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Questions about the New Media Faculty-Staff Development Seminar

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It’s been a thrilling albeit sometimes rough ride this term. I’ve learned a ton. The local group I’m privileged to be part of has gelled far beyond my expectations, and activity across the network has often been a wonder to behold, even in these early days and with sometimes very difficult situations emerging. But the seminar is a work in progress, of course, and there’s lots to tweak and think about. I’ve been in conversation with several folks about the tweaking and thinking, and one particular exchange was so rich that I thought I’d adapt it for a blog post. The result is largely from that one exchange, but with many things folded in from other conversations. I hope I haven’t misrepresented the exchanges in any way, or merely erected straw men to knock over. As always, I welcome and invite comments, if they’re civil. I won’t identify any of my conversational partners in what follows, as I haven’t asked permission to do so. But these are questions and ideas that did spring from real conversations–I’m not just making up interlocuters here.

I hope some of what follows is helpful or stimulating or both. It’s certainly long–no doubt, too long–but I thought the topic worth exploring at length. So here we go.

What’s the larger purpose of the seminar, and how can we get there? How much prescriptive and explicit “set-up” is necessary? How much open-ended “explore and invent” is possible when the readings are so complex?

I certainly want, as one colleague recently put it, to remove the fear barriers, open the doors, and create a runway for creativity. The question is how to do that. I’ve thought about that a lot, and for better or worse I have definite ideas. J For me, the key (as with all the work I do as a learner and teacher) is to work intensively with complex ideas that resonate both personally and socially (by which I also mean “culturally”). The ideas can be quite varied, and they can be expressed in different ways, but without them, there’s none of the deep synaptic work that in my view is necessary for genuine freedom and a new or renewed imagination. Then the question is how best to engage with ideas, especially when they’re complex. I feel very strongly that trust and conversation among spirited companions is the best way to engage with those ideas, especially when they’re new and complex and perhaps even off-putting, because in the end, trust among fellow learners opens the path to the next level. Or so I believe. I do also believe that guidance is necessary, however, and with several colleagues I’m now thinking about what form that guidance might take, and to what extent there should be explicit guidance.

Is the seminar merely flogging folks with hard technical readings the way we’ve flogged them in the past with technologies they don’t understand but are forced to adopt (e.g., “we will all now migrate to version x.x of software y—and no complaining!”)? Shouldn’t we find seductive ways to open minds and free imaginations instead of offering more impenetrable, painful experiences? Isn’t seduction (e.g., an iPad) better than flogging (e.g., requiring hard reading)?

Well, I hope flogging and seduction are not the only alternatives! I firmly believe in catching my flies with honey—that’s why God made honey-pots—but I want to suggest a third option: not flogging (bad extrinsic motivation—“the beatings will continue until morale improves,” and that sort of thing) or seduction (good extrinsic motivation that activates all the pleasure centers—hey, I enjoy that as much as anyone, believe me) but encouragement. Giving heart. Flogging suggests harsh paternalism and inspires resentment. There’s also a perverse pleasure in being flogged, as it allows one to escape any personal responsibility and blame it all (whatever “it” may be) on the Man, or the Woman, or the System, etc. Seduction sounds great by comparison, but it also evades the question of personal agency and plays into a “now, isn’t that *easy*?” paradigm that can be just as crippling as the leg-breaking. Not everything will be easy, not everything will be seductive, not everything presents itself immediately as fun. Some things are bound to seem or be strange or off-putting at first.

Take the universal experience of culture shock, for example. Yes, Steve Martin was right: they really *do* have a different word for everything in France. So what to do? Learning the language out of a phrase book is not fluency, but narrowly conceived utility. Learning the language with drill-and-kill memorization is similarly limiting. If all one wants to do is ask for directions, the first way will probably work as long as the directions are simple and straightforward. For real human complexity, though, it isn’t enough. The second way is also problematic, as Milton himself noted. (There’s my Milton reference for the day.) If all one wants to do is master the language in a limited way that does not engage with the real beauty of the language’s expressive capacity until very late in the game, by that time the student may simply have given up, or the capacity for real pleasure may be gone. I believe there is an encouraging way to do the hard work that does not take the big-picture expressive pleasure out of the experience even as there is unavoidably a steep learning curve—at least if one wants real fluency and an unfettered imagination.

But all of that brings into sharp focus the question of why one would want to “learn French” in the first place.Or to put it another way, why should we work hard to move our minds into bigger, messier, less certain, and less immediately comprehensible frameworks? For me, this whole New Media thing is that question, written larger and more comprehensively than anything before in human history. Ted Nelson says we can and must learn computers NOW. He wrote that in 1974. His essay makes it clear, I think, that it’s about expanding human capacity, augmenting intellect. His idea of “fantics” is wildly seductive to me, sure, but not because of ease of use. I don’t know if I’m explaining myself all that well. I guess I’m trying to say that the question of “what does it mean to learn computers?” is far larger and more urgent and more important than either the “flogging” or “seduction” can address. That said, I certainly think we can make the seminar more seductive through many means, cultural as well as technological (if there’s a real difference there, that is).

But aren’t these readings in The New Media Reader just stuff for techies? Can we really expect folks from traditional disciplines to work to understand them? What if people are just so turned off that they never come back? Don’t we risk simply making everyone defensive because they feel flogged by materials they don’t understand and don’t care about?

First, I’d want to challenge the assumptions implied in this question: that these essays are all “for techies,” that they’re all dry and difficult, and that people from traditional disciplines won’t find connections in there. My experience with the Baylor groups has been that some essays are more immediately accessible than others, but that there are connections in there for every discipline, for every role, for every learner, and that in finding and exploring those connections together (via those “nuggets” I always talk about, those points of resonance, puzzlement, or resistance) we become a true learning community. I really don’t think the situation is as dire as the question implies. This semester in particular, I’m seeing a truly astonishing blossoming of ideas and fellowship not only in the Baylor seminar but across the entire network. There are huge exceptions of course, but I never went into this thinking that the goal was a 100% yield. I’ve never been in a learning situation where that was the case, anyway. My goal is not to hit 100%, but to scale the experience (via the network, and over time) so that a critical mass of digitally awakened imaginations can begin to collaborate on the hard work of building, reforming, and augmenting education in the 21st century.

Perhaps some people do feel a bit bruised by some of the readings. It makes me unhappy to think so, but I’m sure some do. Well, here’s the deal, for me. If they feel flogged, how can we as fellow learners and, sometimes, guides help them not feel flogged? There’s a stark difference between being required to upgrade to Windows 7 or to lock one’s courses into Blackboard 8 or 9 or 15 or whatever and being encouraged to engage with ideas that are complex and suggestive enough to furnish mental models that truly liberate the digital imagination.  The question for me, then, is how to encourage people to engage carefully, openly, bravely, and joyously with new readings that are not necessarily in their “first” language, in terms of discipline or preference. But we know how to do that! We are teachers, after all, and we can do that for each other. The idea I have is that smart and curious folks working together can in fact equip themselves with a core set of ideas and conceptual frameworks that will empower them to think clearly, bravely, and innovatively about networked computing, the force that has enabled the largest increase in expressive capacity in the history of the human race.

Also, I don’t believe we will ever be able to craft any experience in which folks are not put off by something. If they feel they’re simply incapable of understanding the essays, in my view the problem is the feeling, not the reality. I firmly believe we *are* capable of understanding the essays. And I firmly believe that these ideas and conceptual frameworks are the ones we really should engage with—and that these essays (with some tweaking, sure; no syllabus is perfect or final) are the motherlode, the resonance frequency.

OK, but are we being innovative enough? Isn’t this just a 1930s-style graduate seminar that’s just enhanced somewhat by network technologies?

As my friends the edupunks know, I am not anti-tradition by any means. This experience is in fact, and unapologetically, modeled on a graduate seminar—but a graduate seminar in which there are no grades, no “deliverables,” just the responsibility and privilege of engaging with fellow learners, locally and remotely, in conversation about deep, rich, complex, and urgent ideas. And I do think that a face-to-face meeting at the local level is crucial to the success we want. So I really don’t think there’s anything wrong—and in fact I think there’s a lot right—because we’re doing something that’s based on a structure from earlier times (I’d say, at least since Socrates, or the Peripatetics). I also don’t see the seminar as being “just enhanced somewhat” by the ICT we use. I don’t see this as a small thing, a “just” thing. The networked design, the blogging, the Deliciousing, the tweeting, the forum (all of which is being used, to varying degrees, across the network) builds a platform and makes the intellectual activity visible. What folks build on that platform and how they respond to and contribute to that activity is up to them. That’s the beauty of it, and the challenge of it. I do agree, though, that I and we can do a better job of articulating the platform and explaining what the seminar can be, why the readings are there, what the experience may be like (including the side-effects, for some, of nausea and heartburn until we’ve gotten a few weeks in :).) My impulse is not to impose my own thoughts too strongly on the platform but to let folks discover it as they go, and invent new pieces that we can all learn from. This puts a huge burden on the individual group leaders (or facilitators, if you prefer).  We need to be in conversation more ourselves. I see that very clearly now. I’ve got some ideas in that regard. And I think all the seminarians, myself included, can and should work harder to encourage each other to blog, comment, and comment on other people’s blogs at other sites. It’s a lot to try to do in twelve weeks, but it’s worth doing.

But aren’t we still stuck in tech 101 by sitting in chairs and using printed books? Shouldn’t we be thinking about radically reshaped learning experiences?

I don’t agree with the assumptions underlying the question. Sitting at tables and discussing printed material is not just primitive, we-can’t-do-better, and unimaginative. It’s the core of building a local cohort dedicated to imagination and innovation. I don’t think the Internet makes the idea of local communities obsolete by any means. Rather it augments the local with the global—and vice-versa. Again, I don’t see the networked part as “just enhancing” something. I think the networked part makes the richly effective traditional face-to-face engagement into something that goes all the way to 11—something huge. I think that in fact it DOES radically reshape the learning experience. I think the radical nature is what’s putting people off, frankly. Cool tools ain’t radical. Getting early adopters or even long-time resisters together to geek out on seductive stuff isn’t radical. Workshops aren’t radical. Many times, even “course redesign” isn’t radical. What *is* radical is the idea of a seminar, unfettered by grades or projects or deliverables, networked so that the intellectual activity is visible and richly interactive. More on this below.

But isn’t blogging just another form of professional writing, one that strongly resembles the writing for professional journals we’re already used to?

Oh no! I’m actually dismayed to think anyone would think so. I think blogging is utterly (and radically) unlike writing for professional journals. Maybe part of the problem here is that folks don’t have a deeper understanding of blogging itself. It’s freer, looser, more voice-filled, more exploratory, more goofy, more fun, more multimodal. I’ve written for a number of professional journals, and blogging isn’t that at all—and shouldn’t be in this context either. It should be thoughts, scraps, false starts, stories of the progress of one’s own learning and missteps and questions and problem-finding…. The local seminar leader/facilitators should make these distinctions clear, I think—but that’s hard, I understand, unless one has some experience with blogging. Again, there is a certain amount of bootstrapping oneself into understanding that’s simply unavoidable (but can be fun, too).

I think the fact that blogging is utterly unlike writing for professional journals is one of the reasons it’s so hard for faculty to do (or at least to start doing). They feel lost and vulnerable without those professional journal structures. And they’ll say weird things to me like “who wants to read what *I* have to say?” This from people who are professors making their living from people who pay to hear what they have to say! No, I truly believe that blogging in this context should free us for authentic learning and sharing of our learning. I’m seeing that happen in the Baylor seminar, big time, partly through luck of the draw, partly through experience (I have the good fortune of being on my *second* iteration locally, and fifth in terms of the undergrad class, so I’ve got more mistakes of my own to learn from), and partly because of another part of the “networking” I kind of backed into this time: teaching the first-year seminar at the same time as the faculty-staff seminar. *That*’s been extremely interesting and suggests models of education that are well worth exploring in more detail, particularly as the two groups begin to interact. This too could scale in interesting ways.

But we’re still conscious of our audiences, just the way we are when we write for professional journals. The only thing that’s really different here is the speed of publishing and interaction.

I don’t think this is right. There is no writing that does not involve consciousness of audience, so we’ll leave that aside. The difference here is not simply speed. It’s that the entire process of the blogosphere is wired differently, with trackbacks and comments and aggregation, etc. One PSU person commented on the forum that all this talk of trackbacks and so forth sounded like mere logistics. I understand why that person might think so, but that’s precisely the opposite of the point (and I certainly need to do a better job of explaining why). In New Media, webby logistics shape and extend content, and thus change the conditions and possibilities of content, and thus begin to alter our notions of what counts as content and how we will create it. The medium is the message. A link is not just a technical contrivance. It represents something new in terms of implicit and powerful citation/association, something that’s as much a game-changer as the alphabet. If trackbacks are logistics, so is language itself. Similarly, blogs furnish a very different model of peer review, what Shirky terms publish-then-filter, instead of the traditional filter-then-publish. When one begins to understand those possibilities, to assemble a network of filters and amplifiers (Udell) that make that system sing, one finds a huge and powerful set of differences between blogging and sending an article to a professional journal that goes well beyond speed. No peer review. Built in comment affordances. Permalinks. Trackbacks. Feeds. Aggregations. Embedded images and video and audio. One can commit art in a blog, and should!

The more I’ve experimented with this seminar, the more it has been growing on me that blogging represents something fundamental that needs to be more widely and deeply understood. I actually spent a little more time on that with my group at Baylor this year, and it seems to have paid off very well. So this may be another area to push forward. Believe me, it’s radical!

Are you saying that more creatively social approaches are unnecessary in this seminar?

Not at all. There’s room for much growth and improvement here. This first iteration of the networked seminar makes that clear to me. And of course that’s one reason the maiden voyage is so important. I agree we need to work the social aspect much more vigorously—but I still maintain blogging will be a key part of the platform we build.

But is blogging really social and interactive? Can’t we explore more interactive tools?

We should always explore, certainly. No problem there. But again, I want to unpack the assumptions a bit. Blogging can be highly interactive and social. It’s built to be that way. It certainly has been interactive and social in my experience, profoundly so. But it does demand commitment far beyond Foursquare check-ins (not that there’s anything wrong with that). It demands deep intellectual engagement. And I believe that only deep intellectual engagement can move us in a positive direction, away from what is so often the witless or flogged technology practices we’ve seen in higher ed.

And here’s another thing I think about: why is “deep intellectual engagement” of this kind something so difficult to get going in higher ed? Does anyone see anything wrong with this picture? 🙂 Where’s our curiosity and spirit of adventure? We ask so much of our students, but it’s hard for us to write two or three paragraphs about something *we’re* learning, to be that open and curious and wondering and vulnerable. See, that’s the radical idea … that we should learn in front of each other.

Well, what if instead of reading Ted Nelson, we explore Xanadu virtually, for instance.

GC: In *addition to*, sure. The Baylor facilitators that day actually played for us a video of Nelson explaining Xanadu, and doing that was both stimulating and helpful. I feel strongly that seminarians should bring some kind of interesting new media into every session. We’ve certainly tried to do that at Baylor. But why *instead of*? In my view, we could explore Xanadu all day, but unless we’ve read the impassioned and provocative excerpts from Nelson’s manifesto, the experience will be superficial, weightless—just another interesting tech demo. We’ve had enough of these, and they just don’t change anything.

And for most of the folks who blogged about it, Nelson’s essay was easy to read–even fun. Folks enjoyed his spicy rhetoric. I’m not sure the problem is spice. But the readings need to be framed and experienced as vital, deep explorations of essential challenging ideas. I think that’s not only possible, but necessary. The book and essays are the platform. Build the social stuff on and through and around it, yes, but at the end of the day, if we want to know where Nelson is coming from, his crazy multimodal manifesto is the foundation. And it can be fun—and is for many people, potentially for everyone if they just relax and go with it!

Shouldn’t we be modeling the kind of pedagogical innovation we want to bring to our undergraduates? Are reading and conversation really innovation in terms of a course of study?

GC: This isn’t a “course” in that sense—at least, as I’m struggling to articulate it. It’s more like a reading group on steroids, a deep conversation, a think tank, a set of community activists in fellowship. No doubt we can mix the experience up more to help the readings come alive for folks who are struggling to get their imaginations awake in that medium. But the idea is not to leave the medium of the essays behind—it’s to *augment* them, and by augmenting them, to awaken our digital imaginations.

I’m confident that NMFS is not the only way to do it. But I’m also confident that it’s never really been tried like this. And I’ve seen such rich results from my undergrads and now from my colleagues at Baylor that I think the thing to tweak is not the basic philosophy of the seminar, but the ways in which we can mindfully work together to make that experience as rich as possible. Remember that it was an *undergraduate* class that led to the NMFS. In many respects, one of my primary goals with this experiment is to model the idea of the *seminar* in a purer and less encumbered way than one typically finds it in higher ed. My experience has been that a seminar like this is pretty radical for the undergrads too—we talk about this with some frequency.

For me at this point, the problem is not the idea of a seminar, it’s that the idea of a seminar has become corroded and compromised by all the clanking of the industrialized model of schooling. A real seminar, where we’re all learning together, where we’re all bootstrapping and augmenting ourselves into a fuller level of understanding, is highly innovative in a world of grades, semesters, products, GPAs, credit hours, etc. Or so it seems to me!

I guess we’re learning as we go, as guinea pigs for each other. We’ll press onward through the fog.

Part of any learning experience is watching the fog lift. Some weeks are foggier than others. I felt foggy last week. Not so much this week. Here’s one huge reason why: http://homepages.baylor.edu/lance_grigsby/what-we-behold-becomes-us-too/. I really do think the blogging is key. A good motherblog is key. Recirculating/aggregating/displaying comments. Being explicit about what a blog is and how it works and what it can be and can mean. It’s the whole package. I agree wholeheartedly that we need to be more explicit and have deeper conversations about how all this augmenting is designed. Maybe the local leaders/facilitators need to be in intensive conversation for two or three days before the next iteration. In fact, I think that’s a great idea (and I’m very grateful to the colleague who suggested it). We really do need to understand the platform at the outset, so we can share it with confidence with each of the local groups. I think about the Center for Digital Storytelling in this regard—they’ve got this “train the trainers” thing down cold.

And hey, if folks want to do their own thing, that’s fine—that’s what was happening before any of this started. But I have to say that I am firm in my conviction that we need to be in *idea space* (Kay) and the way to get there most deeply is by reading and talking about and blogging about these essays, augmented by all the new media wonderfulness we can muster. Without that depth, we just won’t get the traction we need. Without that traction, we can’t move toward the change or reformation we desire.

Free, as in Unfettered

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I do many presentations these days centered around the idea of openness and the value of teaching ourselves and our students the ways and means of digital citizenship, which for me inevitably includes publication to the open Web (there’s that “open” thing again) and subscribing (RSS or otherwise) to material published to the open Web. That’s why it’s the Read/Write Web.

Clearly my ideas have been influenced–I’d say “shaped” is more like it–by the resonance frequencies of Bush-Licklider-Engelbart-Nelson-Kay et al. As several folks have pointed out in the Baylor seminar, that resonance frequency is also present in McLuhan and in today’s reading, Bill Viola’s “Will There Be Condominiums In Data Space”? I confess: I chose the readings and ordered them as I did to find and amplify that resonance frequency. For me, it’s the music of the spheres, not just because *I* like it, though I do, but because it sets in motion complex individual resonances that lead, I firmly believe, to the imaginative leaps and awakenings that we need to make sense and use of our digital world (and perhaps our world, period–though they’re rapidly becoming synonymous).

Prepping for today’s New Media Faculty-Staff Development Seminar meeting, I re-read Viola. I re-read him yesterday too as I prepped for the First Year Seminar meeting. Each time I marveled even more at the extraordinary range and depth and quality of his thought.. His commitment to convergence-divergence, or is it divergence-convergence, is breathtaking, even if he sometimes doesn’t quite get the science entirely right (Hillary is characteristically on point in her critique but also characteristically generous in her final appraisal). He really is someone with McLuhan’s heart who also makes the kind of art Errol Morris makes, as Paige brilliantly notes, in which whole and part dance together in a wonderfully delicate yet amazingly powerful quodlibet. Or perhaps it’s a foxtrot, or a minuet. But I digress.

I hadn’t quite finished my Health Camp meal when I finished re-reading the Viola. I meditated for a bit, then flipped through the pages of the New Media Reader in search of another interesting nugget. I was, frankly, in the mood for a manifesto. I saw Haraway’s famous “Cyborg Manifesto,” but that was too direct for me at that moment, the glass of Dublin Dr. Pepper still half full. I wanted something stranger, or less direct. So I went to the next manifesto, on the very next page: “The GNU Manifesto.” I had a nodding acquaintance with the topic, and I was intrigued, since “open” as in “open source” has been a big topic of conversation at my workplace lately.

And then the tumblers aligned, the key turned into the lock, and the scales fell from my eyes:

Since “free” refers to freedom, not to price, there is no contradiction between selling copies and free software…. Because of the ambiguity of “free,” people have long looked for alternatives, but no one has found a suitable alternative. The English language has more words and nuances than any other, but it lacks a simple, unambiguous word that means “free,” as in freedom–“unfettered” being the word that comes closest in meaning. Such alternatives as “liberated,” “freedom” and “open” have either the wrong meaning or some other disadvantage.

And that was in a sidebar, quoted from “The GNU Operating System and the Free Software Movement,” by Richard Stallman, also the author of the Manifesto. It pays to check everything: sidebars, captions, titles, epigraphs, copyright pages, acknowledgements, dedications, even the little SDG at the bottom of Bach’s scores….

So I’m thinking today that the kind of education I want to support, and to co-create, is unfettered learning. The trick is to understand when open means unfettered, and when it might be a closed platform that sets us free (and I mean in terms of learning, NOT in terms of copyright. The copyright “protection” of closed LMS’s is actually one of those weakening prosthetics, as it keeps us from agitating vigorously for our Fair Use rights and keeps the current copyright jailers in the money). When does a curriculum unfetter us, and when is it a set of handcuffs? When does a teacher unfetter us? When do our classmates unfetter us? A classroom, or a credit hour system, or an advising system? And so forth. These are very difficult questions indeed, and of course some oppressors believe most sincerely (it seems) that they’re keeping handcuffs on for the inmates’ own good–and of course Stockholm Syndrome means that sometimes people don’t want to lose their fetters, so thoroughly do they identify with their captors.

But these are the complications we should confront continually, lest we fetter ourselves and others. Kierkegaard tells us that the worst despair is not to know you’re in despair. Blake anticipates Kierkegaard’s aphorism by calling the worst fetters “mind-forged manacles.”

In every voice, in every ban,
The mind-forg’d manacles I hear.

Only the awakened imagination can make us aware of those mind-forg’d manacles, let alone help us to slip their bonds and help to free our colleagues and fellow pilgrims. Let alone help us desist from creating them for others, among them, horribile dictu, even at times our best beloveds. I take it that that’s why Blake was a poet, that’s why Bill Viola does his art. But that’s also why scientists labor to uncover new knowledge, and talk so passionately–and imaginatively!–to their colleagues and to all of us about the scale, scope, and importance (and excitement!) of their work. For we are all imagineers, and we are all in this together….

And while Pete Townshend was right that there’s no easy way to be free, loosing fetters and creating portals to realms of greater unfetteredness for all is, I believe, one of the highest, noblest, trickiest, most exhilarating aspects of this thing we call, simply, education.

In my experience, no human invention has had greater potential for that unfettering than the Internet itself. The pub-sub model that Jon Udell describes in the podcast I linked to in my previous post is right on target about how that can and should happen. That the Internet also has the opposite potential (and that’s what we hear the most about, unfortunately–man bites dog and uploads video to YouTube) should surprise no one. Every powerful human invention cuts both ways. But that’s the bad news and the good news too. Both ways. And I suppose we have some say in the matter, if we can loose the mind-forg’d manacles that keep us from the freedom of the Internet itself….

Awaken the digital imagination, then strengthen the heart, hands, and mind for digital citizenship.

In that spirit, then, I offer a podcast recording of my keynote talk last Friday at the E-Learn 2010 conference. I called it “The Great Internet Backlash,” and through that lens I viewed what seem to me to be both the manacles and the possibilities for unlocking them. I believe I am right, but I am not sure of it. That’s why I want to keep this conversation going.

Conference website: http://www.aace.org/conf/elearn/speakers/default.htm

Archive of the talk with PPT slides: coming soon, I hope.

And here’s the recording I made. I hope it resonates. Let me know.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (41.4MB)

The global nervous system worked like a champ

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One view of conceptacularity

I’m exhausted, so I won’t be able to do anything like even the most superficial justice to the experience–but I want to note it now, before this magic moment subsides.

I’m at OpenEdTech 2010, sponsored by the Open University of Catalonia. For the last two and a half days, thirty educators from around the world (India to Canada to the US to Spain to Jamaica–you get the idea) have been working, laughing, cooking, eating, and dreaming together about how we might help to build online learning spaces that support and inspire the joy of learning. We seek to co-create online learning spaces that are just as memorable and magical as those places on a physical campus that embed themselves into our experience and weave themselves into the texture of *alma mater*.

We just had our summary session. Tonight we will eat together once more, then disperse to our scattered homes. But not quite yet. There’s time for one more reflective journey before the miles come between our company.

As we were finishing the last intensive bit of group work before that summary session, I suddenly knew what I must do. I must contact my young colleagues at Baylor. These colleagues, as fine a conceptacular crew as one could wish for, had a perspective on this “joy of learning” question that simply must be part of our discussion in Barcelona. So I set about convening them, virtually, and put the question to them for their consideration and expression.

As a result, ten of the eleven students in the class (yes, students are my colleagues, and each others’–at least, that’s been my experience for twenty years) blogged their responses to the question. They were thoughtful, playful, energized, focused, imaginative. Our work together in the New Media Seminar had prepared them well to think about online learning in large terms, a la Engelbart, V. Bush, Nelson, etc. They made fascinating distinctions and ingenious suggestions. They got superbly artful with their linking (one strong mark of a master blogger, in my view). The quest was on. And mirabile dictu, they began commenting on each other’s blog posts just about as quickly as they could be written. They built out stunning examples of how individual depth and social breadth could also, and very quickly, become individual breadth and social depth. E pluribus unum–and the reverse, however that might look in Latin. 🙂

And then I shared the responses with my colleagues in the room in Barcelona, half a world away, yet intimately connected in the global nervous system Jon Udell so eloquently describes in this podcast. The room got very quiet. It was magical.

I confess to you: I love my colleagues, my students, my conceptacular fellow-travelers. I love how quickly they responded, how well they entered into the sustained conversation, how they conversed with me and each other and, today, the world. I am proud to be among them.

If you’re of a mind, please visit their blogs and leave some comments. Comment love, we call it, and not idly, either. Start with our motherblog to get the range of the conversation. Then click over to the individual blogs, listed here, to interact with the posts my colleagues contributed on this very special day:

The first time I saw the mother of all demos, indeed the first time I read Engelbart, I quickly intuited that days like today were made possible by his vision. More than that, I somehow understood–I honestly don’t know how–that days like today would be part of that same dream of augmentation, that dream of how the world could be that I first brushed against when I read of life in an integrated domain and the conceptual framework that could make it possible, even likely. This is my experience, no doubt not shared by all, but undeniably part of the fabric of which I continue to be woven. That noosphere Engelbart and others saw on the distant horizon, the summation that Jon describes so very beautifully and urgently, is ours for the asking, now.

So why not ask for it? No, that’s not strong enough. Why not insist on it? Look at my young colleagues’ work and the joy that carries it aloft like sweet incense. Can we not answer that joy with open hearts and minds of our own?

The Arts of Augmentation

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It’s been quite a week since last Wednesday’s New Media seminar at Baylor. The seminar meeting itself was an extraordinary session, as Christina Engelbart, Executive Director of the Doug Engelbart Institute, joined us via Skype to discuss the many facets of her father’s work and the Institute’s ongoing mission. Christina’s contributions were warm, direct, and clear throughout. Several participants remarked how much better they understood her father’s conceptual framework as she explained it. Christina’s great gift for connection came across very compellingly through that Skype window. There we were: she in her house, and we in our seminar room, our company knit closely by a version of the very affordances her father had imagined and helped to bring into being all those years ago. The effect was uncanny, especially as we had begun the session with the clip from the end of “The Mother of all Demos” in which Doug Engelbart thanks his team for their support and dedicates the entire demonstration to his family, the loved ones who for as long as seventeen years had endured his “monomaniacal” commitment to augmenting human intellect. Moving from that digitized movie on YouTube to our conversation with Christina via Skype, all displayed on a flat panel LCD screen at the side of the room fed by a Mac mini controlled wirelessly by a keyboard and mouse—well, it was a richly recursive experience in what sometimes seemed to be a time machine connecting us to the past, and at other moments seemed to be a time machine connecting us to the future.

The key is connection, of course. Christina reminded us that for her father, the technology was always a means to an end, and the end was always collaborating and communicating in a way that would bring our collective IQ into the fullest range of its expression and usefulness. Otherwise, we cannot possibly address the complex, urgent problems we face as a species, nor will we ever realize the enormous potential we have for learning, creating, and sharing.  Without a strong, committed co-evolution between us and our tools, especially the tools represented by the promise of interactive computing, we’ll be forever distracted by our “isolated clever tricks that help in particular situations,” and never attain the “integrated domain” of which Doug writes so movingly in the opening of his seminal “Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework.”

In the blogs around the seminar meeting, at Baylor and elsewhere, and in the discussion at the Baylor meeting as well as at Tulane on Friday (I was privileged to be their guest facilitator), many folks commented on how difficult and dense they find “Augmenting Human Intellect.” Some speculated the difficulty comes from Engelbart’s engineering background. Some were troubled by the way Engelbart switches from first-person to third-person as he tells the story of “Joe” trying to tell the story of the augmentation framework. Still others remarked that Engelbart seems naïve about the various power agendas that motivate human beings and block real collaboration.

When she spoke with the Baylor seminar, Christina Engelbart emphasized that her father had written “Augmenting Human Intellect” pretty much in isolation, as he had been strongly warned against sharing these ideas with anyone, lest he be thought crazy. (There’s an irony as well as a paradox in Engelbart’s isolated writing—more to consider there.) Many did think Engelbart a “crackpot” for many years until the Mother of All Demos—and the future it pointed toward—showed that Engelbart was not only sane but indeed a towering visionary. It’s never easy to sum up a decade’s worth of thought, especially when that thought has seemed dangerous to utter.

But now it’s time for a confession. When folks ask me if I, too, find the essay difficult, I usually mumble some kind of assent out of fellow feeling. Yes, I do find it a challenging piece of writing—but no more so than Milton, or Shakespeare, or Woolf, or Faulkner, or Joyce. In fact, in its complexity and playfulness, “Augmenting Human Intellect” resonates with me very strongly as a work of art, even a work of philosophy. I can’t claim to have gotten to the bottom of it. Perhaps I never will. Art is like that. But I rejoice in it, and enjoy the many wry twists and turns of rhetoric and storytelling Engelbart employs. (Christina spoke movingly of her father’s gift for storytelling, and how her childhood friends ask her if he’s still telling those stories.) For me, the idea of working collaboratively within the structure of a concept and all its associative trails is positively thrilling, and Engelbart describes it so vividly that I cannot help believing it can truly happen at the scale and with the fluency he imagines. When I compare his vision to the reality of most of the meetings I participate in during the course of a normal week, well, there’s really no comparison. We’ve devised so many methods for de-augmenting our work together that one would almost think we actually prefer a state of de-augmentation. Engelbart’s hope lifts my spirits and strengthens my resolve that we can do better.

And if it all boils down to hegemonies and power games, and collaboration is always already a mask for overtaking the other, then permit me my callow hopes. The sophisticated, brittle, cynical alternatives don’t much interest me. No nourishment there.

When I read “Augmenting Human Intellect,” beginning with that astonishing first paragraph on the integrated domain, I feel I am reading one of the great humanist essays of our time. My confession for you is that the real difficulty I feel is not in reading the essay. It’s in measuring up to its deeply felt humanity.

Seven Wonders, Vannevar Bush, and NMFS_F10

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Thanks to Alice for the image. <3

I’ve actually seen Cinerama, real Cinerama, at one of the few places left on Earth that’s got the synchronized projectors, the skilled technicians, and an actual Cinerama print to show. The three-screen Cinerama process was expensive. The machinery was finicky. The logistics pretty fierce. As a result, Cinerama never really caught on, despite the splendors of movies like How The West Was Won. But if you travel to Bradford and get to the museum on the right day, you can see what all the fuss was about. And you can join in the continuing celebration.

What I’m witnessing as we begin the third week of the New Media Faculty Development Seminar leaves Cinerama, breathtaking and beautiful as it is, in the dust. (And I don’t say that idly–I loved This Is Cinerama when I saw it in Bradford in 2000.)

I’m not going to be able to knit my thoughts into anything very elegant or polished. I’m feeling rather awestruck by the network, by the beautiful patterns of response emerging from it on a daily basis. The most obvious place to see those patterns is the Netvibes portal, one great place to get the comprehensive view of the activity generated by the network (and the network generated by the activity).

But the portal is only one of the wonders. Another is that the every node in the network, seen with the digital imagination, is also potentially a great place to get the comprehensive view.  I wish I had superitalics to stress this point even more emphatically. The fractal, network-of-networks model doesn’t just follow a paradigm in which sets of unitary-simple-examples aggregate into a highly complex set-of-sets that retains features of each set and each element in each set. It does something far more rich and strange.

Let me try to explain. You know babushkas? Here’s a picture from the Wikipedia article:

Women amid the flowers

This design is pretty easy to understand, and accords well with our sense that in the physical world, small things go inside bigger things. That’s the key to the Maggie Sort Algorithm, too:

What I’m seeing in the Networked Seminar, however, is more like a Klein Bottle:

Eine Kleine Klein Bottle

which Wikipedia defines as

a non-orientable surface, informally, a surface (a two-dimensional manifold) with no identifiable “inner” and “outer” sides. Other related non-orientable objects include the Möbius strip and the real projective plane. Whereas a Möbius strip is a two-dimensional surface with boundary, a Klein bottle has no boundary. (For comparison, a sphere is an orientable surface with no boundary.)

It’s fair to say that I have little idea what all that means, but “little” does not equal “no,” and the metaphor intrigues me (always has) for the same reason Moebius strips intrigue me, but more so, because the Klein Bottle lets me talk about objects in which the inside is bigger than the outside.

Which is really the point I want to get across here. The networked seminar is not, or not just, a set of nested self-similar iterations of the same idea, though that’s certainly the easiest and most direct mental picture of the initial design. The difference between the babushkas and the networked seminar is that any given point in this augmented human network, one may find that the inner or “smaller” nodes are actually every bit as large as the complete aggregation, and in many cases even larger. As near as I can tell, that’s because every single brain, every single embodied instance of personhood, every single blog post with its language of words and images and sounds and concept structures, can link freely to itself, to other posts in the person’s blog, to other blogs within each local group, to blogs at other local groups, to the portal itself, and of course to the other people represented and enacted by these things, which means that every post can be a kind of portalesque motherblog, and every motherblog can be thought of as a single post, and every person is potentially the entire networked seminar, and any link as well as the entire aggregation can be held in a single thought. I can see this happening in ways that are deeply interesting, even spooky.

Let’s go with spooky.

Last Wednesday I facilitated the Baylor seminar’s discussion of Vannevar Bush’s “As We May Think.” I talked about blogging as a particular genre of, instantiation of, metaphor for, the Memex, particularly with the ways hyperlinks, including the trackbacks they can generate when blogs are linked, are examples of “associative trails.” I thought I’d not spent quite enough time on the essay itself, and too much time on the mechanics of blogging. But then, to my delight, the integration I was trying to get at actually happened over the past week, across multiple levels, because the blogs started coming in across the network in earnest. In fact, folks in our Baylor seminar are all now blogging, and many are now blogging with posts full of links (hyper- and semantic, and is there a difference?) to other blogs. One such blog elicited a comment with its own playful links, which must qualify as some kind of link-jazz.

Further, last week a blogger at the Monterey Institute of International Studies quoted a blogger at the Baylor site. Obviously the MIIS blogger was reading the portal feed, or moving across the motherblogs by means of the networked seminar directory. Ah! And though the link was a quote and not a hyperlink (see how the notion of “link” moves from concept to procedure and back again),  I caught the link myself because I had also been scanning the blog feeds on the portal, and when I read the MIIS blogger’s post I had recognized the quotation (made the connection mentally, so formed/recognized the link). (I confess: when I saw the title was “Nuggets,” I *had* to go take a look. Witness, dear reader, the value of the evocative title.) Now, having incorporated those links into this post, I have folded the mental links and hyperlinks into the entire set of (implicit and explicit) associative trails (and scaffolding) that the blogs are producing within and across all the sites.

Um, whoa.

Then an even spookier thing happened.

Thursday I had the great privilege of facilitating the discussion on Bush’s essay via a Skype connection with the group Tom Haymes is leading at Houston Community College. It was a great discussion, very passionate and insightful, and I found myself quite inspired by it all. Friday, I was scanning the blog feeds to read the HCC blogs about the discussion. Then I clicked over to some of the other sites’ blogs to see what was happening there. Oops! I was brought up short. I thought I’d clicked on a St. Lawrence University blog post. It sure looked like their site. But as I read the post, it was clear to me something had gone wrong. I was reading a description of the discussion at HCC, which had included very thoughtful inquiries into the relationship of information, knowledge, and wisdom. Then I realized that in fact I was reading a description of the HCC discussion–because that’s what they’d talked about at St. Lawrence University as well.

And now my links bear witness to that connection, tell my story of those connections, and enact them anew.

This property of the link–that it is both map and territory–is one I’ve blogged about before (a lucky blog for me, as it elicited three of my Favorite Comments Ever). But now I see something much larger coming into view. Each person enacts the network. At the same time, the network begins to represent and enact the infinities within the persons who make it up. The inside is bigger than the outside. Each part contains the whole, and also contributes to the whole.

Bush’s idea of folded-in-associative-trails gets at this phenomenon, though he doesn’t explore it as fully as I’d like. For me, this folding-within, up and down the scale until scale itself acquires paradoxical meanings, is where the going gets really, really good. I mean quantum good. I also think it’s where Engelbart begins to build his conceptual framework, which for me is a framework about how the inside is bigger than the outside–among many other things, of course. But I’ll save those many other things for the next NMFS blog.

Oh, and here’s the lagniappe. My friend and colleague Tim Logan has a great idea for an NMFS visualization project. I’m going to need some expert help on this one. Tim’s idea is to construct a dynamic map of the thought-connections among the network nodes. I suggested trackbacks (i.e., incoming links) and comments as proxies for these connections. Now all we need is some way to gather the comments-and-trackbacks and have the map automagically trace/draw the connections within and among the sites. Anyone have any ideas for how to do that?

Thursday’s class, part one

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We refer to a way of life in an integrated domain where hunches, cut-and-try, intangibles, and the human “feel for a situation” usefully co-exist with powerful concepts, streamlined terminology and notation, sophisticated methods, and high-powered electronic aids.

I need to blog about my First Year Seminar meeting from last Thursday. I won’t do it justice and I won’t be able at this point even to recreate it well, but I have to try and I have to start. It really was an extraordinary experience, one I’m still marveling at. In the way of all such class meetings, the synergies defy explanation. But at least I can try to relive the sequence of events as best I can, if only as a partial and grateful memorial of that day.

I walked into class on Thursday, September 9, knowing from several of my students‘ blog posts that at least some of the students had not found the assignment very interesting or inspiring. I anticipated some resistance to the work we would do together. Nothing unpleasant or disruptive, mind you; these are very polite young men and women, and they’re high achievers, which means they’ve learned how to thrive even when their hearts aren’t in it. (An important skill, to be sure.) Yet I had wished for more, as I always do, particularly in this course, and particularly with this reading assignment: “Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework.” Longtime readers understand how important this essay has been for me. It’s right up there with Frost’s “The Figure A Poem Makes” in my esteem, which is the highest praise I can deliver. Engelbart’s essay changed my life. And while it’s foolish and perhaps dangerous to pin one’s pedagogical hopes on one’s students sharing one’s deepest passions–well, I’m only human, and a foolish one at that, and I always do get my hopes up, despite my maturer cautions.

So I convened the class meeting. We did a little business: log on, greeted our magnificent librarian (who’s not physically in the room, but who’s following along in our Twitter stream), and filled out our Apgars. The class Apgar was low-ish: 6.8 on a 10-point scale. I had challenged the students to bring the average up to an 8 for this epic essay. My heart sank a little more. Still, like the Millennium Falcon, I had a few tricks left in my sweet heart. Time to see if we could make the jump even with uneven crew preparation.

I started with the students’ chief complaints about the essay, most of which centered on Engelbart’s description of his notecards. I gave some historical context, but paid even more attention to the fascinating mixture of humor and incandescent intensity in Engelbart’s prose. Make sure they understand he’s a writer, I told myself. The students began to get interested. They had assumed the essay was straightforward in every respect, so they had missed the drollery, the goofy moments (such as when he uses the charming word “blinko”), the multiply-layered doubling back maneuvers. I asked for passages they’d found confusing, off-putting, strange. Together we began to explore the textures of those passages, their complex tones and arguments, what Bakhtin would call their “internal dramatism”–all of which Engelbart himself acknowledges and celebrates as he writes the essay, inviting us to take a most astonishing and improbable imaginative journey with him as he describes something about our very powers of cognition, description, and communication.

I could feel interest building–there it was, just enough, just enough–and I took the next step I had imagined as I had re-read the essay and prepared for class. Time for the Oxford English Dictionary, and a deep dive into the word “concept,” a word absolutely central to Engelbart’s essay. One might guess that centrality from the title, of course, but the word just sits there so innocently, biding its time: “Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework.” Nothing like the OED, preferably online, to release the strange energies inside those innocent little words. I had deliberately not done the deep dive before class. I knew what was lurking there in that word “concept,” but I didn’t know what words might surround it in the display, or what the OED’s examples might say. I needed to preserve moments of surprise and authentic discovery for the class and for me as well. No discovery in the teacher, no discovery in the students. I was utterly confident of the treasures awaiting us–I knew how rich and strange the word “concept” was–but I didn’t already know what we would find as we made our way through the paths of the OED–and the “not already knowing,” important most of the time, was absolutely crucial on this day.

Suddenly overcome with a wave of nervous energy, I had to pace a little.  I warned the class we were about to go down a very deep rabbit hole where growing echoes of  “curiouser and curiouser” would pursue us all the way to the bottom. I needed to know: were they really ready? Things were about to get very odd, very complex, very puzzling. They were about to learn some mind-altering stuff. Were they really ready?

Yes, Dr. C., we’re ready.

So to the OED we went.

–To Be Continued–

Integrative Learning and the Gift of New Media: General Education for the 21st Century

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Necker Cube
How to move from “general education” to “generalizable education.” That problem was the thread running through my keynote presentation at Benedictine University last March. Dr. Wilson Chen and the Benedictine General Education Task Force kindly invited me to speak to the way information and communication technologies could inform a revised general education curriculum–and, by implication, speak to what endures, what changes, and can be radically improved in higher education as a result of this revolution.

My answers came obliquely, as they typically do. (They come that way to me, so it’s only honest and fair to express them that way as well. At least, that’s what I tell myself.) In this case, I was obsessed with the idea of changing “general education” to “generalizable education.” Instead of what Tim Clydesdale calls the “liberal arts hazing” that first-year students “endure” (see his book The First Year Out for this chilling description) as they bounce from intro survey to intro survey, getting their general education like shots at a clinic, why don’t we explore the richly integrative possibilities of a truly generalizable education, an experience that stresses the kind of learning that stimulates persistent cross-domain thinking and imagining. Why not build a “general education” out of immersive, compelling experiences of analogy-making? My main inspiration was a book by Douglas Hofstadter called Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies. (My thanks to Jon Udell for turning me on to this book–it’s his favorite Hofstadter, and I can well understand why.) The book is entirely too rich for any summary to do it justice, but suffice it to say that Hofstadter takes Polya’s How To Solve It to a meta-meta level, in which disciplined cognitive procedures thoroughly informed by embodied, thick-context experience and observation leads to a certain “reframing” ability, what Hofstadter describes as a “Necker Cube” operation in which the cube can face out or in, depending on how one flips one’s perspective. To be able to perform such cognitive operations, not in a random way, but in a way guided by reason *and* intuition is, it seems to me, what we mean when we talk about “critical thinking”–and more. My thoughts are obviously indebted to Michael Wesch’s idea of moving from “knowledgeable” to “knowledge-able,” though I hope the particular case of general education–in which the idea of becoming truly knowledgeable is a non-starter–explores another angle of his complex argument. The idea of generalizability, as it came to me from Hofstadter, is also important, I think, for the idea of general education as integrative. And of course ICT is for me the meta-platform that, properly framed and built, is almost pure integrative potential. One of the Benedictine U folks asked me if my ideas suggested that majors should come in the first two years of one’s college career, with general education of the kind I was advocating becoming a capstone experience, not an introductory experience. I thought that was a brilliant idea, and I still do. What a breathtakingly risky undertaking that would be, to turn the curriculum on its head! Yet how rewarding to follow concentrated studies in a particular discipline with an increasingly integrative set of generalizable courses.

These are not particular cogent or illuminating remarks, I fear. I hope the talk itself is more lucid. The recording isn’t pristine, and the ideas are as always a work in progress–but hopefully the results will spark some thoughts in other folks, and lead us all together to something more than any of us could achieve on our own. Keep in touch, and let me know. My thanks to all the good folks at Benedictine for a truly wonderful, inspiring visit. I couldn’t have asked for better hosts, or more dedicated colleagues.

Oh yes: here are the slides as well.

Integrative Learning And The Gift Of New Media: General Education for the 21st Century

Here’s the audio from that presentation.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (32.1MB)

Digital Citizenship

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In honor of Jim Groom, who did some astonishing work at Baylor over the last few days, I’m going to try to pick up the pace a bit….

Two weeks ago I was a respondent and workgroup facilitator for the 2010 Campus Technology Executive Summit in Boston, Mass. In my respondent role, I did a very short presentation speaking to the subject Susan Metros of USC was addressing. My presentation was titled “Digital Citizenship,” a phrase that I did not invent but which I’ve been working with, and on, for the last few months. I’m trying to get to the next steps after digital fluency, the steps that might finally inform an entire curriculum. I started with a little album of YouTube videos illustrating the varieties of instruction on this website:

I picked these because they were all different, and all rigorous in their own ways. All posed vigorous challenges to our typical school practices of teaching, writing, and learning. Here are the slides that I used after the video to try to tease apart some of the suggestive layers within each example, layers that led in turn to my larger points.

The Road to Digital Citizenship

A work in progress.

Backlash whiplash: should we dump the term “PLN”?

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Flickr photo by merry heart. CC Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0

Responding to Alan Levine’s post (be sure to check out his links and the comment stream):

If the phrase “personal learning network,” or “PLN” (guess that makes me Dr. Evil), has really become CLICHE then I’m happy to drop the term. But I don’t think it has, or should. I’ll take the words in order.

Why does it matter that it’s personal? Because for many people, the only learning network they think about is school, and school is typically not very personal–at least, it’s not something we feel we should be personally responsible for constructing for ourselves. Educators make our schools for us, and we go there to consume an education, work hard, get good grades, get our degrees. Yet I’d say that the deepest engagement with education comes only when we act as if we really are bringing the learning network into being, ourselves, every day–just as every course should write itself into being. So “personal” implies “personal construction and personal responsibility,” not just ownership and right of use, which is why the analogy with cars and hammers doesn’t work for me. (When I wrote my piece on “a personal cyberinfrastructure,” I was thinking along these same lines: we are the web, the machine is us, and the best way to get the best out of that macro-cyberinfrastructure is to practice building our own on its platform.)

Why does “learning” matter? Why not just “network”? Because that word “network” gets used for lots of things, not just for deliberately self-directed learning. My network consists of friends, birds-of-a-feather, various information resources, etc. My *learning* network is my personal suite of trusted and inspiring experts. That’s not the same as the folks I share experiences and interests with, though the two may (actually, do) overlap.

(Digression: I miss the energies of 2005 and 2006, when so much of this conversation was exploratory instead of polarized and polarizing. That polarity is one of the reasons I’m finding it difficult to blog these days. Though I understand both are valuable, I like exploring more than arguing. While everyone else debates Beatles vs. Stones, the lads themselves are sharing a good time at the Scotch of St. James–while still enjoying their rivalry.)

So I think all three words in PLN are important, and that their biggest value is that they suggest deliberate actions that don’t depend on someone else’s curriculum, degree program, or institution. Not just the open web, though it’s the open web that makes them possible–and that’s why the word “network” is vital as well.

That said, it’s the wrangling and the seemingly inevitable hype cycle for these terms that really get me down. I remember all those arguments about “Web 2.0”: it is real, it’s not real, it’s hype, it’s O’Reilly branding, etc. etc. In my experience, Web 2.0 is a useful concept that has its limits, just like a bunch of other useful concepts (actually, they all have their limits, don’t they?). And believe it or not, I still talk to rooms of faculty where half or more of them haven’t heard the term, let alone the ideas it represents. Sometimes I think intensity of the edtech community makes us forget that the things we argue about or abandon are still news to lots of folks and have a lot of good left to do.

P.S. I don’t know what a TLA is. I’m also iffy on CBDs, TYAs, ORCs, JUTs, and KWEs. But I am curious. Maybe I should ping my PLN.

P.P.S. Whatever my PLN is, it’s not a Nixty, at least so far as I can see. On this count Alan and I are in total agreement.

From Accreditation to Standards and Excellence: New Media Leading Academic Change

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More from the 2010 NMC annual meeting last month in Anaheim. These are fairly rough notes, but rather than trying to make them into a more finished narrative, I’ve decided that there’s a play of voices here that can stand on its own. A few of my own interjections emerge here and there, in parentheses, representing thoughts at the time and thoughts somewhat later. What I remember most vividly about this session in retrospect is not necessarily anything we decided or any consensus reached, but rather how extraordinarily moving the conversation became as we went along. We are indeed united by our passion. We care about the potential for computers, for the Internet, for richly mediated human interaction as engines for the augmentation of human intellect. That caring is difficult to sustain within many typical educational practices and organizational realities, many of which are either indifferent or openly hostile to these ideas and this potential.

As Janet Murray asks, how long before we recognize the gift for what it is? In many respects, this session wrestled and dreamed with the hope of answering Murray’s question, and the goal of honoring and fostering the recognition more widely.


Getting started on day two of the NMC annual conference with a town hall meeting: NMC members are responding to NMC’s emerging investigation into possibilities for accrediting New Media programs at colleges and universities. To begin, Cornell’s Joan Getman, chair of the NMC’s Commission on Standards and Excellence, recaps the April San Antonio meeting and summarizes the conclusions, most of which turned out–usefully, in my opinion–to be questions about values and meaning. I’m impressed by Joan’s summary, its the clarity and faithfulness to the experience. (I was there on the last day.) I look forward to reading them in the NMC monograph that will come out of the April meeting and subsequent discussions.

Larry Johnson picks up the discussion here, talking about Rachel Smith’s visualizations of the April discussions, telling the story of the experience through these remarkable drawings. The drawings are online, and I urge you to consult them to get a sense of the rich texture of the discussion.

At this point in the conversation we begin to try to define New Media. A difficult and interesting moment. A member from Australia cites interactive design, use of electronic tools, research abilities in a cross-disciplinary research design with critical media studies work, and the foundations of education terminology and theory. A colleague from Wisconsin sees New Media as a great equalizer, a way to bring the disabled into society, an avenue for participation that might otherwise be lost. Another colleague says New Media is about agency and generativity. Yet another colleague speaks to New Media’s emphasis on storytelling and rich contexts. A colleague from UT-Austin describes New Media as “a field that combines the arts and sciences to communicate human experience.” Another voice: New Media is about innovative thinking, forward thinking, thinking that leads to new research and new methodologies. New Media makes the invisible visible, very powerfully.

Larry points out that the field of New Media is mature, twenty years old. That’s part of why we feel this need to bring more specificity and focus to our work. (At the same time, the generativity of New Media constantly works against this codification–a fascinating tension.)

A colleague from England speaks to his work in new literacies. The word “new” implies an opposition to old media, and raises the question of when something new becomes old. At a higher level, we see that all human experience is mediated. New Media implies a paradigm shift in how we view this mediation, and how we conceive knowledge to be constructed and shared.

And what about the toolkit, one voice asks? The toolkit changes all the time, but the end is the constant of human experience and its expression. Another voice helpfully adds that we also value a certain attitude toward the tools, a set of expectations regarding creativity and the possibility (indeed, the necessity) of innovation.

And what of old media? Do we reject old media? Far from it, Mike Berman suggests, pointing to Rachel’s visualization of the discussion as a wonderful example of analog, “old media” expression, not all that different from the cave paintings.

Another question: what experiences *are* New Media? Is SMS still “new media”? Perhaps NMC’s Horizon Report can lead the way here: the newness is at the horizon, at the leading edge. (“Horizon Media”? An intriguing possibility.)

From Maricopa Community Colleges: New Media is about digital literacy, teaching people to drive cars, not drive Fords. Preparation for transport, not for a particular brand of automobile.

And a very poignant suggestion arises: can we define New Media in words? Perhaps we must define New Media by using New Media. (My heart beats faster at this suggestion, I confess. I find it bold and inspiring.)

Yet another fascinating suggestion: perhaps work in New Media combines both research and application. (This idea maps well onto The New Media Reader’s suggestion that New Media unites making and knowing, techne and episteme. In that same volume, Janet Murray writes eloquently of the braided interplay of cultural expression and technical innovation at the end of the twentieth century–braided interplay, which Ted Nelson might also call “intertwingling.)

Larry asks why we’re interested in New Media. “Toys!” a person shouts out from the back of the room. “Imagination,” another adds. These “toys” empower children to enter the conversation. For all of us, the tools empower tinkering–we use these tools to commit art. (I think of Seymour Papert and the “children’s machine”–how much of the history of New Media has focused on education, especially on early childhood development.)

More thoughts now, coming faster (the question obviously taps into some deep wells of emotion): The field has dreamers and outcasts–the field enables us to be the misfits, successfully. New Media builds a subculture. New Media also bridges the new and old cultures, and allows communication between the rising generation and the older generation. This is a profoundly human activity, one that generates innovation and rewards imagination. New Media also fills in the gaps between imagination and communication. New Media helps us make information digestible. Think also about SF: the children have extraordinary learning opportunities in science fiction. The Star Trek holodeck is a tremendous learning technology, a tremendous learning environment. Arts and Sciences have become ossified and do not embody our current knowledge of what we are and what we’re capable of. New Media is a field, a structure, a community that can embrace scientific methodologies as well as artistic practices and possibilities. It also generates respect for intellectual diversity, and perhaps generates enough big picture thinking to lead to something as ambitious and apparently out-of-reach as world peace. New Media gives us the chance to hear voices we would not otherwise hear–the voice now speaking cites Joe Lambert and the Center for Digital Storytelling as sterling examples. And a voice adds that “transparency in the use of the technology” leads him to fascination with New Media, which focuses on the expression even more than the tool.

So now the question is, “what is excellence?” Bryan Alexander offers three ideas. 1. Future scanning: methods of looking forward. 2. Awareness of copyright, including an appreciation and celebration of fair use (dammit, he adds), 3. Storytelling. Another voice speaks up: the willingness to admit we don’t have all the answers. Ruben Puentedera adds: an awareness of the history of the field, the thinking involved in getting to that point. I contribute a thought born of years within the profession of English studies:

What of assessment? What of the end user? What of innovation defined in terms of the strengths and abilities of individual students? The new objects of study–do we really intend web science as our focus? Can we set aside some of what we value as we search for this focus?

Another person emphasizes the need for not only copyright but also citation, giving proper acknowledgement to the works we use and alter. Works cited: a hallmark of an excellent program, with a rich sense of rigorous scholarship. We also need to be mindful of the professionalism we seek to prepare, an important connection with the corporate world in which many of our students will be working. We also need to use New Media to help teach the skills and values of collaboration. And then there is Henry Jenkins’ concept of transmedia, an exciting way of thinking about the new media landscape and the cultural products that emerge from that landscape.

Larry closes with a look forward to a monograph coming out in the early fall, a catalyst to continue this conversation about accreditation/standards and excellence for new media programs at colleges and universities. There’s a wiki where you can add to this conversation. We hope to craft a process that embodies the values we hope to promote.

Practicing our values. Walking the new media walk–with our eyes on the horizon.