not pressing and the averted vision. An indirect approach, an open space, like a cup for Elijah, who might one day return to demonstrate the poverty and dessication of spirit that often conceals itself behind bullet points and elevator pitches.

One of my holiday books–a birthday present from my sister-in-law and her husband–is Keith Richards’ memoir Life. I understand I’m a little late to the party. I really did need to read Pete Townshend’s memoir first. But now I’m there, thanks to family and surviving another trip around the sun.

As many others have reported and experienced, it’s a terrific book. Those who are skeptical about Keith’s powers of recall after a life of storied dissipation have obviously neither seen him organize the ultimate Chuck Berry concert in Hail Hail Rock ‘n Roll!  nor thought very deeply about the Rolling Stones. The man is whip-smart, generous of spirit, albeit sometimes dangerous of mood–and obviously, attractively so. He’s also tremendously insightful. So in the midst of all the stories of glory days and decades on parade, thrilling as they are, there are also extraordinary moments that reveal a spiritual intensity, and devotion to music, not unlike Pete T.’s own. Keith is quite open and compellingly articulate about his own search for the music of the spheres.

And along the way, I found a passage that reminded me, very strongly, of much of what I value about large parts of the open-education movement, those parts in which the activists are large and generous of heart. The passage celebrates records.

I’ve learned everything I know off of records. Being able to replay something immediately without all that terrible stricture of written music, the prison of those bars, those five lines. Being able to hear recorded music freed up loads of musicians that couldn’t necessarily afford to learn to read or write music, like me. Before 1900, you’ve got Mozart, Beethoven, Bach, Chopin, the cancan. With recording, it was emancipation for the people. As long as you or somebody around you could afford a machine,  suddenly you could hear music made by people, not set-up rigs and symphony orchestras. You could actually listen to what people were saying, almost off the cuff. Some of it can be a load of rubbish, but some of it was really good. It was the emancipation of music. Otherwise you’d have had to go to a concert hall, and how many people could afford that? It surely can’t be any coincidence that jazz and blues started to take over the world the minute recording started, within a few years, just like that. The blues is universal, which is why it’s still around. Just the expression and the feel of it came in because of recording. It was like opening the audio curtains,. And available, and cheap. It’s not just locked into one community here and one community there and the twain shall never meet. And of course that breeds another totally different kind of musician, in a generation. I don’t need this paper. I’m going to play it straight from the ear, straight from here, straight from the heart to the fingers. Nobody has to turn the pages.

Now of course there’s a great deal to criticize, modify, and otherwise nuance in this panegyric. And as a rock and jazz musician (barely, in most cases, but still) who can also read music and loves classical music as well as all the electrified (and otherwise popular) idioms, I do wish Keef were not so eager to trash the results of trained musicianship.

But still…. Listen to the melody of his words, and for “machine” think “networked computer,” and for “what people were saying, almost off the cuff,” think “blogging,” and for “how many people could afford that?” don’t contradict Keith with free concerts in the park so much as remember the nearly unavoidable class distinctions enforced by the experience of formal symphonic performances, and remember too that Keith was working-class and council-house through and through. Feel the liberation he’s feeling, and evoking. He’s honest enough to admit, readily, that not every note of recorded popular music is golden. But the care and thoughtfulness with which he evokes the experience of his own emancipation as a musician, and his deep gratitude for having this creative path, this mode of knowing and expression, opened to him–these, yes, are the deep and moving confessions of a person whose talent would not have found its glorious expression before this stage of technological development.

“And of course that breeds another totally different kind of musician, in a generation. I don’t need this paper.”

We are now at an interesting moment–yes, partly because of MOOCs and partly because of what web-builders and OER advocates and other educational activists have been doing for many years. And that moment could go in any number of good or bad directions. And “some of of it can be a load of rubbish,” and is. Yet I wonder if this interesting moment is like that moment in which recorded music began to breed another totally different kind of musician. I wonder if we have begun to see the beginning of a critical mass of varied open educational opportunities and experiences, and if we will breed another totally different kind of student, in a generation–or perhaps less. A student who doesn’t need this paper. A student for whom learning goes straight from the heart to the fingers, and back again. The formality of the experience isn’t necessarily bad. Keith’s story reveals his own hyperfocused, obsessive, diligent practice of his art. He is a scholar. But the scholarship was mediated differently, and his compositions too, and these would have been lost without the turn in the technology. This turn enabled deeply committed work to emerge. Musical notation can and does too, of course. That itself is a technology, like writing. Keith misses that. But he gets the need and the liberation, and the technology’s role in feeding both. He learned his music. And while music in its origins was learned without pages, it’s a  lead-pipe cinch that Keith wouldn’t have made the connection with a culture half a globe away, the connection that opened himself to himself, and to us. For him, the records were open educational resources, and conveyed an openness of spirit within the medium that could not otherwise be conveyed, or shared.

Not always, and no guarantees. But perhaps often enough, if we think with at least some of the spirit Keith shares with us here, and keep searching for the music of the spheres, wherever and however it may be sounding.

Life, p. 71.

A few days late, alas. I had this one done in time for Christmas, but with one thing and another it’s only now I’m posting it.

As Warren Zevon once sang, “And Johnny is my main man.” Of late, in addition to my other projects, I’ve been working steadily on a couple of scholarly projects involving John Milton. I’ll finish an essay on temptation this week. Well, I won’t finish it, as writing is never really finished. I’ll simply abandon it–but not until I’ve given it one version of my best shot.

To keep the mood going and the context fresh and vital, I thought I’d do a podcast of Milton’s first mature publication, “Ode on the Morning of Christ’s Nativity.” I describe it a bit in the first part of the podcast. Suffice it to say that, like all great art, this poem proceeds from many sources and emerges into many vectors. Some of these are exhilarating. Some are admirable. Some are worth wonder. Some are scholarly curiosities. Some represent the struggles of a believer in many things, not all of them consistent. You’ll notice that Milton lingers, very lovingly and harshly too, on the pagan gods the Christ child has come to banish. I think Milton had many mixed motives and ambivalent emotions as he did so. To believe in anything is to disbelieve in other things, no matter how broad one’s outlook. Milton knew and felt this reality more keenly than any other great artist I know. The struggle was costly, and revelatory, and complex. My own critical position is that Milton understood the struggle and the cost, and created astonishing art to represent these complexities out of both certainty and uncertainty, settled conclusions and wandering appetites. He tells us so, pretty explicitly and quite beautifully, in all his work–if we’ve a mind and heart to read it so.

But now I’m writing my essay, and time is my tedious post should here have ending. Wherever you are, geographically or politically or epistemologically or religiously, I hope you enjoy this example of a 21-year-old poet exulting in his newly fledged artistic powers and taking the measure of some of the best poetry ever written in English. As I read it, I felt again the sensation I had in the fall of 1980 when I read this poem for the first time–the sensation that here was a verbal imagination that could achieve any effect it wished to, an imagination whose wishes were born of the desire for human progress, human justice, and human community. A desire more fierce and visionary than that of any other poet. A desire that could also embrace tenderness, and poignancy, and order serviceable.

Happy birthday, 2013.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (12.4MB)

How could anyone resist a session with this title–and this layout for the schedule display?

So I went to Bret Victor’s session, arriving about fifteen minutes after he’d begun. There was an animated fish on the screen, and a worm on a hook, and sometimes bubbles, and sometimes a little wheel (that I later learned was a timing element). Bret was demoing the most recent iteration of his Dynamic Pictures research. The idea, as I understand it (and my understanding of it is just beginning, so this is all memory, exploration, interpolation, and probably full of mistakes and gross oversimplifications), is that math is not only about language, as in an abstract set of symbols, either mathematical symbols or programming code. Instead, math is also about geometry, visual representation that can move and be acted upon directly through a UI that nevertheless asks the user to think abstractly about what’s happening “concretely” in the visual representation one is manipulating.

Bret’s project is to use the computer to allow for new methods of reasoning–or perhaps not “new” so much as “newly applied.” We now have the tools to allow us to think, to reason, in differently mediated ways. Why not use them to do so?

The session was mesmerizing and so … different … that I had a very strange sensation as I tried to take it in. I felt at the very edge of my zone of promixal development. That is, I could understand what Bret was saying as he was saying it, but that cognitive bubble was very small, so small that I found myself with no extra resources for deep metacognition. At the same time, I also felt as if I had had this experience already at various times in my life: when I fingerpainting in kindergarten, when I got my Radio Shack 50-in-1 electronics kit for Christmas, when I got my first stereo and began to understand what “soundstages” were in audio reproduction.

Picture from an Ebay seller. Mine is in better shape (and in Texas right now).

What all of these experiencs shared was a strange, almost surreal link between the world of objects and the world of thought, as if a sufficiently intense thought could create something material, or as if a sufficiently intriguing, provocative, or alluring material object could somehow emit thoughts as if those thoughts were embedded within it. Longtime readers will recognize that the “meaning” and “doing” modalities here are part of my obsession with poetry, with the myth of Orpheus, with John Donne and T. S. Eliot, with computers and stereos and electronics generally. Bret is an obsessive’s obsessive whose mental landscape must be a mashup of Magritte, Tufte, Mike Oldfield, Cervantes, Alan Turing, and Ada Lovelace. To name only a few.

Doug Engelbart came strongly to mind during Bret’s demo, as his ideas of hypersymbolic communication and the next stage of human evolution seem eerily realized and advanced by Bret’s work.

If I recall correctly, Bret himself cited Seymour Papert’s work with LOGO and the programmable turtles as an influence. The interesting difference here is that Bret takes Papert’s turtles and re-abstracts them into the realm of visual representation, with the twist that dynamic visual representation then becomes the origin point, not the result, of programming. It’s as if one programmed the computer by moving the turtle–but the motion is realized with the precision and yet also the familiarity (tactile, motor, cognitive) of a simple drawing. A virtual turtle that moves the mind that imagines it.

Bret’s website–actually, I’d call it his cognitive exoskeleton–is worrydream.com. It’s actually (online) cognitive exoskeleton 3.0. His previous websites, linked on the new one, also repay close investigation. The biographical sections are very interesting, as the representation of self in language, to my mind (heh), is analogous to what Bret is doing with his dynamic pictures.  The precise modes of “interaction” and dynamism that linguistic self-representation enacts (particularly in poetry) are extraordinarily complex, of course, and more than I can get into here. But I wanted to register the resemblance.

To bring in one more of my favorites, I don’t believe I’ve ever seen a more convincing elaboration or illumination of Alan Kay’s aphorism that “the computer is an instrument whose music is ideas.” (I just learned that Alan Kay knows Bret’s work–of course he must–these circles are unbroken–lovely to see this.)

The climax of the session for me was “part three,” in which Bret performed a short video uniting myth, the creation of life, the rise of cities, space flight, and a panoply of human voices that, unlike the ones Prufrock hears, wake us and we breathe…. You had to be there. You’d have heard the whoop than rang through the room as we responded to what we’d just experienced.

Tweets for Bret Victor’s demo at FOO Camp 2012

I sensed it’d be something special, and I did make an iPhone video that works for me as a souvenir. I don’t know how intelligible it would be for others. Perhaps all you need to see are the gestures, the timing, the slight swaying-to-the-beat. Here’s one frame from the video, toward the end:

See the way that fellow is leaning forward? Take that as a representation of what I think we were all feeling at that moment.

Bret’s Twitter page has a one sentence profile: “The Prerequisite Is Hope.” Bret’s logo is a windmill. As I write of this remarkable session, I find myself wishing I could spend a semester (or more) of advanced study as a cognitive apprentice to this young man. Anyone who gives Papert’s The Children’s Machine seven stars on a five-star scale is someone I would gladly know better. Perhaps our paths will cross again. The trick for me will be to retain the enthusiastic naivete that would keep me hopeful, instead of the all-too-easy sinking feeling that would make my naivete cower in shame. That’s a roundabout way of saying that if I’d known as much about Bret before FOO Camp as I’ve been learning since, I’d have been too self-conscious to rush up to him and say hello the way I did the day before. And that would have been a great shame and a greatly wasted opportunity.

EPILOGUE:

After Bret’s session, I wandered to the big tent for the closing session. I was a bit disappointed. Tim and Sara spoke briefly. Tim said he thought the Camp had gone very well indeed, and that it was a fitting 10th-anniversary iteration of the grand idea. Sara thanked all who’d made it possible. We yelled out our thanks in return. There was applause. And that was it. I’m not sure what kind of closure I expected or wanted. I know everyone was worn out. But I wanted more reflection from the leaders, I guess, more of a sense of their hopes and dreams. Sometimes one wants a sage on a stage–the key word here being sage. I have no problem with the sage on the stage when I feel there is wisdom to be gained, as I did here.

So I walked around for a bit afterward, looking at the now-empty spaces where just a few  moments before there’d been such a buzz of activity and conversation. I like walking through such spaces and hearing the mental echoes of the presences I’d experienced there. I learned those pleasures when I did theatre in high school and college, and found I enjoyed walking around the set after everyone had gone home, or even after the play had closed. Something about moments and people and the places we inhabit, something about the relation of mental space and emotional space and physical space.

As I kept on wandering, I found myself heading upstairs in Building B to look at the Make Lab, one place I hadn’t been during the weekend. There I found a set of folks still busily engaged in various activities, as if the weekend were still going strong.

In this corner of the O’Reilly multiverse, the Camp hadn’t ended after all. I now understood the sign I’d seen on the Conference Schedule wall earlier in the day:

I have a sneaky suspicion Bret Victor made this sign.

Unparadoxically (guess I watched my steps well), it turned out that it wasn’t too late to get a 3D printout of my head. A “bust of Gardo.” I got in line, got scanned, and got my printout in the queue. “Come back in about an hour and a half,” I was told. So I did, and you can see the results here.

Many thanks to Sabrina Merlo for that ultracool photo. Special thanks to Eric Chu for his patient, welcoming work on the scanning and printing, and on answering my many questions about the process, all long after folks were vacating the campus. Really, everyone at Make Lab was amazing. I felt a depth of connection there that took my breath away and helped me feel less like an outsider and more like a fellow geek. It was a superb ending to the FOO Camp experience, one in which I had many conflicting emotions, chief among them my great desire to make the most of the time I was there by contributing to it in some meaningful way.

I found that “making the most” was difficult for me this go ’round. In other experiences like this, most notably the Governor’s School in Virginia and the Frye Leadership Conference, I’ve found the “come on in” portal sooner, or more securely. I didn’t really find it here until I found the Make Lab on the final afternoon. Having found it there, I could see the places the portal might have been flickering earlier in the weekend–or even places I might have walked through that “come on in” portal without knowing it. Hard to say.

But as you can tell from this series of blog posts, my first blogging in (I regret to say) over three months, the experience made a huge impression on me. Looking back a week later, I can see that these posts came out of a strong sense that if I hadn’t found a way, I had to make one. Just like the tagline says. So these posts are my portal, and for what they’re worth, my contribution.

One last thought. Before I got my invitation to FOO Camp, I may have heard of the gathering, but I had no idea, really, what it was, or why it was, or who had been. During the Camp, several tweets appeared in the stream from folks who weren’t there. Some were angry, some were rather snarky and resentful. For some reason it always surprises me to see such things, which is very strange, as such responses are utterly predictable and have a long history in all things human. While it wasn’t fun to hear virtual raspberries, especially when I felt very much the outlier and was trying hard to make sense of it all myself, I am gradually becoming more aware of FOO Camp’s place in the larger hacker/maker/thinker culture in which it exists. All very complicated, to be sure, but in some ways I also feel as if I’ve been here before: the always-difficult balance between community and exclusion, between the drive for excellence and the gradual narrowing of one’s criteria for excellence.

I was bemused (not amused–there’s a difference–see definition one) to see this tweet shortly after the Camp ended:

Required reading for all #foocamp-ers -> The Inner Ring by C. S. Lewis lewissociety.org/innerring.php

— Jason Huggins (@hugs) June 11, 2012

A salutary caution indeed. Yet the care the FOO Camp leaders take to refresh the group each summer by making fully half of the crowd new attendees suggests the leaders are mindful of these dangers as well. And there are outliers–more of us than I might have imagined–who have little or nothing to do with Silicon Valley or hacking or web development. Still: point taken. And I did reread the essay. At one point Lewis writes, “Until you conquer the fear of being an outsider, an outsider you will remain.” Interesting that his caution can apply equally to people who believe themselves “in” and to people who believe themselves “out.” I guess it comes down to motive, to “desire” (Lewis’s word), to the why of one’s participation or ambition. But here I feel a Milton essay coming on (all these topics are covered in his work, to stunning effect).

So that’s it for now. To all at FOO Camp, but especially to Tim O’Reilly and Sara Winge for leading the Camp, and to the person or persons (you know who you are) who suggested I be invited, my thanks. I’ll be thinking about this experience, and working through it, for a very long time to come.

Thanks also to Virginia Tech and the good folks in the Division of Learning Technologies for supporting my travel and participation.

A dream we dreamed one afternoon long ago.

Inch your way through dead dreams to another land.

This day didn’t turn out as I had planned, but though that was hugely disappointing (more on this below), what did happen was, it turned out, very important. I wish there’d been some way to have it all, but then I always wish that. Someone has to wish that. Otherwise, we don’t get as much as we might. Or so the story goes (i.e., the one I’m sticking to).

Session One: FIX COLLEGE, led by Allen Downey of Olin College. I’d seen Allen at several of the sessions I’d attended. I was curious to see what his session would be like. Like the Academic Research debate the day before (Allen also attended that one), this session was very lively and quickly got to some core issues, which of course was a very good thing. Allen listed “what needs fixing” on one board as the audience contributed a long and familiar list of candidates: cost, access, curriculum, narrow vision, lack of intellectual integration, etc. I contributed “absence of creative participation in Internet culture,” which for once, I’m happy to say, actually made sense to a group of discussants. Most higher ed people have little or no idea what I’m talking about when I say “creative participation in Internet culture,” I’m sorry to say, because most of them do not creatively participate in Internet culture themselves. Several people in this group actually help define current Internet culture–Nerdfighter/SciShow maestro Hank Green was sitting right in front of me–so they grokked what I was saying immediately. In fact, someone piped up right away to say, “yes, though many universities seem to believe they are actually ‘using technology’ in their teaching and learning strategies–the term “Internet culture” demonstrates what they aren’t doing.” As I look back on FOO Camp, that moment was one of the true highlights for me, one time when I felt that a true, deep grokking had happened that typically eludes me in other contexts. I will also say, here and now, again, that without creative participation in Internet culture, colleges and universities are fooling themselves with regard to their strategies for progress in the age of online learning. The nightmare scenario, of course, is that colleges and universities will not only fool themselves but turn us all into (bigger) fools as well, as they’ve shown themselves to be completely capable of doing with the industrial models of education and “learning management” they’ve perpetuated in what should have been a Golden Age of digital learning comparable to the Golden Age of the early days of networked, interactive computing itself. The next stage, of course, will be to find ways to use analytics and flipped classrooms and climbing walls and big-time athletics and whatever else comes over the transom to make learning manageable (and profitable) (and effective at creating tractable, non-disruptive “citizens” out of free democratic agents). Then we’ll have what we have now, but even more commodified, and probably cheaper too, except for the finishing boutiques available to those who can still pay the stiff tuition and/or endure the crippling debt.

But I digress. (I delivered a burst-screed not unlike the above at the session and elicited the response “tell us what you really think,” to which I responded “well, the play was terrible, too.” Hey now, hey now.)

One of the participants (I think it was Hank Green) pointed out that graduates are likely to be expected to know how to blog, but of course universities aren’t doing much of this. (I’m proud to be an exception and to be helping more VT colleagues move in that direction; I’m also proud to have had a hand in the BIg Exception led by the exceptional folks at the University of Mary Washington.) Instead, it’s still term papers all the way down. Right. This is a tough needle to thread. I don’t want students to be blogging because that’s something General Electric wants them to be able to do. On the other hand, blogging has such a wonderful potential for disruption (if it’s really blogging and not just PR by other means) that I do want a generation of graduates able to practice their potential disruption–and its twin, innovation–on company time. Oh yes.

Lots of lively discussion in this session, with a closing emphasis on “what can we do?” Allen shared his proposal for mini- or even micro-colleges that would have few students, a completely set shared curriculum, no classrooms (only co-working space), no classes (all studio-style learning, with direct instruction mingled with coaching, mentoring, apprenticeship, etc.), no dormitories (students find places to live in the community), and a huge emphasis on having the students work within the community, and share their learning with the community. Kind of an “embedded studenthood.” There’d be next to no student services. The students would provide their own extracurriculars. An entire layer of administrators and support personnel could be eliminated. The resulting cost savings would mean about 10K per year per student in tuition.

This is a wonderfully audacious vision and there’s a lot to like about it. Fact is, I’d love to work at a college like that. The biggest downside, as one participant noted, is that students would have to have decided not only on a college but on a particular curriculum before they’d even enrolled. Allen agreed this was a problem, but pointed out that the cost of switching would be low. Some folks responded (I among them) that the larger goals of intellectual development and the acquisition of a cultural toolkit that could be used to change the culture might also be lost in this plan. Allen conceded these were difficult and important questions. But I remain intrigued by the idea of a network of minicolleges, learners embedded in their communities, curriculum and learning vastly reimagined. Intrigued, and inspired, and grateful to Allen for convening the session. We ended by nominating “weird schools” for ambitious students and wise parents to consider. I gave a loud plug for Hampshire College. Another person gave a shout-out to Warren Wilson, which her parents had attended. Everyone pointed out the value of internships and (especially) study abroad. And at one point, someone proposed a survey of who among us had graduated from a “top 50” undergraduate college. Fewer than half of us said “yes.” Fascinating.

Session Two: O’Reilly.edu. This session never really started, as the facilitator didn’t make it in to start it. So four of us sat around and talked for awhile, which is itself a good outcome, even though it wasn’t the one I had anticipated. The best part of the talking for me was a very intense and passionate conversation with a professional skateboarder named Rodney Mullen. This was the most direct, electric connection I felt with anyone during the camp. It deserves a blog post all its own. Suffice it to say that Rodney listened with astonishing energy; when he focused on what you were saying, the focus was of such high quality, so generous, that the saying took on a life of its own. I found myself near tears as I tried to articulate my own practice and ambitions as a teacher and a learner. We went from New Media to Milton and back again within two minutes of blazingly intense exchange. I didn’t feel his commitment to our conversation waver at all, even for a nanosecond. And he was equally generous in the way he talked about his own work, his own life’s journey, and his own struggles with imposter syndrome. I was floored, gobsmacked, humbled, inspired. It was a great gift and the one moment during the entire experience where I felt a complete high-bandwidth connection with another person, where I felt my need to be understood and my drive to understand were in perfect synchrony, mutually reinforcing, and making their way to another land. My thanks to Rodney for those thirty minutes. They made all the difference.

Session Three: I had signed up to lead a discussion on “Helping Faculty UNCLENCH About Computers.” I had struggled with the title, at first calling it “Bring Me  A Higher Love (for participatory culture),” but then thought that would be way too abstract, or perhaps even coals to Newcastle in this setting. What I really wanted to talk about was my ongoing (and distressingly desultory) work with the New Media Faculty-Staff Development Seminar.

As it turned out, it didn’t matter what I called it, as no one showed up.

I sat there for fifteen minutes or so. I spent a few minutes wondering what the heck I thought I was doing and who was I fooling anyway? I watched Ted Nelson’s very strange little video entitled “Silicon Valley Preview 1.3,” which I’d been dying to see since Anil Dash brought it up in the very first session. Then I decided to pack up and head for Bret Victor’s session, “Stop Drawing Dead Fish.” As you can imagine, I was pretty crestfallen (ok, maybe even crushed) that my session drew zero interest. On the other hand, I had wanted to see Bret’s session anyway, and was disappointed when we turned out to have selected the same slot on Sunday.

So as it further turned out, it was a good thing to have seen Bret’s session. A very good thing indeed. I’ll try to explain why in part two of my write-up on FOO Camp, Day Three.

FOO Camp 2012

Yesterday the unconference sessions got started. I want to record some memories and thoughts here. I hope to expand on them later, but I know myself well enough to know that if I don’t get something down right away, it will become harder and harder to get the headspace I need and the events deserve. All a longwinded way of saying “half a loaf ahead … better than none, I hope.”

Also, please note that about eight to ten concurrent sessions are typically going for each time slot. My experience, alas, will thus be a very very thin slice of the whole (half a loaf, and very thin slices as well; someone call the metaphor police, please).

SESSION ONE “Dave Winer Is Always Right.” Led by Anil Dash, one of the many folks whose name and face I recognized, while at the same time recognizing that I truly knew next to nothing about his work. I’ve had many such humbling moments at FOO Camp. I need a sabbatical or three. Nothing to do but keep working.

As I said in one of my live tweets from the session, I felt like I had just enough knowledge of Dave, his work, and the larger technical/cultural issues to be able to follow along. I was fascinated to learn more about Dave’s role in the tech community, including the way his stubborn insistence on certain core principles had earned him both respect and rejection. Personality aside (though this tribe is certainly personality-rich–I’m often reminded of the movie Real Genius around here, and one of the participants in this session looked exactly like Kevin Smith’s “Warlock” character in Live Free, Die Hard), Dave’s core principles were, by consensus, largely correct and consistently prescient, if one accepts the idea of a free and open Internet as a good thing (I certainly do, and the folks in the room did too). RSS beat Atom because RSS was good enough. While others debated standards, Dave developed RSS enclosures, teamed up with ex-MTV VJ Adam Curry, and made podcasting a vital force in the cybersphere. Dave’s idea of the “river of information” actually predicted the world in which we now live, where the experience of reading a constant feed informs the core experience of Facebook (even though all acknowledged that Facebook was not a model of a free and open Internet). The idea of a personal cyberinfrastructure (my term) that came up as a “local server for poets” went by very quickly and I didn’t get the reference, though it seems to be like the ideas Dave was expressing in his “Let’s Build A New Internet In Academia,” where he argues, correctly in my view, that “Every student should at least have a chance to manage their own infrastructure.” (I would add to this that the creation and management of that infrastructure should not only be viewed as creating and managing a tool, but envisioning and displaying a kind of cognitive architecture, a network that is also an artifact.) Two other impressions I took away from this session: this conversation has been going on a long time, and the participants were all acutely aware of the history and had in fact contributed extensively to it (another way of saying I was visiting another tribe, one I’ve tried to participate in with my distant, crab-wise, oblique strategies); and that there was a sense of nostalgia in the room for the more robust days of the late 90s through the middle of the first decade of the 21st century, a time when folks were blogging furiously about all the new modes of interaction coming online just as Web 2.0 kicked in fully. The folks in the room, most of whom looked quite young to me, talked about new developers who had “the arrogance of youth” and were busy reinventing mainstays like blogging in their own image. They spoke admiringly of this new generation, but also noted they “could teach them something, could help mentor them.” Not for the first time I was reminded how quickly Internet years pass, and how much has happened in just the nine years since I started on my own path in edtech. Part of the session’s praise of Dave Winer had to do with his stubborn persistence as a blogger–he just keeps talking, and never gives up. (I have taken this to heart.) Much more to say about this session–I felt like an elderly anthropologist, but also like a kid listening to the grownups talk about the old days. A strange mixture to be sure.

Session Two: “The Future of Reading,” led by Linda Holliday. This session was the most disturbing of the day for me, and I need to unpack it at much greater length. Here’s the short version. Many people in the group thought the purpose of reading serious nonfiction was to get the “ideas” from the text, and that books would be better if one could skip all the “narrative” parts (remember, we’re still talking about nonfiction here) and just get those “ideas.” The use case was Kevin Kelly’s new book What Technology Wants. Apparently Kevin writes his books by putting Post-It notes everywhere with his sources, ideas, etc. Then he connects those thoughts and sources with a narrative thread running through a long monograph. But wouldn’t it be better, the session asked, if we could just skip the “narrative thread” part and just get the original Post-It notes of “ideas.” I keep putting that word in quotation marks because, as I argued in that session, the notion of context-and-narrative-free “ideas” really didn’t match with my idea of ideas, which includes the richness of context and all the associative trails, as Vannevar Bush would say, that formed that web of context. There was more talk about how attention spans were shrinking and we needed ways for books to accommodate that fact. I of course think that we should be militating against shrinking attention spans (if they are in fact shrinking).

I’m all for exploring new forms of writing and publishing. The demo of Citia I saw was genuinely interesting: it reminded me of HyperCard and had very intriguing functionality with respect to highlighting, annotating, and storing favorite parts. Yet when the talk turned to “giving people what they want,” and what they want appeared to be a mere set of bullet points or sound bites instead of the rich experience of cognitive engagement shared by author and reader, I found myself increasingly disturbed. Skimming, sound bites, bullet points, dessicated and contextless “ideas”? At times it sounded as if I were hearing the reinvention of No Child Left Behind as a strategy for marketing books. One person (I’m not trying to call anyone out by name here) noted that she just couldn’t read the elaborate Victorian prose of William James’s Varieties of Religious Experience, and wished there were a more modern rendering available of “just the main and original ideas.” “Like a Cliff’s Notes,” another person chimed in, without a trace of irony. I confess I was appalled. We’re talking about losing the ability to appreciate and understand a wide variety of expressive strategies in language–and treating the 19th century as if it were Chaucer’s Middle English. Another person talked about how hard it was to read Shakespeare. Admittedly, there is indeed a language barrier there, but there are also many helps to get one to a more skilled reading of the original text. This person appeared to want the helps alone, and was ready to give up on understanding the originals. I could hear Joe Friday in my mind, repeating “Just the facts” over and over, as if facts derive or communicate meaning in the absence of context. Again, I must emphasize that the platform I saw was intriguing, and I fully agree that we need multiple modes of reading and communication. The bound volume made of dead trees is not the gold standard by any means. But the argument I was hearing wasn’t so much about formats or modes of expression so much as it was about what seemed to me to be an Evelyn Wood approach to skimming rich expressivity in search of brief, declarative sentences that would fit on the electronic equivalent of an index card, all in the name of saving us time and catering to our busy modern lifestyles. One participant did ask “what about the synthesis an author provides?” but that question didn’t really get answered, at least in my hearing. Jeepers. I wasn’t the only one pushing back here, but it did seem to me that I must experience and value reading in a way that’s very different from the other folks in this session. I found that disturbing.

Lunch: I had an interesting conversation with folks about education and analogous strategies for organizational motivation and productivity. When folks at the table asked what I did, I replied “I’m an English professor.” The fellow to my right said, “are you sure you’re at the right conference?” To which the only answer is, oh yes. One very interesting fellow across from me had the Christmas Story “Fragile” leg tattooed on his arm. I found this very charming. One of the great things about FOO Camp for me is seeing how far people are willing to go to assert their status as mavericks.

Session Three: After SOPA/PIPA, what? Led by Catherine Bracy. Here the basic question emerged of whether the recent (partially) successful defense of the open free Internet should be extended to other human rights questions such as prison reform. Should we try to encourage free Internet advocates to take up other kind of advocacy as well? There was no consensus. A strong point was made that advocating freedom of speech was qualitatively different from using free speech to advocate various other policy issues. (This struck me as an interesting platform-vs.-application argument.) I found myself in sympathy with the hope that the Internet community could rally to other causes as well, while at the same time believing, like Milton in Areopagitica, that disagreements and the “hewing of timbers” were not only inevitable but desirable in an open exchange of ideas, and the openness of that exchange is a different matter from the direction or conclusions of that exchange. Still, I recognize that these are very complex questions.

At one point, I raised the question of education: I argued we should be teaching the basic architecture of the Internet, and the values that informed its development, as part of civics lessons in middle school. I challenged the group to come up with three Top Reads they’d recommend to anyone who wants to know why a free and open Internet was created and why it matters. What emerged was John Barlow’s “Declaration on the Independence of Cyberspace” and Benkler’s The Wealth of Networks (I asked, “the whole thing?”). Perhaps there was one more–the discussion was getting a bit chaotic by that time, veering from lobbying to expert testimony to the question of whether democracy could really scale to 300 millions citizens. I didn’t get much traction with my challenge, in the end, though there was general agreement that a democracy depends on an educated citizenry, not just a bullied and manipulated and influenced citizenry. There were also interesting arguments about whether Congress was venal or simply clueless–many argued the latter. The limits of the apolitical and the political were also discussed, indirectly.

Session Four: Invisible Economies and the clothesline paradox. Led by Tim O’Reilly. Taking his point of departure from an essay in Stewart Brand’s “Coevolution Quarterly,” Tim asked us to help him capture examples of new monetized Internet economies as well as unrecognized economies born of the Internet whose values are not yet being tracked or measured, values that could play a role in new kinds of economies. The ideas are much more complex than I could possibly summarize here. Luckily, Tim’s been working on this idea in other venues, and Ethan Zuckerman has a very helpful and articulate account of Tim’s recent visit to the MIT Media Lab, where he discussed many of the same ideas he did yesterday at FOO Camp. Tim’s obviously stepping back at FOO Camp so this doesn’t become the O’Reilly show, and I certainly respect him for that. Still, it was great to be in that session with him and to be in contact with a mind and spirit I’ve got such tremendous respect and admiration for.

Session Five: The Quantified Mind–self-hacking to get greater cognitive gains. Led by Jeremy Howard. Jeremy told the story of learning Chinese as a cognitive performance experiment, and revealed that the CIA actually maintains a list of languages rated by their level of difficulty for Westerners. (Who knew?) In his learning, Jeremy did an experiment, and used a feedback program called Anki, a program like another, older program called “Super Memo,” to let him know what times of day, and what circumstances, led to greatest effectiveness in memorization. Also discussed: Amazon’s spaced-repetition Kindle highlights, Memory Theatre, Treadmill Desks, and (my contribution) the growing field of neuroeducation as evidenced in “Mind, Brain, and Education,” which seemed of interest to Ze Frank, which of course gave me a good feeling, being a fan of his work and all. (I really am working hard to keep up the self-confidence and not be too dazzled by all the Folks I Am Meeting In Person. Bear with me.)

Session Six: How to Build Community. Led by Hank Green (of Nerdfighters and SciShow) and Ze Frank. Issues discussed: best practices in moderating forums, encouraging followers to become mindful contributors, community-as-action and not just community-as-aggregation, the relation between online communities and communities in physical space. At one point, Kathy Sierra told the story of Java City and their policy of “no dumb answers.” The idea was to encourage community by lowering the threshold to close-to-zero for folks who wanted to pitch in and contribute answers to the knowledge community (and to keep the Java Jocks from beating up on the newbies so severely, though the newbies had to earn their way up, too.) I thought this was a fantastic idea. Note that she didn’t say “no wrong answers.” Of course there are wrong answers. But the word “dumb” means “we’ll never get anything good out of you, and how dare you speak at all.” Very easy for a newbie to get that message (I don’t think I’m just projecting here). When the idea of a “dumb answer” is taken off the table, we get to that sweet spot where we can talk about learning, about failing early and often, instead of about whether one deserves a seat at the table.

Session Seven: Debate about Academic Research. This was a corker. On one side the flip chart said “Academic Research Rocks.” The defenders: Arvind Narayanan and Hadley Wickham. The other flip chart read “Academic Research Sucks,” and the defenders were Anthony Goldbloom and Pete Warden. Issues discussed and questions entertained: Value of long-term long-range no-immediate-payoff work vs work driven by immediate competitive gains. On the other hand, value of more rapid churn vs entrenched self-certifying self-validating work that never answers to any real-world goals. The problem of academic writing (dry and colorless, with meaningless bans on using “I” that crush imagination–Pete Warden brought this up and I went into a sympathetic rant–sorry, but I hate writing pedants and the little red pens they rode in on, and hate is strong word). The problem of fear and loathing in academia, top to bottom. Altmetrics. How to recognize value of blogs, etc. One of the participants, as it turns out, was Josh Greenberg of the Sloan Foundation, who’s funding work of Altmetrics folks at UNC-CH SILS. Excellent. Need to communicate findings of scientists, etc. with public. No real mention of humanities scholars aside from Tim Carmody, who got his Ph.D. in comparative literature. (The problem of research in the humanities is a huge problem, as is increasingly apparent to me. Clark Kerr helped me understand the scientific-grant-driven multiversity, and I’m beginning to understand how humanities scholars have effectively removed their own reason-for-being by doing nothing but epistemology games. Generally speaking.)

There was also considerable discussion of whether researchers should be teachers, or whether there was any relationship between teaching and research. Andrew Downey of Olin College observed that undergraduate education was in a parlous state. Point well taken. Was tenure to blame? This is less clear to me. Again, the humanities simply did not figure in the argument in any meaningful way. Yet the humanities, among other things, help us understand the history, process, and possibilities of making meaning. I do not agree with my colleagues at Baylor University (most of them in the Great Texts program) who believe that scientists are soulless mechanics who desperately need a grounding in philosophy, ethics, and religion (presumably this would keep them humble? from doing science if it seemed irreligious? I never could figure this out). At the same time, the humanities do seem to me to have an important contribution to make to the ongoing process of human ingenuity in the sciences. I think poetry is exceptionally important in this regard, largely for the same reasons Bret Victor explores visual representation at his astounding website, though Bret’s work is so far beyond anything I can execute that I can only stand back and point, usually slack-jawed. Even with a slack jaw, though, I sense some resonances. I hope so.

At the end of the session on academics, I delivered myself rather strongly of my rather strong opinion that not only were most structures, processes, and practices in education ineffectual, but also that many of them were in fact unethical. The leaders of the session adjourned on that note–to my chagrin.

One thing that must be said: I think Hadley Wickham is exactly right to say that the onus is on the tenure candidate (or academician generally) to see to it that his or her work is maverick enough to be personally satisfying, no matter what the consequences–while at the same time trying one’s best to make it understandable to those who would like to support it. I could wish for much more collegial support, especially when the project doesn’t make sense; as I re-read The Dream Machine, I’m reminded of how many mavericks in the early computer age were simply blocked, stymied, or otherwise thwarted by dimbulbs and hostile forces in the academic bureaucracy above them. I cordially despise the ritual hazing and obligatory snarky adversarial interaction that characterizes much of academia (I’ll be taking up that topic in a subsequent blog post, now in draft). But Hadley’s right. Academics shouldn’t claim to be victims when the opportunity to do great self-defining work is theirs, at least for awhile. Many people don’t get that much of an opportunity. I’m reminded of my dear colleague Shelli Fowler’s beautifully relentless emphasis on agency. We do get to choose. Yes we do.

I then had a very stimulating dinner conversation with Stacey Aldrich, state librarian of California. Ridley Scott, prison libraries, futurists, archives. She approached me by saying “you’re the teacher, right?” Yes, I am. A lovely talk ensued. I hope our paths will cross again. The world needs (many) more futurist librarians, and librarian futurists. That Stacey was at FOOCamp gives you an idea of how eclectic and farsighted the roster can be–though of course that also means at least one runt may get in (namely me).

Ignite FOO Camp followed dinner. You can see a 360 panorama of some of the attendees by Rachel Sklar here. There were inspiring, funny, provocative talks on taxes, financial meltdowns, Boxie the robot, Einstein’s Brain (Steven Levy), and turning aid to Africa into Made In Africa. The whole thing was streamed live on Google+. It was great to be there, but I would have had a better seat in front of a PC/Mac screen–that’s me on the floor in Rachel’s photo, looking thoughtful and trying to see around a column.

I was psyched to attend the session on MOOCs planned for the 9 p.m. slot after the Ignite talks, but the room was dark when I got there. Seems that Saturday night was calling. I did get to meet Andrew Ng and speak with him briefly. I am deeply curious about Coursera and will be following its progress closely. (It was an honor to meet Andrew–I wish I’d had a chance to hear him talk.)

Two other bits of serendipity. I got to meet Bret Victor, whose worrydream.com site is one of the most astonishing things I’ve seen on the web, ever. Jon Udell turned me on to this wonder, and I felt very fortunate indeed to meet Bret and shake his hand there on the breezeway of the O’Reilly campus. It was hard not to gush so I didn’t even try. He was shy but very cordial and asked about my work as well. I hope there’s a longer conversation in our future. I’d love to bring him to Virginia Tech for a talk. Stay tuned.

The other bit was that Dave Winer himself tweeted something kind about FOO Camp, and I responded immediately with a “wish you were here!” He seemed to appreciate that. It was great to make contact, however briefly, with someone whose work has informed everything I’ve tried to do over the last eight years in the edtech domain. I felt I had been able to say “thanks,” and being able to do that always means a lot to me.

Welcome to FOO Camp.

They’re eating breakfast at FOO Camp right now. I’ll join them in just a few minutes, and tuck in for some geekery, some intellectual soul food, and some inspiration during the full day and evening of sessions ahead. Sessions and serendipity, too. The unconference format (this is my first unconference, by the way) is nothing if not a “designed serendipity” environment. The phrase is from Michael Nielsen’s new book on networked science Reinventing Discovery, where he cites the source of the idea, Jon Udell, who recently was at Virginia Tech as our first Distinguished Innovator In Residence. Jon was here at FOO Camp last year. I wish he were here this year. I always feel a bit lonely and lost at these new gatherings, so I try to throw myself into the proceedings as best I can. It’s easier with the extremely warm and welcoming staff at O’Reilly, who’ve done a great job of getting this party going (and to judge from prior years, keeping it going). And I’ve already started to meet some of my illustrious and driven fellow campers. Last night at dinner I met Eric Gundersen of Mapbox and had a fine conversation about our separate work and mutual obsessions, including our shared membership in the Jon Udell fandom. So I suppose Jon is here, after all, though it’d be more fun without quite so many degrees of separation.

I’m also following and contributing to the Twitter stream at #foocamp (Tim O’Reilly’s choice, though Sarah, who thought up the idea of FOO Camp originally, said the tag was #foo12–somebody bring in an aggregator here), and learning by the way about others who’ve been here in the past, as well as the thin stream of resentment that such gatherings occasion. One snarky tweet said attendees were “pretentious tools” who were straight out of the movie Metropolitan. I’ve always thought it would be interesting to be in a Whit Stillman movie–the people are acting, after all. And hearing the charge of “complicity” (a tool is complicit, yes? a house slave?) brings back not-so-fond memories of the bully colleague in a former English department who’d trot out that line every time anyone wanted to do something generous or trusting involving the administration. You know, “the man” who’s “doing us wrong.” Sometimes he is, of course. But I digress….

It’s a fascinating experience here already. I hope for more connections, and look forward to what the day will bring. I’ve signed up to lead a session tomorrow in the last time slot: “Helping Faculty UNCLENCH–about computers.”

I will continue to wrestle with my own worries and insanely cosmic dreams.

I’ll keep you posted on what transpires.

A cautionary salutary song for a Monday morning, for all who, like me, can use it:

Some folks see the world as a stone
Concrete dashed in dull monotone
Your heart is the big box of paints
And others, the canvas we’re dealt
Your heart is the big box of paints
How coloured the flowers all smelled
As they huddled there, in petalled prayer
They told me this, as I knelt there
Awaken you dreamers
Adrift in your beds
Balloons and streamers
Decorate the inside of your heads
Please let some out
Do it today
But don’t let the loveless ones sell you
A world wrapped in grey
Some folks pull this life like a weight
Drab and dragging dreams made of slate
Your heart is the big box of paints
And others, the canvas we’re dealt
Your heart is the big box of paints
Just think how the old masters felt, they call…
Awaken you dreamers
Asleep at your desks
Parrots and lemurs
Populate your unconscious grotesques
Please let some out
Do it today
Don’t let the loveless ones sell you
A world wrapped in grey
And in the very least you can
Stand up naked and
Grin

“Wrapped In Grey,” by Andy Partridge, from the XTC album Nonsuch