Steve Greenlaw over at Pedablogy said very nice things about the preceding post, and I’m grateful. Moreover, I want to show my gratitude. But Steve asks for practical suggestions. You’d think we’d just met. Have I ever given him practical suggestions? Well, okay, perhaps once or twice. I do try. Actually, I thought I had put some practical suggestions into the preceding post. Yet I suppose it all came out the way it does most of the time. What he gets from me is what everyone gets: dreams and myths and song lyrics and movie quotations and cryptic mutterings about this and that delivered with mournful looks or hand-waving manic excitement. Steve’s patient with my cryptic mutterings. I do try to save some of my best ones for him.

So here are some mythy dreamy non-practical practical suggestions, by semi-request, in honor of Pedablogy’s fifth birthday (back in May; I’m late).

The contest is depicted in the lower panel.

I’m fascinated by the tale Pliny the Elder tells of  a contest between two Greek painters, Zeuxis and Parrhasios.[i] (I’m using it right now in a Milton article I’m trying to write.) Which of these painters could craft the most compelling representation? The word “representation” is important here. These paintings were made to imitate visible reality, and the extent to which they tricked the eye (thus “trompe l’oeil”) would determine their success. With a century and a half of technological image capture behind us, we may ourselves judge such a contest as aesthetically unsophisticated, yet the story as Pliny tells it has deep resonance for all lovers of poetry and symbolism. I think it has deep implications for teachers and students as well. What motivates interest? What representations of knowledge, in the moment of learning facilitated by a teacher, inspire curiosity?

Zeuxis shows his painting first. He removes the cover from the canvas, to reveal a painting of a bunch of grapes. The grapes’ verisimilitude delights the crowd, and the audience responds with praise. Yet an even more persuasive endorsement is near, as several birds swoop down to the painting to peck at the grapes, so complete is the representation, so powerful is the illusion. One might at that point judge the contest decided. If the natural world itself is fooled by a representation is such a direct way, uncolored by subjectivity, the representation is essentially perfect. I’d link this perfect representation to an utterly clear, well-organized set of descriptive information presented to students as if teacher, classroom, and student were all blank canvases ready to receive the crystalline perfection of the precise and authoritative exposition of the subject matter. (Not that there’s anything wrong with that, in the Seinfeldian sense.)

But the contest has another layer of perfection to be revealed. I’ll quote directly from the translated text of Pliny’s Natural History:

Parrhasios then displayed a picture of a linen curtain, realistic to such a degree that Zeuxis, elated by the verdict of the birds, cried out that now at last his rival must draw the curtain and show his picture. On discovering his mistake he surrendered the prize to Parrhasios, admitting candidly that he had deceived the birds, while Parrhasios had deluded [Zeuxis] himself, a painter.

That moment is for me a parable of engagement, of the kind of hungry interest that can drive a learner both faster and deeper than anyone might imagine. Zeuxis’ cry begins the experience. In some senses it defines the experience. It’s a complex moment: something great is at stake for him, and the event has already brought him a considerable triumph. We can think about the ways in which one can construct the drama of the learning moment, and how one can bring some experience of elation to any learner at any level. The deepest bit for me, though, is that urge to lift the veil. The urge has little to do with crystalline clarity of exposition. And it has everything to do with interest. I felt that urge when I went to college. I was a first-generation college student, working class, ready to find a more comprehensive sense of the mystery and complexity of the world and learn to articulate it for myself. Many teachers who work with similar students report they are “hungry” for an education. Encountering a student with that hunger, and helping that student find the food that will both satisfy and increase that hunger, is one of the great and humbling rewards of being a teacher.

But what to do with the students who, like the one Steve describes in this post, are simply not hungry, who announce (with pride? defiance? boredom?) that they have no interest in the subject being taught? And what of those students who are hungry, but who have had their interest quashed by teachers who may well be interested in their own interest but have not learned to be interested in their students’ interest, to be fascinated by the growing fascination with areas that may be “old hat” for the teacher but feel like radical innovation, even revelation to the student?

I suppose that’s my cue for practical suggestions. I think these work for all three types of students I’ve described above. They’re all about making a veil–really, a kind of meta-representation–that elicits a cry for revelation.

1. Practice being visibly interested in your students’ interest. (Go meta; Google recursion (H.T. to Tim Logan)). Watch them like a hawk for any flicker of curiosity, confusion, or awe. Don’t pounce, but do attend, and let them know that you find their interest fascinating, or at least potentially fascinating. This requires top-notch listening skills, patience with digression, and the steely discipline not to look down, away, or at your watch/cell phone/class clock/notes whatever. There has to be a rhythm here, of course. If you’re hanging on their every gesture, students will a) not believe it and b) begin to find you rather creepy. You also don’t want to pander to them by suggesting everything they say is right, deep, astonishing, etc. What I’m suggesting here isn’t really about praise, however. It’s more about finding their interest interesting, and letting them know that. You can tell them when they’re wrong, misguided, etc. What’s not good is to miss the signs of interest, or to ask merely for repeated information (though that has its place, a steady diet is pretty deadening), or employ a kind of mock-interest merely as a way to use their contributions to take you to the next step in your own well-laid instructional plan. The latter strategy is perilously easy to spot. Next thing you know, the students will be feigning interest right back at you, and then the jig is up for everyone.

2. If  you can connect your interest in their interest to your interest in the subject matter, you’re actually demonstrating a vivid human and social context for the life of the mind. That context is, I believe, one of the primary reasons for school in the first place–not that you’d know it from some of the last century’s industrial strategies, some of which people are trying even now to sustain in this century as well.

3. Include robust portions of the conjectures and dilemmas that drive your particular areas of intellectual concern and the methodologies that drive your inquiries into those areas (in other words, your discipline). Searching through my blog archives, I see that I’ve invoked Jerome Bruner’s idea of  “conjectures and dilemmas” many times without actually quoting the wonderful story with which he illustrates his concept. I will now correct that oversight! A long quotation follows. Trust me: it’s worth it.

There are several quite straightforward ways of stimulating problem solving. One is to train teachers to want it, and that will come in time. But teachers can be encouraged to like it, interestingly enough, by providing them and their children with materials and lessons that permit legitimate problem solving  and permit the teacher to recognize it. For exercises with such materials create an atmosphere by treating things as instances of what might have occurred rather than simply as what did occur. Let me illustrate by a concrete instance. A fifth grade class was working on the organization of a baboon troop–on this particular day, specifically on how they might protect against predators. They saw a brief sequence of film in which six or seven adult males go forward to intimidate and hold off three cheetahs. The teacher asked what the baboons had done to keep the cheetahs off, and there ensued a lively discussion of how the dominant adult males, by showing their formidable mouthful of teeth and making threatening gestures, had turned the trick. A boy raised a tentative hand and asked whether cheetahs always attacked together. Yes, though a single cheetah sometimes followed behind a moving troop and picked off an older, weakened straggler or an unwary, straying juvenile. “Well, what if there were four cheetahs and two of them attacked from behind and two from in front. What would the baboons do then? The question could have been answered empirically and the inquiry ended. Cheetahs don’t attack that way, and so we don’t know what baboons might do. Fortunately, it was not. For the question opens up the deep issues of what might be and why it isn’t. Is there a necessary relation between predators and prey that share a common ecological niche? Must their encounters have a “sporting chance” outcome? It is such conjecture, in this case quite unanswerable, that produces rational, self-consciously problem-finding behavior so crucial to the growth of intellectual power. Given the materials, given some background and encouragement, teachers like it as much as the students.

To isolate the major difficulty, then, I would say that while a body of knowledge is given life and direction by the conjectures and dilemmas that brought it into being and sustained its growth, pupils who are being taught often do not have a corresponding sense of conjecture and dilemma. The task of a currculum maker and teacher is to provide exercises and occasions for its nurturing. If one only thinks of materials and content, one can all too easily overlook the problem.

Quoted from Jerome Bruner, Toward A Theory of Instruction (Harvard Univ. Press, 1966), 158-159.

“Life and direction” are good eye-catchers–and good I-catchers, too. A caution: one should not confuse the teaching of conjectures and dilemmas with “teaching the conflicts” (as Gerald Graff urged us to do at the zenith of the era of high-theory epistemological panic), which in my view has real but highly limited value. Demonstrating that people have different opinions. judgments, points of view, foundational assumptions, etc. may take some very sheltered students by surprise, which is its real value: it inculcates a certain kind of tough-mindedness. But it’s not a conjecture, nor is it a dilemma. A conjecture is what Bruner calls an “invented” answer, not a “found answer,” and of course original thought doesn’t not proceed by merely looking up answers that are already there. And a dilemma is “a problem offering at least two solutions or possibilities, of which none is practically acceptable” (Wikipedia). In my experience, “teaching the conflicts” never gets to the conjectures that inevitably emerge from incomplete data or the dilemmas that emerge when one takes conjecture and incomplete data and nonetheless feels compelled to act or reason in one way or another.

4. Everett Rogers argues that observability is a major factor in the diffusion of innovation. I believe that this argument works for interest as well. Interest spreads when it’s observable. How can students observe each other’s interest? Well, one way is to have everyone sit in a circle, where a circle is defined as everyone’s being able to see everyone else. (Many “circles” fail this test, in my experience. I always insist on it, and I clown and cajole until I get it.) Another way is to play a game, one in which the players’ interest and engagement are readily visible and drive the entire experience upward in terms of its intensity and fascination (my colleague Blaine McCormick does this with a game in his intro marketing class). Yet another way is to create a visualization of individual expressions of interest, both in and out of the class meeting, and make that visualization available to the class and (this is important) to the world as well. We teachers feel pretty good when students say they’re interested in the classes we teach, but what we really want, I think, is for students to be interested in what the class is about, what it represents in the life of inquiring minds around the world, what this one course and one semester stand for more largely and importantly. For that to happen, there must be ample provision for displaying student reflection (e.g. blogs), resource collection (e.g. Delicious, Flickr), and in-class thinking (e.g. Twitter) to the world. It’s one thing to tell students that the local class meeting has lifelong, global, even eternal significance. It’s another thing altogether to connect to the global network and raise the possibility of contact and interaction with that field of larger significance (i.e., civilization). Who will read my blog? Is it possible that nearly anyone in the world might? Whether or not a miracle comment from an expert, an alum, a parent, another classmate ever emerges, the tantalizing possibility of that contact lends urgency and a bracing sense of expectation to the work and its aggregation. Ditto for Delicious: students see on the motherblog, or in their reader, or wherever, that their classmates are thinking about the class when the class isn’t meeting. One might imagine such a thing happening, but something as simple as an RSS feed in a sidebar will demonstrate that fact–and the observability of that demonstration of ongoing interest will drive more interest. At every juncture, then, we must think of ways not only to elicit and nurture interest, but to make the aggregated display of the students’ interest into an object of interest itself, thus perpetuating a most virtuous cycle. We will find ways to make interest go viral–and “we” in this case primarily means “the students themselves”–but only if their individual work, as appropriate,  is visible to the entire class and, as appropriate (which is more often than not), to the world.

I never intend to write these elephantine posts. But having “wreathed my lithe proboscis” yet again, with my Jumbo apologies any my hopes that something in all of the above is useful, perhaps even practical, I take my leave with a quotation from Steve’s very first blog post at Pedablogy–what I’d call the most practical suggestion of all:

I’m writing this blog primarily for myself. For years I’ve had stray thoughts that I have wanted to think through, but ended up slipping away. I’ve decided to let this blog be the place for me to think through those thoughts.

Rock on, brother, and amen.

"The Primum Mobile, the largest and swiftest sphere in Dante's cosmology, is the physical origin of life, motion, and time in the Aristotelian-Ptolemaic universe."

Image and caption from “Danteworlds,” a beautiful and deeply imaginative website at the University of Texas at Austin.

Sometimes I feel as if we’re all arguing about local traffic ordinances when we should be working together to craft a bicameral legislature and a three-branch system of government with the appropriate checks and balances. Or that we might really want to talk about varieties of representative government more generally–or is it more specifically? All the leadership training and experience I’ve had over the last six years has made me instinctively reach for that strategic layer–which also, and increasingly, feels like a foundation. Strange trick of perception there, depending on the cosmology perhaps.

So I hear and participate in lots of talk about educational innovation and, more urgently, educational reform. And I keep reaching for that foundational layer. Or is it the strategic layer? Either way, it’s a sine qua non: if we’re not talking about that layer, it really doesn’t matter much what else we are talking about. But finding that layer, that’s not so easy. It’s either dreamy or impractical or too complex or too obvious and simple. No wonder it’s so elusive.

Today, I want to entertain the idea that the strategic foundation for learning is interest, a particular kind of intrinsic motivation that manifests as openness to new ideas, a willingness to be in conversation, a genuine reaching-out to the unfamiliar and sometimes even the daunting or repellent. A penchant for wanting to know. A habit of inquiry. A disposition to wonder.

Thanks to Hillary Blakeley, our founding Graduate Fellow in the Academy for Teaching and Learning, and Ellen Filgo, Baylor’s E-Learning Librarian, I feel as if I’m standing on a hill overlooking a vast new land to explore, as they have brought me resources on curiosity and interest that even at the outset seem to me to be vital starting and ending points for thinking about learning.The in-betweens matter, of course; they’re crucial. But I’m suspecting that the idea and experience of interest–my own, my friends’, my colleagues’, my students’, especially as the experience (not necessarily the object) of interest is shared–is at the center of what I call real school.

The other day, Ellen sent me some links to Paul Silvia’s work on interest. Silvia, a cognitive psychologist at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, is already teaching me a ton. From him I’m learning that there’s a great deal of evidence to suggest that interest is not just a state of mind. Rather, interest is an emotion. I’m not joking when I say that this idea thrills me, and begins to radiate explanatory power through a lot of what I’ve been thinking and dreaming about for decades. It also resonates quite strongly with my favorite description of the poet John Donne, by another poet, T.S. Eliot:

For Donne, a thought was an experience. It modified his sensibility.

It sounds basic, obvious, simplistic even, to say that interest is at the heart of self-directed, intrinsically motivated learning. Yet Silvia, and much of the work he cites, demonstrates that interest is far from simple, and that acquiring the ability to make something interesting to oneself is one of the highest metacognitive capacities we can develop. My fascination continues as I learn about Silvia’s work on metrics for curiosity (now there’s an authentic assessment for liberal learning: has this curriculum made you more interested in the world around you, and if so, how?) and about his extensive writings on interest and aesthetics. I’m seeing that “interest” is not necessarily “passing” or “mild” or otherwise superficial. At its most intense, interest is directly linked to peak experience, to “flow.”

Yes, perhaps my greatest pedagogical interest will turn out to be the experience and sharing of interest itself. Perhaps my feedback loops, my recursions, my motherblogs, and all the rest are efforts to turn what JSB calls “curiosity amplifiers” into “interest engines” or even “interest viruses” that spread like wildfire through the learning community as the interest (or engagement) streams are made visible and themselves become an object of interest, or of meta-interest. And perhaps the fascinating spectacle of shared interests and the shared experience of interest will also inspire one of the other “knowledge emotions” Silvia studies, and I treasure beyond the telling (and suspect he does too): awe.

I’ll leave you with a great little nugget (that’s my word for those resonant passages) from Silvia’s 2006 book Exploring the Psychology of Interest, one that reminds me of Eliot’s description of Donne, and of W. H. Auden’s observation that a teacher must also be a clown:

People who must create feelings of interest–entertainers, teachers, writers, artists, magicians, and beleaguered babysitters, to name a few–need to know how to manipulate the emotions of other people. This requires understanding the dynamics of emotional experience.

A word to the Kindle tribe: I’m annoyed (to put it very mildly) that the Oxford University Press discounts the 59.95 print version by only 20% for the Kindle version. University presses ought to get wise about e-books, if only to build market share. Books like these could appeal to a much wider readership than psychology professionals. But against this vexing reality is the lovely surprise of the sample download (aren’t you downloading free samples for your Kindle app, on whatever devices you wish?), which is quite substantial and will no doubt lead to a sale in the near future.

Bonus round: Paul Silvia has made much of his scholarly work available on his website.

Easter egg: Today I learned that one of our new ATL Grad Fellows (and an alumna of our New Media Faculty Development Seminar), Megan Johnson, is a fan of Silvia’s work. Megan is herself a doctoral candidate in psychology, so of course I feel quite affirmed by her professional endorsement. 🙂 And I’m looking forward to some intensely interesting conversations to follow.

I often quote Jon Udell’s principle of the “conservation of keystrokes,” so I was pleased to see his particularly acute and insightful blog post on the principle behind the principle. As is often the case with Jon’s writing, I found my mind moving to one of JSB’s “adjacencies” as I read along, triggered by the anecdote of how folks didn’t “get” Lotus Notes. The telephony demo story is perfect, and points to what I’m thinking is the real difficulty here with understanding the principle behind the principle: the imagination.

Presenting the telephony demo on a stage is as heroic in its way as trying to represent four-dimensional space on a piece of paper. You really are about two dimensions down. So when I talk to my colleagues about narration, curation, and sharing–or to use Jon’s words,  discover, share and reuse (the trio that I hope we can train digital citizens to grok by emphasizing narration, curation, and sharing in the curriculum)–I’m really trying to suggest multiple dimensions that simply aren’t visible, except by a leap of the imagination, through the suggestive abstractions I use in the demo. I call them “suggestive abstractions,” but of course they look to me like case studies, because I’ve actually seen them work, because I participate daily in those modes of communication, and because I know other teachers/writers/artists etc. who have also had these experiences. Yet these real-life examples, testimonials, and so forth that are not only real to me but indeed hyper-real (multiple puns intended) end up not answering the question “why would you want to do that?” And they don’t answer that question because the way I imagine what *that* is ends up diverging in some fairly stark ways from the way my audience imagines what *that* is (let’s say for brevity’s sake that we both call *that* “education,” or more accurately perhaps, “school”). I demonstrate the uses of blogs in the classroom, or urge student work be showcased on YouTube, or whatever, and it’s like demonstrating telephony on a stage. Folks see it, and understand it, but they don’t understand the dimensions that make it compelling, because those dimensions cannot be revealed to witnesses examining a process on a stage.

But there’s the (meta) rub. I’ve had the experience I’ve had with these tools and online writing spaces because my imagination led me to those experiences. A long time ago, I could intuit what they were about. When I began reading Engelbart, et al., I found sublime and complex articulations of that intuition, and I’ve had an amazing intellectual journey since then. But the intuition came first. Lately I’ve been re-reading some of the science fiction I read as a kid. (Brain Wave is the latest: horribly dated in some respects, but in others an eerie parable of mental amplification that has strong resonances with our current situation.) Is that where it came from? Or did the intuitions lead me to science fiction? Who knows? The real question is whether that intuition can be awakened or strengthened in others. I believe it can. But only the imagination can lead there and beyond. Otherwise, it’s just tool adoption, with the predicable backlashes and ineffectualities.

Then the question becomes how to build, inspire, provoke, or otherwise empower the digital imagination. It’s a question of meaning, in some respects, like the move from signs to words and their semantic potential. It’s also, I think, a matter of watching other intellectuals try to work through these questions as they imagined the digital age to come. That’s a big reason why I’m excited about the New Media Faculty Development seminar that the Baylor Academy for Teaching and Learning facilitated last spring, a project we’re repeating this fall (more on this soon). We didn’t do it by ourselves: we had enormous help from Alan Levine and the New Media Consortium, and we had thoughtful, serious, and open participants from several sectors of Baylor University, including the Baylor Interdisciplinary Core. There were many happy convergences. But it all had to do with the imagination.

Most people in the seminar have told me that it was enjoyable and meaningful for them. It may not have worked for everyone, but for one example of where it did (I know there are others), this seminar participant’s reflections suggest that our readings and conversations did help to awaken and strengthen the digital imagination, and that there is a layer beneath–or above–what Jon calls the “tech churn,” a layer that may help us see the four-dimensional (or n-dimensional) worlds that are implicit, and for some of us lived and inspiring realities, in the line drawings of a network.

Another in a series of posts from the 2010 New Media Consortium annual conference. Most of this material was written during the session itself, hence the use of present tense. I’ve added some connections and commentary along the way in parentheses. Mishmash or melange? Caveat lector. Whatever it is, there’s a lot of it.

Holly Willis, one of our University of Southern California hosts and Director of the USC Institute for Multimedia Literacy, comes to the podium to  introduce John Seely Brown, aka “JSB,” as I will call him for the rest of this  post. Holly tells us JSB has chosen his own job title–“chief of confusion.” But then she contextualizes that wry piece of truth-telling: JSB is the chief of confusion who asks the right questions and gets thought going in a better direction. He’s a “smoking man,” as in the character from The X-Files, the person who introduces clarity and helps the Institute for Multimedia Literacy envision a bigger picture. He raises the bar, identifies uncanny connections, and makes everyone in the room feel smarter. (Yes, there’s the meta-bar; that’s the meta-standard. To be able to emulate it!) Today, JSB will speak to us of “A New Culture of Learning.” (You can see the video of his talk, download it and the slides from his presentation, find links to the other keynotes, and more, on the NMC website.)

Here’s the message JSB has for us. We’ve shifted from a predictable world of equilibrium to an exponential world of constant flux and disequilibrium. There’s no denying the enormous scale of this shift. There are profound ramifications for learning, for media, for a world of rapid sets of punctuated moves. The exponential laws in the worlds we inhabit show no signs of slowing down. Even as Moore’s Law slows, our architectures and uses still increase exponentially. We used to live in a world of S-Curves:  rapid evolution up the curve would be followed by periods of stability along the top. Now we live in a world with no top to the S. He takes cloud computing as one example. (A canny example, as for many people “cloud computing” seems like the ascent up the “s” toward a stable new paradigm, a world of thin clients, network appliances, and manageable training and expectations. If not the summit, it would be at least a basecamp where we could rest awhile and reorient ourselves.) Behold: instead of a new one-paradigm-to-rule-them-all that would usher in a new period of stable, predictable development, cloud computing is already complicated by the emergence of massively powerful and sophisticated graphical processing units (GPUs). Why? Complex, immersive, real-time visualizations need powerful GPUs at the local machine. The cloud simply can’t deliver that level of real-time computing power, so suddenly we have to rethink cloud computing. We had no “S-top” to think about stability in the realm of cloud computing. (In other words, it’s ecosystems, networks, and complex connections all the way up.  Perhaps at one time intellectual history–say, for example, Kuhn’s idea of paradigm shifts–could be thought analogous to tectonic motion. Same thing, but on a somewhat faster timetable. No more. Now we must live in a world of near constant intellectual “seismic” motion. I trust I make myself obscure.)

Civilization has never seen a game like the one we’re now entering.

This means the half-life of any given skill is shrinking. Most skills we teach have a half-life of about five years. (In my view, this means we MUST teach at the meta level, always, in every way. This is also, as it turns out, the platform for the most effective pedagogy.) We must learn how to participate at the edge of interesting flows. Now learning has more to do with creating the new, rather than learning the old. But the creation has a strong tacit component. (Thus I’d say that teaching must refocus from teaching the explicit to teaching strategies for recognizing and accessing tacit knowledge.) “If you’re not curious, you’re screwed, in a world of constant flux.” These new mobile devices are not so much mobile computers as curiosity amplifiers. (Looking stuff up on the net becomes a habit of mind, a practice of renewable learning. But also see Bruner on various disciplines of curiosity–on the need to focus curiosity.)

(And yet. The NMC conference reinforced my growing conviction that one of my central areas of interest is the question of interest itself, with curiosity as either a synonym for interest or a particular mode of it. Thus JSB’s words above were particularly resonant for me. If you’re not curious, you’re screwed…. Yet so much of education, in my experience, leads away from curiosity, its impulses and distractions, its rambling stubbornness and exasperating energies. Too much to “cover,” and with enough self-discipline, one can learn without any interest or curiosity whatsoever. Why not detach the pleasure from learning, or at least train oneself neither to need or expect such pleasures? Kids’ stuff. You think this is recess? One might even darkly speculate–I will darkly speculate–that for many schoolers, curiosity or interest is seen as a frill, perhaps an embarrassment, like the overwhelming pleasure that complicates the simple business of reproduction. If only we copulated the way trees do, Sir Thomas Browne lamented, without all that silly business that just runs away with you. Or as Augustine imagined, perhaps in the Garden of Eden there were no involuntary responses to sexual stimulation. Instead, one soberly decides that it’s time, and reasonably gets on with the activity, with no dangerous digressions or worrisome, unmanageable desires. A fanciful and far-fetched analogy, perhaps, but I often think we have made education scalable and manageable by organizing the mess, impulse, and sharp joys of learning into, well, something of that tree-state Browne imagined, students rooted to their desks, careful not to ask questions that manifest curiosity, questions that would interfere with the thoughtful, deliberate march of coverage on which their teacher leads them forward. Work is play for mortal stakes? An interesting thought, but we don’t have time to think about that now; we’re already two slides and eight bullet points behind.)

JSB continues. Perhaps we need to rethink how we learn the tacit–and how new media has changed this game in fundamental ways. A view of knowledge as substance and pedagogy as knowledge transfer, with sophisticated pedagogy as “impedance matching” that yields the most efficient transfer of knowledge-particles from source to receptacle,  metamorphoses into a social view of learning: “we participate, therefore we are.” “Understanding is socially constructed” (and all this is articulated very well by Bruner in “Toward a Theory of Instruction”–yet education has resisted these truths for decades). Nothing beats a study group–but how those groups form, and how this peer-to-peer teaching works, changes in a virtual-physical hybrid world. (I’d argue that in fact all education has always worked, when it’s worked well, in just the way JSB describes. These new technologies simply make it harder for us to lie to ourselves about what we aver is happening, must be happening, in our current architecture of schooling, the house of cards we tell ourselves is as solid and irreplaceable as the ground on which we walk. Harder, but not impossible, at least until the next articulation of the explosive increase in human expressive capacity.)

JSB: Yet some misunderstandings of this new situation are possible. Example: Ryerson University didn’t get the social life of learning. Chris Avenir created a chemistry study group on Facebook, which notoriously resulted in Chris’s expulsion over 146 counts of academic dishonesty. The case against him? Learning should be hard, there is no structure of regulation for online behavior and that makes it incompatible with academic work, and it is our job to protect academic integrity from any threat. The conclusion: unless learning is hard and directed by others, it fails to meet the standard for academic rigor. Thankfully, in March of 2008 Avenir was cleared of all charges. The engineering faculty appeals committee found no proof the Facebook group led to cheating. (An instance in which peer review and faculty governance worked–a hopeful story, perhaps.)

In contrast, JSB tells two stories about groups that got it:

The Grommets of Maui, an island that had never produced a world champion surfer. A little boy named Dusty Payne announced his ambition to be that surfer. He formed a cohort that would compete and collaborate to perfect their skills. At 20, Dusty achieved his ambition. And so did every single one of the kids in his cohort–including the fifth one that can’t communicate or socialize because he suffers from Asperger’s Syndrome. The group pulled themselves up by their bootstraps until each one became a world champion. (We see a video of Dusty here–this is truly a champion–breathtaking stuff.)

How did they do it?

1. passion to achieve and willingness to fail, fail, fail along the way. Failing in surfing is very physically dangerous, by the way …

2. they accessed and analyzed surfing dvds, going frame by frame to discover the techniques these champions used

3. they used video tools to capture and analyze each of their own improvisations

4. “they pulled the best ideas from adjacencies: wind surfing, skateboarding, mountain biking, motorcross” (this is an especially beautiful idea–love this new noun I just learned, “adjacencies”–cf. Hofstadter’s fluid concepts and creative analogies–yes–also Polya’s “How To Solve It” and the notion of problem-solving strategies/heuristics. And of course poetry is among other things the art of the unexpected resemblance, a lovely, fraught exploration of the very idea of adjacencies.)

5. “accessing spikes of capabilities arouund the world–leveraging networks for practice in an ecosystem” (they placed themselves in a network of peak performers, apprenticing themselves to those performers)

6. “attracting others to help them around the world” (A gift economy of learning)

And always, a deep collaborative learning with each other.

What’s the mindset? A passionate pursuit of extreme performance with a deep questing disposition and a commitment to indwelling. Perhaps we should teach not skills, but dispositions. Immersion in, not about; marinating in the phenomena. Without digital media, this quest and this indwelling and this immersion would not be possible. Textual descriptions wouldn’t cut it, in this instance. (These are JSB’s words; the italics represent my own sense of urgency as I listened and recorded them.)

Now another example from JSB: a quest within World of Warcraft that generates exponential learning, not learning with diminishing returns. Joint collective agency, a community of practice: this is what’s formed here. To see this richness, we must pay attention not only to the core game, but to the “social life on the edge of the game. The edge is often referred to as a knowledge economy” (JSB’s emphasis). The WoW mantra is that “If I’m not learning then it ain’t fun.” In this environment, the ability constantly to perfect one’s skills is linked very strongly to one’s sense of identity. (In other words, I learn, therefore I am a consequential citizen of this world.)

So we see two kinds of learning spaces here: in-game learning, and out-of-game learning. Put another way, we see learning within, and learning about/above. In-game learning is collective indwelling: constant experimenting, constant tinkering, constantly playing around. High-end raids operate on gut feelings of how the system works. Complex analysis tools and dashboards are crucial aids to this indwelling. The dashboards are crafted by each player; they are “A Key to Masterful Play.” The dashboards are complicated (see www.fraps.com). Sometimes the game itself is played through the dashboards. (Owning the dashboard as a personal creation is a very beautiful idea, I feel. A personal dashboard is a key component of the personal cyberinfrastructure I envision and advocate. Perhaps the key component.) “After action reviews” evaluate everyone equally in a true meritocracy. The result: a new kind of collective virtual indwelling that blends the tacit and the explicitly cognized. We’ve focused on the cognitive all our lives. Now we must think more about the tacit (but a question emerges: if we think about the tacit, have we actually transformed it into the cognitive? Does the marinade go away once we begin to be out/above?). Out of game learning (aboutness) includes the following: forums, videos, databases, wikis, blogs, etc. This “talking about” is  another social level. (At this point I’m lost: is this out-of-game learning a part of what JSB calls “the cognitive,” which I read as “explicit knowledge presented in a linear fashion to the logico-executive mind, to be mastered more-or-less by being memorized”? Or is it a kind of social immersion that is also a version of what he calls “indwelling”? The point is important, as Bruner recognizes in his attempts to analyze and reconcile what he calls the “third way” of schooling, what JSB seems to think of as the cognitive way, with more enactive modes of situated learning.) WoW players manage knowledge via guilds, which provide a structure of filtering and feedback loops;  guild structures are learning structures.

Thus “about” and “in” are fused in this space (it now seems that JSB means by this “cognitive” and “tacit,” and perhaps the fusion represents a new kind of “indwelling”), and exponential learning is the result. an unusual learning we haven’t been able to measure before. Think also of speed chess and hard-core hacking. Speed chess: marinating practice in instincts forces integration at high speeds, and the result is that “not being able to think about it” actually transfers to success in non-speed chess as well. (A counterintuitive observation–and a revealing one. I’d like to hear more about the fusion he describes. Can it occur without some part of prior learning being cognitive? How do we acquire the cognitive and tacit knowledges that will be integrated, prior to their integration? Or can we somehow do it all at once? I have trouble imagining how. Hofstadter describes a back-and-forth, zoom-in/zoom-out kind of pattern to the way we seek patterns–and pattern-seeking/pattern-recognition are modes of integration–but the entire question bears further consideration.)

JSB raises a crucial question now: how do we combine man as knower (homo sapies) and man as maker (homo faber)? For homo sapiens, tools are instruments. For homo faber, tools are a form of productive inquiry. (An absolutely crucial observation; I couldn’t possibly agree more!) For homo faber, answers become questions. Tools are a way to think and talk about the backtalk of an environment. When the tool pushes back and doesn’t work quite right, that’s a rich source of learning. And now we have homo ludens as well: man as player. Homo ludens experiences the play of failure, the play of imagination in something like poetry, the play of epiphany, as in solving a riddle. Poems train us to be attuned to turns of phrase (semantic adjacencies)–JSB offers the example of hip-hop. (But one should go deeper with poetry, which trains us to be attuned to turns of thought, and adjacencies of imagination. A clever and revealing turn of phrase is one thing, and a good thing. But the larger symbol-play of poetry is a richer, more expressive activity still.) Play can stage epiphanies: and epiphanies are never forgotten. Play is the progenitor of culture–not the reverse. (He’s clearly drawing on Vygotsky and Huizinga here.)

These exercises teach us reframing, and the reframing is all. (Again, very clear connections to Hofstadter and Polya here.) JSB shows us a very simple riddle to illustrate his point.  (There’s an oddly disturbing moment for me here. When I raise my hand to answer the riddle, JSB walks over, looks at me, and says “Oh, I’m not calling on you.” I’m not sure why this happens, as I’ve not met him. Elementary-school flashbacks ensue, and I struggle to shake the distraction.)

Now JSB is speaking about blogging. Blogging is not just content creation–it’s context creation. He quotes Andrew Sullivan on blogging. (I hadn’t seen Sullivan’s “Why I Blog,” or if I had, I don’t remember it–though I don’t think I would have forgotten such an essay.)

[The blogger] is—more than any writer of the past— a node among other nodes, connected but unfinished without the links and the comments and the track-backs that make the blogosphere, at its best, a conversation, rather than a production…. Jazz and blogging are intimate, improvisational, and individual—but also inherently collective. And the audience talks over both.

(From “Why I Blog,” published in the November, 2008 edition of The Atlantic Monthly. Sullivan’s blog, “The Daily Dish,” appears on the The Atlantic Monthly’s website. Interestingly, Sullivan again praises the roles, natures, and values of blogging in today’s “Daily Dish,” posted on the day I complete this long-overdue blog post. Happy Fourth of July.)

JSB argues that if we take this blended epistemology of knowing and making seriously, we find deep tinkering, playing at making, testing trying riddling, the system as thing and context simultaneously. (Compare the preface to The New Media Reader, which makes a similar point. A couple of months ago, I used the NMR preface as a jumping-off point for some of my talk at the NMC Accreditation Convocation. In my research, I discovered that episteme (knowing) has a mythical personification, but techne (making) apparently does not. I conclude that this strange and dysfunctional disunion between knowing and making lies deep in the religio-philosophical heritage of the West, though there have been very helpful interventions against this disunion along the way–and to be fair, many cosmologies of creation emphasize the union of knowing and making. Certainly Milton’s monist materialism insisted that knowing itself was a material process–and by no means a “merely” material process. But I digress.)

To continue his point and drive to his conclusion, JSB points to danah boyd’s blog post “For the lolz” on the ways in which 4chan is hacking the attention economy through a process of playfulness and deep tinkering.

(Here begins a digression that’s way too long. You can route around it by clicking here.)

(At this point I confess I’m starting to feel a bit restive. First, I’m not at all sure that 4chan is really a place where, in JSB’s words, “recreation becomes an act of re-creation/remix & productive inquiry.” That’s not to say that only “productive inquiry” has value for learning. Also, in some respects, danah’s post seems to be arguing that unproductive, Lord-of-Misrule carnivals can be the incubator for attitudes and experiences that later lead to modes of productive inquiry. But that’s not the same as arguing that cow-tipping, metaphorically speaking, is an act of remix and productive inquiry. Maybe what I’m stumbling over here is the question of varieties of making and play. Are they all equal? Does playing at virulent, destructive hate speech qualify as good play?  If the idea is to preserve an anonymous space for the marginalized to find and share their voices, good. If the idea is to keep Internet inventiveness out of the maw of corporate commoditization, good. But if the idea is to take nothing seriously, or not to take anything “too” seriously, whatever that means, then I’m not convinced that 4chan offers us the learning culture JSB describes. One of danah’s commenters makes much the same point by arguing that 4chan’s attention hacks–which seem to be a kind of spectacle generation that sometimes produces memes–are only superficially like what the earlier generation of computer hackers were doing. Are these really attention hacks? Or are they attention snacks– and a kind of snacking that in some cases is, well, not far removed from coprophilia? EDIT: “coprophagia” is more precise. But either word will do.

Christopher Poole runs 4chan. There are no rules on 4chan. Or rather there are Christopher’s rules, which are ignored, and the community’s own Internet rules, which seem in Christopher’s TED Talk not to be rules so much as in-jokes or wry observations or “laws” like “Sturgeon’s Law.” Here’s the you-have-been-warned disclaimer that appears if you click on a 4chan link:

By entering this section of the website, in exchange for use of this website, you the user hereby agree to the following:

1. The content of this website is for mature viewers only and may not be suitable for minors. If you are a minor or it is illegal for you to view nudity or mature images and language, do not proceed.
2. This site is presented to you AS IS, with no warranty, express or implied. By clicking “I Agree” and then viewing our site, you agree not to hold the webmaster and staff of this site (4chan.org) liable for any damages from your use of these boards.
3. As a condition of using this site, you must fully understand, and comply with the rules of 4chan.org, which may be located by following the “Rules” link on the home page.

Is this an elaborate satire? Am I being winked at? Is the rule of law being invoked here, internally and externally, as a way for Christopher to immunize himself from prosecution? I have to say that Christopher’s TED Talk makes me squirm, not because of the content of 4chan (that’s way too intensely mixed a bag for “squirm” to describe my responses), but because he’s so eager to make the case JSB is making, that 4chan really has a heart of gold and enables good things to happen, like lolcats and attacks on Scientology and CSI-type work that uncovers a cat abuser who’d posted his video on YouTube. 4chan guards anonymity and claims it is an unalloyed good, but then its members band together to identify the YouTube villain. Don’t get me wrong:  I’m ecstatic that the cat abuser was arrested, but there are many instances of contradiction and special pleading in the way Poole makes his case as he advocates lawlessness for his board but turns to the rule of law for the YouTube case. And Poole’s own absolute distinction between speaking and doing doesn’t accord well with the fusion of knowing and making that JSB’s been praising. But this is a very old concern, and a particularly difficult one: is there a distinction between liberty and license? Mix these uncertainties with a concern I share–that we not overlook potential good because it arrives in a new or unsettling form–and the questions are vexed. But worth raising. What bothers me in this moment, then, is that a very complex matter comes into the talk very late and with a fairly superficial appraisal of both 4chan and danah’s blog post. danah herself admits that the subversive entertainment of “betting on the anarchist subculture”–if 4chan is truly anarchist–doesn’t make her “too thrilled for every mom and pop and average teen to know about 4chan (which is precisely why I haven’t blogged about it before).”

There’s a great article about Wikileaks in a recent New Yorker. Toward the end, author Raffi Khatchadourian makes this acute observation: “Soon enough, Assange must confront the paradox of his creation: the thing that he seems to detest most—power without accountability—is encoded in the site’s DNA, and will only become more pronounced as WikiLeaks evolves into a real institution.” Mutatis mutandis, there is a caution here for 4chan, as well as our our analysis and celebration of 4chan.)

.

JSB concludes his talk with this observation:  the culture of learning is a culture that thrives on participatory lifelong learning and a quest to always become. (I anticipate the response that this conclusion would get from many of my colleagues.  I hear the legitimate complaints as well as the tiresome beside-the-point complaints, and I feel like Psyche with her seeds. Where are the helper ants? Can Eros send any aid for this mental strife? A brilliant talk in almost every respect, but the question of become what? become why? won’t be silenced. Even if these questions can’t be answered, they can’t be eliminated, and they should be asked. Perhaps the idea of emergence is implicit here. As so often, I feel at war with myself in this matter. Neither flux nor rigidity can be ends in themselves, though the argument seems always to resolve into these binaries. Conserve! Liberate! Be! Become! Where are the more complex imperatives?)

Enough of this post and my many hesitancies, questions, surmises, and yearnings. The conference was splendid, and it ended, and now we wait for next June to roll around. I hear it’s lovely this time of year in Wisconsin.

Let’s keep the conversation going. Next year, it’s the University of Wisconsin at Madison. June 15-18 in one of the nation’s best college towns.  See you all there.

For other responses to this keynote, see my fellow conference bloggers: Barbara Sawhill and Natalie Harp. Salute!

Note: This is the first of a set of belated posts from the 2010 New Media Consortium Annual Conference. I’m finishing the posts based on drafts I did while the events were still going on, so don’t be misled by the present tense. This post narrates events that happened on Saturday, June 12, 2010.

Holly Willis, one of our USC hosts, praises the conversations she’s heard, the hybridity of groups here, the generosity and mutual support of the NMC culture. She’s feeling worn out, but not burned out–an important distinction, and one that the room endorses as it prepares for the climax of the conference..

Susan Metros offers her farewells and leads us in the Mickey Mouse Club song. See you real soon!

This moment encapsulates one of the many things I find fascinating and lovely about the tribe that is NMC: the group is sophisticated about Disney’s mixed and sometimes disturbing enchantments, sure, but it’s open to the genuine wonder and playfulness that’s in that world, too. It’s a privilege–and frankly, a relief–to be with people who can articulate and even revel in these complications, these paradoxes. (I’m strongly reminded of Steve Martin’s description of Disneyland in his recent memoir Born Standing Up. He spots Diane Arbus coming in to take photographs of what he can only assume she will see as a freak show. He fully understands all those layers of irony in their peculiarly strong American variety. Yet he also insists that Disneyland is beautiful.)

Then comes the first Center of Excellence Award: the Houston Community College System. HCC’s successes span all its years with NMC. Its CIT program, begun in 2004, aims to help faculty integrate teaching technologies into their practice. Around 1500 faculty have participated in these programs, and hundreds have been certified. A Teaching and Learning Excellence program was launched in 2008, with similar success. HCC now has a center for teaching and learning excellence, and a new director, both of which will take these development programs to the next level. ICT uses range from distance ed, to English composition (using podcasts, voice recorders, etc. via apps in an iPod Touch), to courses in computational science and computational thinking, to experiments in seamless integration between learning environments, pedagogical innovation, and learning technologies. Instructional design and technical support combine with user-generated content the instructors want to include in their classrooms. A Kindle study is underway (see Five Minutes of Fame account here). The Vocational Nursing Program has a sophisticated birthing simulation–and this part of the HCC video is especially witty. I refer you to the NMC website for the full experience. The end of the video was a point of some discussion afterward. Many of the men in the audience, including me, couldn’t decide whether it was okay to laugh at the mock-horror of the birthing scene. When we heard the women laugh, we felt we had permission to laugh, too. Maybe I was imagining things, but I could swear I heard a slight, high-pitched note of anxiety mingled with the men’s laughter. Perhaps I’m just projecting.

Chris Millett accepts the award for Penn State

Next: Penn State’s Educational Technology Services. In their video, Cole Camplese talks about the programs there, and PSU staff and faculty discuss the need to help students become information sharers in their digital futures. This group focuses on production of digital media as artifacts of learning. Cole speaks to the need for an instructional design intermediary that can support intelligent uses of ICT, and help faculty “get courageous” in an environment where it’s safe to try things out, fail, and learn. A lovely video, and Chris Millet comes up to accept the award, offering thanks to the entire team that’s behind this winning effort. Cole’s vision drives excellence. His team shares the vision and brings its many talents to the endeavors.  Best of all, the video itself is a great example of the very integration that it winningly advocates. (Postscript: Baylor University got a double shot of the Cole Camplese/PSU magic just a week later, when Cole himself visited Baylor for a series of presentations and conversations related to all things ICT in higher education. More on that anon.)

Now Tulane University’s Innovative Learning Center steps forward to receive its award, and their video tells the story. T.R. Johnson describes how he makes documentary films with students about their service learning work–work that has the power to spark a social movement. James McLaren, Dean of Undergraduate Studies, describes how ICT assists with new student registration each summer. Nick Spitzer, Prof. in Anthropology and producer of NPR’s American Roots, draws parallels between his archival work and the work the ILC does, Felicia McLaren, who teaches French culture and French cinema, tells how the ILC helped her in a course. And the examples keep on coming. Just when the list gets too long to take in: a surprise: “outtakes” that were slated for deletion but somehow “escaped.” Now we hear what the home folks truly think about the Tulane Innovative Learning Center–in multiple languages.

Derek Toten speaks!

Sheldon Jones did the video, ILC Director Derek Toten accepts the award, the entire team is on the stage. Tulane’s finale is brilliant self-mockery of the highest order, and a most entertaining conclusion to the awards parade.

And speaking of Sheldon Jones, a fellow traveler on this year’s NMC Photosafari, now we get the slideshow of each participant’s ten best photos. A perfect segue into John Seely Brown’s closing keynote on homo sapiens, homo fabre, and homo ludens … but that’s for another post.

The session begins with greetings from Susan Metros and Holly Willis of USC, delivered with charming Mickey Ears on their heads (Susan wears Minnie ears, Holly wears sorcerer’s apprentice ears). We then watch  video greetings from the head of the USC Cinema Studies program and from the CIO and vice-provost for IT (using an interesting solarization/rotoscoping effect). Then comes the crowning touch (couldn’t resist): Susan presents Larry with his own official high potentate Disney Mad Hatter hat, complete with lovely flowing orange hair at the sides.

A different tea party altogether.

I confess that it’s a little hard to concentrate as Larry delivers his NMC news in this, ah, bold get-up. 🙂 But the news is great: NMC is building on its Horizon Report with an initiative called Horizon Navigator. And what is Navigator? From the website: “Navigator allows users to fully exploit the Horizon Project’s extensive and expanding collection of relevant articles, research, and projects related to emerging technology and its applications worldwide, as well as the NMC’s expert analysis and extensive catalog of sharable rich media assets”

Now Larry’s introducing Mimi Ito, who’ll be speaking to us on “Learning with Social Media: The Positive Potential of Peer Pressure and Messing Around Online.” Mimi begins with Nick Carr’s essay “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” and his new book “The Shallows,” to make a larger point about the rosy hopes and stark panics that shape the conversations at every new inflection point in digital technologies. Her conclusion: both sides are right, but only if one holds both positions simultaneously. “Google isn’t making us stupid; we have ourselves to blame for that.” Our mediated culture represents not only risk, but also a great opportunity for peer-to-peer learning–if we can rise to that opportunity.

Three principles:

I. Stocks of Knowledge vs. Flows of Knowledge.

Much of what we see around us is a networked world in which many of our comfortable boundaries are untenable. (In other words: if we’re to grasp the amazing promise of this networked world, we must organize learning around the networks, not around the models that preserve the boundaries of our current educational practices.) “We expect students to do original work, but we give them the same assignments and standardized assessment routines…. [A]nd then we get upset with them for copying others’ work.” (Indeed. Term paper mills can flourish because it isn’t hard to guess what kinds of rote, unimaginative assignments most classes generate.)

II. Originality and Appropriation.

Now we head to the Numa Numa dance as the beginning of internet lipsynch. (Amazing: I feel the glee and energy spreading through the room as we watch the video together. We all wait for the eyebrow–and there it is.) Next up: the Back Dorm Boys: Wei Wei and Huan Yixin (and one of my fellow bloggers is singing along in harmony–whoa). Same genre, but now collaborative and transnational and self-conscious and ironic: commentary and instance. Next: sfeder321 and a room full of webcams in “A Day At The Office.” A real-space band of lipsynchers, their performances cut together and at the same time choreographed in a single space. (In cinema terms, I’d call this a most unlikely mix of montage and mise-en-scene, as if Eisenstein and Bazin had a love child and called it, well, called it this: mise-en-montage. Did they really do this in one take, as they say they did?)

What we’re seeing here, Ito asserts, is the evolution of video ecology over the last five years. Now we educators must think about how to respond to this evolution and how to incorporate this outpouring of creativity into the ways we think about the learning events and environments we help to design.

More examples now from Jonathan McIntosh and identity remix videos: essays on politics by way of altered ads. We watch one biting satire on a Hummer commercial, the soundtrack stripped out and subtitles introduced that critique our culture of oil consumption and warns of climate change to follow. We see another remix (“Buffy vs. Edward”) in which gender stereotypes from Twilight are mashed up with empowered-woman clips from Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Clever, funny, rigorous, precise. (See more of Jonathan’s work at  rebelliouspixels.com, as well as at Criticalcommons.org).

Ito concludes we’re immersed in the flow, and we need new mechanisms for filter and focus. Education has to be more than transmitting stable canons of knowledge. It has to equip us for adaptability, and lead us to be much more than passive consumers of endless info streams. Ito believes that the “social wrapper of peer-based learning communities” is the key. Don’t fight the peer-based interaction; make it the mechanism for the filter and focus necessary to learning. See Snafu Dave, a webcomic artist. A self-taught artist at that: integrating math, design, and computer science. He embedded himself in a social community organized around webcomics, took online tutorials, built websites that hosted comics by other creators. Snafu Dave was “probably one of those kids who’d drive you crazy in class”–but that would be to overlook the ways in which real learning happens as the student constructs his or her own learning environment out of resources and expertise available on the web.

Some avenues of promise: P2PU (peer-to-peer university): a social, interactive “wrapper” around the experience; Howard Rheingold’s social media classroom; Michael Wesch’s digital ethnography at K-State.

III. Assessment vs. Reputation:

“In peer-based networks … we see kids jockeying for status and reputation within an ecosystem….” For example: kids who take existing anime footage, strip out the sound, and put in the music of their own choosing. How does this peer community assess its own work? It takes place within a social environment that motivates participation. Lots of opportunities for rating, opinion, competition (online and at conventions): “a highly expert community that looks to each others as learners and teachers….” (Great hybridity here, as the experience is local and global, online and face-to-face, individual and massed at special events and screenings.) Open flows of knowledge are not enough: people need opportunities to distinguish themselves within their communities–and these online communities do it very well.

How to leverage all these phenomena for learning? Because our own credentialing is so fixed and successful, faculty are not typically seeking new paradigms for assessment, accreditation, and reputation within the academic environment. (This is a crucial point, in my view, and cannot be overemphasized. What happens as a result all too often, alas, is that our own credentialed security becomes a hollow point of “authority” and enforcement when it comes to students’ learning, and the whole process generates enormous cynicism and degree-grubbing as they simply try to “get it done,” where “it” is their education. To a significant extent, students learn their cynicism about school from their teachers. I say this with sorrow.) She goes on to praise danah boyd (present in the audience) for the way she’s used social media to generate reputation and elicit conversation far beyond most of the researchers working in this field–simply because danah has pursued these new opportunities instead of relying primarily on academic credentialing and institutional affiliation to do that work for her.

Ito closes with a statement of optimism and hope, but hope that depends on our inventing new ways to think of learning as a networked phenomenon, and then harnessing the power of that network to drive intrinsically motivated learning. She’s delivered her critique of school practices and cultures in kind and measured words, but her call for change is unmistakeable and unmistakeably comprehensive. Can we do school by other means, with other attitudes and other practices than the ones that have grown up over the years? An urgent question, and one Ito will be working on as her research continues.

Many thanks to fellow conference blogger Barbara Sawhill for confirming the three principles with Ito after the talk was done–we all had pieces and parts, but in the heat of the moment none of us got the complete list. Don’t miss either of my fellow conference bloggers’ work: Barbara’s is here, and Natalie Harp’s is here. An honor to be among them.

An image of fluency from http://exper.3drecursions.com. They had me at "recursion."

In late March of this year I was privileged to speak at the 2010 Summit of the National Institute for Technology in Liberal Education. It was my second time at a NITLE Summit. The first time was 2008 in San Francisco, when one afternoon I found myself talking to Provost Randall O’Brien of Baylor University about a job there…. These little details do stay with you.

This time nothing quite so fateful happened, so far as I know, but I did have an entire breakout session to explore some ideas I’d been kicking around, ideas related to Media Fluency, a term so variously defined that I had plenty of room to develop my own, sometimes contrarian positions. Bryan Alexander moderated the session–for which many thanks. He’s every bit as good a moderator as he is a speaker, which is saying something.

The recording of the session has some difficulties, as you’ll hear. Technically, there’s a weird rustling noise that I suppose is either the sound of my sport coat rubbing the microphone or a flaw in the mike cable itself. Conceptually, it’s difficult to tell when I’m speaking in my voice, when I’m quoting someone else (the text was generally on the slide, so I didn’t feel compelled to say quote-unquote), and when I’m being ironic and seeming to approve of something that in fact I do not, at all. I’ve posted the slides on Slideshare; I hope they clarify some of the trickier bits in the address.

Even with all the difficulties, the talk does get at some new ideas that are important to me:

• Media Fluency is more than technical skill with images, video, and audio.
• Media Fluency in a digital age must include meta-medium fluency, the crucial step in understanding computers as tools for thought, to use Howard Rheingold’s lovely phrase. In later talks, building on this idea, I’ve identified five steps to full digital citizenship: information literacy, then digital fluency, then metamedium fluency, then a personal cyberinfrastructure, then digital citizenship. More on this in a subsequent post.
• We must stop using the phrase “digital natives,” for three reasons: milennials and younger are not necessarily meta-medium fluent, baby boomers and older don’t get a bye just because they didn’t grow up with the stuff, and (most important of all) I think the word “native” can also be a none-too-subtle euphemism for “savages,” with all the imperialist/colonialist baggage that comes with that word. I develop this argument in the talk, but there’s much more to say.
• I’m coming at deschooling another way these days under the influence of James Fernandez’ extraordinary essay “Edification by Puzzlement.” In this essay, Fernandez warns us to beware of “administered intellectuality.” The phrase and his caution resonate deeply with me and in fact go a long ways toward describing some of the things that have bothered me for decades in my own education and practice within academia.
• In this talk, I introduce the idea of moving away from “signature pedagogies” such as the term paper, and toward “pedagogies of signature” that help students imagine and create their lifes’ work, that is, work that they want to sign, work that emerges from intrinsic motivation and reflects personal commitment. (EDIT: The idea was inspired, in part, by Claudia Emerson’s talk at an Honors Convocation at UMW many years ago, where she spoke of the symbolic importance of the signature. Thanks, Claudia.)
• I also pun on the venerable “long tail,” inviting academia to imagine both a flourishing diversity of work (diversity empowered and preserved in the long tail) and a larger communality of effort and direction, the “long tale” that is the story of civilization we all write together.

The Q&A was interesting, but most of it was so far off-mic that I doubt it can be heard, and in fact I’ve excised a fair amount of the Q here. To sum up:

1. The first question was mostly pushback on the slide with John Hancock’s signature. The questioner took me to task, politely, on the idea that the flourish was inherently meaningful and challenged me to articulate how the idea of the “signature” was more than just self-display. I hope I’ve summarized his objections faithfully. I gave the answer my best shot–but clearly there’s more to say here, particularly about the charge of self-indulgence and narcissism. (These charges routinely come up with things like social media, and they deserve to be taken seriously up to a point.)
2. The second question was about how to get faculty on board/excited about multimodal expression when they’re unhappy with students’ writing skills. Shouldn’t we be concentrating on bringing those basics up to scratch before we launch into multimodal/media fluency territory?
3. The third question was for the second questioner, as the group began to talk to themselves (a good moment, as it always is when the discussion isn’t automatically funneled through the speaker). A woman asked when writing became a core skill—and who gets to decide what’s a core skill.
4. The fourth questioner asked how much pushback I get from faculty who see anything besides writing as merely a vocational skill to be learned after college. “Go to Community College later if you want to learn CAD,” etc.
5. The fifth speaker didn’t ask a question, but tried to answer one. She spoke up in favor of disruption: asking questions, going deeper in the answers she’s given, challenging the answers she’s given. As you can hear, these comments resonated pretty strongly with me (no surprise there)
6. Bryan Alexander then asked about the social nature of these new media—are they daunting for faculty because they go beyond the class or the professor. Our closing keynote speaker, Kathleen Fitzpatrick, noted that she uses social media frequently in her own classes, and said a) it creates some anxieties for the students and b) it creates great excitement too. She went on to say she encourages her students to choose pseudonyms so they have a little bit of shielding for themselves if they want–their future employers won’t necessarily know their “kung-fu videos” are by them.
7. Finally, I ask the “get out of the way” question. A librarian says the lesson for her is that she should be more respectful of what young people are using for their social and communicative lives, and not be so quick to imagine these modes as impolite or irrelevant.

Bryan wisely ends the session just when I was getting stirred up by memories of listening to Jethro Tull in my room as a teenager.

Here’s a good summary of the talk. The last part is my favorite, as it demonstrates the writer was truly paying attention: “Teaching media fluencies is akin to teaching fundamental mechanisms of thought (no pressure). Takeaway question: If we believe this, how do we communicate this to faculty and get buy-in? If you follow this out to its conclusion it rattles the foundation of many of our assumptions around education.” Indeed!

Here’s the talk.

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I agree in principle that we who work in education should be able to describe what we intend to do, and that it is important that we find a way to demonstrate to what extent we have met those goals.

But that principle is a principle of almost unimaginable complexity.

Rather than proliferate crude measures of recall or reductive “normed” evaluations of various templated essays, we should think much more deeply and comprehensively about assessment. To do this, we’ll have to start with what it means not only to learn something in the sense of committing it to memory, vital as that is, but also to understand it, to be able to sense and articulate and share the structure of that knowledge as well as the conjectures and dilemmas that surround it and propel it into new areas of inquiry. We need to think about domain transfer, and ask what kind of learning fosters the analogical and metaphorical thinking that leads to conceptual breakthroughs. We need to think about the teacher’s theory of other minds, as well as the students’. We need to master strategies of indirection that empower each other to imagine and perform what Douglas Hofstadter calls “perceptual regrouping,” that trick of the mind that can perform figure-ground reversals, separate sequences into smaller groups to yield new possibilities, and adapt Polya-esque heuristics to apparently novel situations to reveal surprising connections with apparently far-flung domains.

I have colleagues working as hard as they can to answer the need for complexity. I just hope their work can stem the tide of unthinking “learning outcomes assessment” that Jonathan Kozol pillories in Letters to a Young Teacher.

I really, truly do not think that Likert scales or uniform tests or other simplistic measures are up to the task of helping us map or understand this most profound practice we call “education,” by which I take it we mean a deliberate approach to learning, part of which must include learning about one’s own learning. In other words, the deliberate practice of leading another’s cognition into a richer and more effective relationship with itself.

Of empowering and advancing the brain’s self-shaping capabilities.

I don’t have answers, but I do have a deep intuition that we can best think about this kind of complexity by thinking about similar networks of complexity that have emerged in human experience. (Here’s where I wish I’d majored in anthropology.) There are two such networks I think about a lot these days: language, particularly written language, and the Internet. In this podcast, which records a presentation I did over a year ago at an EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative annual meeting at the invitation of my hero, friend, and colleague Chuck Dziuban, I try to think about assessment by thinking about the emergent properties of the World Wide Web. It seems to me very interesting that a big part of Web 2.0 has to do with assessment, evaluation, reviews, and so forth. Is there a way these emergent phenomena could suggest more comprehensive, inclusive, and meaningful modes of assessing learning? I don’t know, but I do think it’s a question worth asking.

Longtime listeners will hear some familiar themes in this podcast, but cast in a different light. The Shakespeare bits develop some ideas I first began to work on in the “Proof That Matters” talk I did for a K-12 Online Conference a few months before I did this talk. All the ideas here need a great deal more development. I do hope, however, that they’re moving in a more answerable direction than most of the assessment talk I’ve encountered during the last few years.

EDIT: Janet Hawkins alerts me to some parallel thoughts:

http://doyle-scienceteach.blogspot.com/2010/03/rttt-antithetical-to-public-education.html
https://www.blogger.com/comment.g?blogID=4956989639073843954&postID=3538222791054286821

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For days now, I’ve been mulling over this session, and the Twitter response to it while it was happening. (I was there and in that Twitter stream.) Jim’s post and the extraordinary set of comments it elicited have catalyzed my own efforts at response here.

It turns out that I have very conflicting responses. I’m sure I’ll have more as I continue to think about the session and its aftermath. I post these responses in an effort to keep my thoughts going. I have no ironclad conclusions to offer and I look forward to more conversations as I try to sort things out in my own mind.

I thought at the time, and still think, that Bob Young was not just ignorant of his audience, but at least mildly contemptuous of it. One colleague afterwards said to me that Young had been “baiting” us, and I think that’s right. I’m not a fan of confrontational ha-ha’s, particularly at the end of an event that works so hard to encourage mutual support, inspiration, and optimism–and not just through feel-good boosterism, but through thoughtful, open, determined conversations that have the essentially hopeful mission of education at their core.

When it became clear that Young had not prepared any remarks for us, that he had nothing to show us beyond the front page of lulu.com, I was at first mystified, then insulted, then angry. I also thought he was just a little too calculating in his constant self-deprecation, most of which took the form of sniping at school and academics generally. That’s not to say that school and academics don’t deserve attacks–I’d be the last to say that–but I thought his remarks were shallow and dismissive and unhelpful. That he felt he’d wasted four years on a history degree, without a single teacher or classmate or reading making any apparent impression at all, suggests not just that he feels thrown away by the educational establishment (as many people are, to be sure), but that he had a chip on his shoulder the whole time, and one that he wanted us to admire.

Then he started in on the “damn idiot students,” and I felt my gorge rising. This was my fifth ELI/NLII meeting, and I’ve never heard such casual cruelty from the podium.

Yet the nagging question remains: did Bob Young’s inexcusable behavior justify my own snarkiness on Twitter? No. There are some forms of solace that don’t really soothe anything, and I wish I had not been so free with my own anger and dismissiveness on a public forum that would represent ELI to the world. As one colleague often says of such behavior, it just “feeds the beast.” I knew better.

That said, there was also an attempt on Twitter to engage with Young honestly and seriously. There were moments of meaning as well as reaction. But it’s quite true that in the moment, emotions were running so high that communally-fed reactions outpaced communal meaning-making. And in the Twitter environment, those reactions have a long tail that they wouldn’t have if we had simply met for coffee afterwards and vented. I’m certainly not proud of my own snarkiness and venting on Twitter during the event, no matter how helpless (and hopeless) I felt as the runaway train careened down the tracks. These thoughtful responses from another colleague who was not there, but who saw the Twitter stream in action, are a valuable lesson for me in the destructive potential of the backchannel.

But there’s one other thing to note here. A keynote speaker has an enormous responsibility. At these moments, the entire conference comes to a point of focus on one speaker, one set of ideas, one address. ELI 2008 was full of enormously talented speakers, and any of the featured speakers would have been a much better closing keynote than Bob Young was, though I’m sure no one on the program committee had any idea Young would do what he did. But back to the point. Time slots on a program are always precious, especially when so many wonderful ideas and speakers are in circulation. I think we all felt an enormous wave of disappointment (this comment eloquently describes the feeling) that an extraordinary opportunity had been discarded by a speaker who seemed to have no sense at all of the gift he had been given. The program committee, acting on our behalf, gave him a treasure, a great privilege, and to him it appeared to be no occasion at all–nothing to rise to, nothing to answer, nothing to value. Instead, we got jokes about his inadequate speaker’s fee and the relative IQs of his various audiences.

This should not have been just another day on the IT circuit for Bob Young. This was a chance to engage with one of the best chances at academic transformation on the planet. We came to learn. I think we would have responded well to challenges, even to thoughtful provocation. Perhaps Young’s educational experiences really have scarred him to the point that he cannot be open or serious in the way he presents his own ideas, at least to an audience like ELI. But on that day, in that room, I felt hollowed-out and disheartened.

I won’t try to justify my own backbiting on the backchannel. I can’t, and I’m sorry for it. But it’s important to realize that Bob Young is not the only one who’s been made fragile by his educational experience. By analogy, if any of us was invited to speak for 45 minutes to a provost or president, to say nothing of a room full of them, would we do what Bob Young did? We know how rare and precious these visionary opportunities are.

Only at the end did I feel Bob Young was making any real attempt to connect with us, or engage seriously with ideas. When he shared his thoughts about keeping the MIT Press thriving in the midst of the challenge Lulu.com posed to its business model, I believed him, and wanted to hear more. When he told the story of the librarian who implicitly chided him for checking out so many books, and told us that this was the only teacher who had ever made an impression on him, I felt real sorrow over the way he had been cast aside by his own education, and I wanted to hear much more about how he had kept his head high and his determination alive in spite of being told again and again how he didn’t measure up. In a conversation after the session, another colleague said that Young should have led with the librarian story. I thought that a brilliant idea. Think of how the entire talk would have been reframed as a critique of academic processes and dismissiveness, but with the positive direction of imagining a new educational community that finds the brilliance in each student, and encourages real curiosity and intellectual diversity. That would have been a talk worth hearing.

Bob Young clearly has that talk in him, and he clearly has vital stories to share. Why didn’t he choose to give that talk and share those stories with us? At the end of it all, that’s the question that haunts me most.