Gardner Writes

I was privileged to read several lyrics by Coleridge this past Thursday as part of the University of Mary Washington’s venerable “Thursday Poems” series. The idea is simple: gather on Thursday afternoon to hear someone read thirty minutes worth of poetry. No lectures, minimal commentary, mostly just great verse. My colleague and mentor Bill Kemp (of Kemp Symposium fame) started the series several years ago. For my money, it was a great accomplishment. My colleague (and fellow music- and poetry-lover) Eric Lorentzen has kept the tradition going with panache, and with deep devotion.

Coleridge’s poetry can be difficult to read, and certainly difficult to take in on one listen. I’m not sure how intelligible I make it in my reading here. I gave it my best shot, aiming for a climax with “Kubla Khan,” one of my favorite lyric poems, and then a graceful close with the beautiful “Frost At Midnight,” also a favorite of long standing.

I got through “Kubla Khan,” only a little disappointed by the fact that my timing was off and I didn’t have the minutes I needed to read the prose at the beginning of the poem, a story of a forgotten dream that I’m convinced is an utter fiction, indeed part of the poem itself. But never mind: “Kubla Khan” does just fine in its traditional form, and I had a great time reading it. Then I turned to “Frost At Midnight”–and encountered a huge surprise.

I had not read that poem aloud in public for decades, probably not since I was an undergraduate. I’d read it to myself many times since, and of course had read bits of it aloud here and there when I taught it, but not the whole thing, aloud, in public. As I read, I found the pent-up yearning inside the poet as he recalls his lonely boyhood got more and more intense inside my own spirit. The poet thinks of the longing he felt as he watched that film of ash on the grate, the fluttering “stranger” that portended a visit from … someone, and as I read the lines I felt something welling up inside me, too–an expectancy, a grief, an overwhelming hopefulness.

The scene in his memory ends The poet turns to look at his child who is lying in the cradle at his side. “Dear Babe,” the section begins. And as I read those two small words, I was overcome. I struggled through the rest of the lyric, unwilling to let it stop, and at times unable to keep it going.

I’ve decided to podcast the reading pretty much as it happened. You’ll hear a long pause at one point, and you’ll hear the evident emotion as I try to continue. I do make it to the end.

I worried a little about the people in the room, that they would think something was wrong with me, or my family, or otherwise. But there was nothing wrong. There was simply beauty, and love, all the way through. My thanks to STC for giving us this wonderful gift, this poem called “Frost At Midnight.”

I’ve turned off comments on this post. If you enjoyed the reading, please go read some Coleridge for yourself. There’s more where this came from.

And may all seasons be sweet to thee.

 Lyrics by Coleridge, read by Gardner Campbell [31:52m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

WFB in 1984, about six years after I met him. Photo from NY Times story here.

Strange but true: I shook this man’s hand. It’s strange because I never enjoyed the two or three episodes of “Firing Line” I watched when I was a high school debater and eager to learn more about the dark arts of competitive argumentation. I didn’t like the snark (I can do snark, I understand snark, I do not like snark). I didn’t like the shouting and posturing. I didn’t like the predictability of the side-taking and the uber-partisan politics. I didn’t like the way WFB’s voice seemed to come out of his mouth and his nose simultaneously. And at that time in my life, anything remotely resembling patrician would get my hillbilly blood boiling. (I’m still not real big on patrician, but I don’t tar all patricians with the same broad brush anymore.)

But it came to pass during my junior or senior year at Wake Forest University–I forget which–that William F. Buckley, Jr. was invited to speak on campus. For reasons I no longer remember, but probably related to my work at Wake’s NPR station WFDD-FM, I ended up backstage with Buckley in the green room before he gave his talk. I shook his hand and exchanged pleasantries as best I could given my age and my mixed feelings about the encounter. Standing before him, I found that Buckley had a great deal of presence in person, though unusually so: it wasn’t a matter of physical size or charisma or extraversion so much as it was a matter of still intensity and a preternatural alertness. He seemed to me to be completely undistracted. That I was the person in his visual field was both unnerving and weirdly compelling, as he was completely undistracted from me, when there was no earthly reason he should be paying anything but cursory, polite attention to a 20-year-old college kid who had no clear reason for being in the room with him at all.

I’ve often noted how distractable many folks are in conversation. Their attention will wander, and their eyes will follow, and for some reason it doesn’t matter that the thread is lost. Most of the time these folks don’t even notice their attention has wandered, which of course suggests their attention has wandered long before any explicit sign of the wandering appeared. But Buckley had none of those signs of distraction. Quite the contrary. As soon as we had finished our how-do-you-do’s, he began asking me direct, warm questions about who I was and what I did at WFU. I answered him. He asked more questions, not to interrogate me, but certainly not as a matter of small talk either. I was shocked to get the strong feeling from him that he actually cared about my responses and was learning from them. I found this a little confusing, but also bracing. I mentioned that I worked at the campus NPR affiliate. He asked me how I liked that, what I thought about NPR, what programming I enjoyed most, what my particular role at the radio station was, and so forth. There wasn’t a whiff of condescension in his manner or his questions.

We couldn’t have talked for more than ten minutes, if that. I never saw him again in person. I didn’t follow his career, and I haven’t read his books–though one day I may–and I didn’t watch “Firing Line” with any more frequency or enjoyment than I had before. Nevertheless, in the years that have followed I have often thought of that brief conversation, and how rare it is to be able to feel any authenticity of encounter in such a situation, and how great it was when I did feel it that evening. I think what I felt a little of in that moment was not only Buckley’s intelligence but also his talent for friendship, a talent that many have testified to in the stories I’ve read since his death last week. That’s why I may yet read his books, whether or not I agree with any of his political points. In that moment, he not only put me completely at my ease, he taught me that I must never lose faith in the possibility of authentic conversation, no matter how exotic or odd the encounter.

I’m too tired tonight to do any justice at all to this story, but I would like to note it and perhaps return to it another time.

Today in the 11:00 section of my Introduction to Literary Studies class the discussion was particularly rich and intense. At one point I was asking one student a series of questions about some of her own cognitive states as she was grappling with the indirection of parts of the discussion.  As I was trying to weave her own answers into the responses other students were offering to related questions, suddenly yet another student, two rows back, made a quick joke about “author-function,” recalling our discussion of Foucault. In that instant, I could see that the student two rows back had made a huge cognitive leap. It was quite a thrill to witness. The joke was an aside, not a formal contribution to the argument, but it was catalytic and breathtaking. In that moment, the student had realized that for critics of identity, our sense of self is the same as an “author-function.” Foucault had said as much earlier, but it was in the midst of a dense explication of his point. Judith Butler had argued something similar. Said resisted Foucault’s argument at the point of identity and agency. Long story short: the student’s quick joke made several connections in several directions all at once, and launched the class into an even higher plane than it had been before. It was, for me, a moment of high cognitive drama to watch her find that idea. And the class discussion that followed fed on that moment wonderfully.

I’d like to analyze the moment and the events leading up to it in more detail. For now, I suppose what sticks with me is how right until the moment of “Bingo!” things felt to me tentative, uncertain. I had a feeling of “better get back on track.” I put the feeling aside for a little longer than I was entirely comfortable with. That’s not always a successful strategy. Sometimes stirring the pot keeps it from boiling. Today, though, we got to an understanding of certain kinds of arguments about identity that I don’t think we’d have gotten to if I’d been more systematic. Hard to say.

I do know that at one point I said, “There’s thinking going on in this class!”  For so there was, and it was very exciting to be in it.

We finished the McLuhan video in New Media Studies today, and the students learned that MM had children (six, in fact) with a very charming and intelligent wife who both marveled at her husband and waxed rueful about his idiosyncracies. We learned that his son could not convince MM that in fact Brasilia was now the capital of Brazil. This TV special, hosted by Tom Wolfe, is quite the ride. Highly recommended for anyone with any interest in McLuhan. At this point, I’m going out on a limb and suggesting that nearly everyone should have some interest in McLuhan. I can’t believe that it’s been less than a year since I read him for the first time. So many gaps, so little time. Yet desire still cries, give me some more to read. (Secret handshake there for “Astrophel and Stella” lovers.)

Rock/Soul/Prog was a mixed bag today. Some folks are not yet on the bus. I know I shouldn’t worry so much; I know all will be well, and not all is up to me. Yet I also know that there’s energy, passion, commitment to burn in these students, and I know they and we will need it for the work now and the work ahead. I think last term’s class learned that a little later than was optimum, and I think there were some regrets. Every narrative has its own arc, and hope springs eternal–Thursday is another day….

I was shocked when two students from my Intro. to Literary Studies class brought me flowers. They said they were being nice to their teachers today. I confess: I melted. Am I weak, uncritical, unskeptical? Posterity will judge. The flowers are lovely and I was touched. I’ve tried hard this time to be as imaginative about the symbolism assignment as I can be. Perhaps the ideas of resonance I’m working on and with have helped push the effort a little farther along. Hard to say. So hard to get readers to pay attention to the texture and conceptual-tactile joys of language. Maybe it was the Twilight Zone episode that helped. “Walking Distance”–the carousel as symbol–try it at home and report back. What resonates?

Then at last to an orchestra rehearsal. I have a voice-over narration part in one of the pieces commissioned to celebrate Mary Washington’s Centennial. We were rehearsing in the band room tonight. It’s a small room, and the orchestra filled it. I stood next to the conductor. To my right, a young cello player drew dark-toned beauty from her instrument. Ahead, I could see the winds, and I focused on the flutes and bassoons, the two wind instruments I played back in the day. To my left, the violins. Back and to my right, the brass. A harp, a full percussion ensemble, a score spread on the conductor’s desk, a baton dividing time in the air. A room full of timbre, vibrato, popping articulation, melisma. I was taken back to those many late nights I spent rehearsing in my high school bands, in the Roanoke Youth Symphony, in my college’s wind ensemble and orchestra, to that huge sound that took me out of myself and into a much larger arena of being. I wish everyone who loves music could hear a performance from the middle of the orchestra. Surrounded by that sound, one cannot think of power as a merely cultural phenomenon….

Today’s Washington Post features an unusually fine article from Joel Garreau (registration required) concerning the ways in which cellphones have changed, and continue to transform, our lives as a species on this planet. Twenty-five years of cellphone technology have brought us to the point that Google CEO Eric Schmidt can say, “Eventually there will be more cellphone users than people who read and write. I think if you get that right, then everything else becomes obvious.”

The article is full of insightful quotations and balanced judgment. There are the expected laments for lost privacy, for intrusive conversations in public spaces, but they’re contextualized in a much larger and more thoughtful analysis than I usually see. I’m especially impressed with the way in which Garreau has understood the intimacy of human contact represented and enabled by cellphones.

No educator can afford to overlook or downplay the ways in which cellphones are changing civilization on personal and global scales. It’s hard to imagine a technology in which microcosm and macrocosm are so tightly linked. We should have better ways inside the academy to think about these changes with our students, and to create within the possibilities these technologies afford us.

Here’s the way the article ends:

[Robert] Wright muses about adults in this new world: “An organism only gets to new levels occasionally. I wonder, has it ever seemed to any other generation that this is just a different world than the one you knew in adolescence?”

This is not the hyperbole of a techno-utopian, though some may say that “new levels” is too optimistic. The extent and character of the change, however, should not be in doubt.

Northern Voice 2008 comes to a jubilant end. (Maybe I’ll be lucky enough to get there next time-please, please, please.)

Barbara Ganley decides ’tis not to late to seek craft a better world.

In “The Medium is the Message,” Marshall McLuhan writes, “The serious artist is the only person able to encounter technology with impunity, just because he is an expert aware of the changes in sense perception.”

This gathering of inspired and serious artists, this serious artist of the blogosphere and beyond making her own way through her vocation: oh brave real school, that has such people in it! (and never mind Prospero’s cynicism). Tonight I hope I will see and hear them in my dreams.

The Intro. to New Media Studies class today was pretty explosive. I had assigned excerpts in The New Media Reader from McLuhan’s Gutenberg Galaxy and The Medium is the Message. I was up this morning about 5, reading some insightful and tremendously inspiring blog posts from the class. A couple of the posts were especially provocative, hortatory, probing. As it turns out, there was one highly engaged post I couldn’t understand fully. On the way in to school, I puzzled over what had led the student to make what I was fairly certain, but not altogether sure, was a mistaken identification of one of McLuhan’s references. I concluded that McLuhan’s reference to Coleridge must have been the thing the student couldn’t quite pinpoint. As I considered what I thought to be the mistake and a probable cause, it occurred to me that the mistake actually pointed to a deep and important connection that I should consider more carefully than I had. In other words, what I thought to be the student’s mistake, and my own attempts to diagnose its cause, stimulated my thinking in some very fruitful ways, to the point that I couldn’t wait to get the conversation started.

When I got to class, I asked the student for clarification, and as soon as the student realized the mistake, the student became embarrassed. I was dismayed by the embarrassment and tried to tell the student how thought-provoking and rewarding I had found the experience of grappling with the question of whether a mistake had been made and if so, how. The student replied with more embarrassment. In my ardent attempts to frame the mistake as a portal, I finally blurted out, “Penicillin was a mistake!” and then carried on with some reflections on how we must trust each other with our mistakes. We must be willing to open our minds to each other as we learn, and endure our mistakes, and be alert to the possibilities of learning that mistakes can reveal or even inadvertently stimulate. I said to myself how terrible it was that schooling had kept mistakes from being turned into opportunities while the learning was taking place. What messages have the designs of schooling sent to me, and to my students, when the rightful desires for accuracy and precision become massive inhibitions that block the revelations that are one or two steps away?

I hope the penicillin story was helpful. I followed it up with one of my favorite aphorisms, from Pasteur: “chance favors the prepared mind.” I thought again how vital trust is for any community, but especially a community of learning. I hoped against hope that the student understood how grateful I was for a risk, a mistake, and an opportunity for deeper engagement with the essay.

We’ll see.

EDIT: Re-reading this post, I see I left out one of the more interesting small ironies: I was mistaken about what had caused the student’s mistake. It wasn’t the Coleridge reference, it was confusion over the name Adam Smith. But behold another portal! My search for a plausible error-diagnosis led me astray in terms of the student’s mistake, but led me on quite effectively to focus my attention on a passage I’d not yet fully mined. There’s some elasticity of inquiry here, as well as a willingness to be entertained and instructed by one’s own great big floppy clown shoes. I’m working on loving my clown shoes and following where they lead, when I have the patience and grace for it.

So write Alan Kay and Adele Goldberg.

Corollaries:

An introduction to New Media Studies is a metacourse.

The third pitch we throw had better be a metapitch.

The metalevel is the most generative level, the most frustratingly inexact level, the most emergent level, the level where experts and beginners can have interesting meetings. It can be a wide-eyed level, an untethered level, a level where imposters run amok by asking pseudo-profound questions. But each level has its irresponsible party-crashers. The levels below the metalevel have their own versions of irresponsibility, not least the droning mediocrity of lockstep apparatchiks.

I always thought the metalevel was where professors lived. Sometimes we do, I suppose. Other times it seems the level that professors protect for ourselves or our disciplines. Still other times it seems the place that “theory” pretends to go while always already stopping one step short. And finally, it seems the place that goes away in the press of academic production day-by-day. Articles must be written, courses must be managed, service must be done: who has time for the metalevel? And isn’t there something terribly unsophisticated about anyone getting excited about the metalevel? Self-awareness is more useful for sophisticated self-congratulation than for readiness to go out onto that unknown plain with the Red Crosse Knight, Una, the dwarf, and the donkey.

I want to extend the metaphor, but that will need to wait for tomorrow.

A too-brief follow-on to the previous post:

• I would much rather see learning objects in a container like David Wiley’s course than in any CMS (I refuse to call them LMS’s–just my little gesture of protest) I’ve ever seen, for all the reasons everyone’s pointed out.
• That said, I am still not enthusiastic about the “content” and “resources” I’m seeing here. I wish I were more excited. Four years ago I probably would have been. And yes, I understand that incrementalism is valuable, and that taken together the elements here constitute a significant advance. I suppose I’m wishing the steps had been taken in a different direction.
• I see that the course feeds out. But what feeds in to this course?
• Honestly, for resources that simply feed out, I’d much rather listen to a podcast of a really good lecture, or even a YouTube video of a great presentation, than see a set of links or an outline of a lesson. The links and the lesson are valuable, too, and I’d much rather see them exposed like this than sitting behind a Blackweb wall. But it’s the human context that I want to see, hear, experience.
• Maybe it’s the word “content” that gets me restive. I want to see content that’s more responsive to the medium. And I don’t think that such content necessarily replaces books, or essays, or any of the things we experience in schooling now. I think the digital medium, and the digital imagination, moves us off default positions and into a much more intelligent place from which to choose and craft the experiences we want to lead our students through–and to equip them to choose and craft those experiences for themselves. (Both are necessary, in my view–but I’ve written about my concerns about a completely learner-centered paradigm before.)
• As I understand it, learning objects did not really catch on for precisely this reason: a resource without a rich context is difficult to adopt, and not terribly attractive to a faculty member who rightly or wrongly believes that she or he is being paid to develop materials reflecting her or his own expertise and judgment.

Most of all:

I’m still finding my way with all this stuff myself. But I have a strong sense that we need to get to Alan Kay’s vision of the computer as an instrument whose music is ideas, and I don’t see this paradigm getting us closer. I could be wrong. Help me understand! It pains me to think that any part of the conversation would turn bitter.

I confess that I’m not feeling it yet, this heightened buzz about republishing/remixing content. To some extent, this looks like the second coming of learning objects, which is fine so far as it goes, but it doesn’t go nearly far enough. To be honest, I was a bit underwhelmed by David Wiley’s course site. (I say this with fear and trembling, as I’ve learned to take very, very seriously what Brian and Jim and Chris and others in this community get excited about.) It’s a spiffy site, to be sure, and the syndication is a huge plus, but the biggest challenges I face as a teacher are not about content or even content management. My biggest challenges are about inspiring learners, raising their consciousness about what they’re doing as learners and (especially) as a community of learners, enticing them to expose their own learning processes to each other and to me so that magic recursion takes place in which the mind of the class, exposed to the class, becomes part of the class and takes them to the next level. My challenge is to get to real school in which the administrative parts are all means to an end and are never, ever be confused with the course’s larger goals. I suppose that means I’m not likely to have a link that says “download this course” on any of my online materials, even though they’re open to the world. Though I do see how these materials can be helpfully repurposed, I don’t think we’re looking at the deeper opportunities online learning communities and the expression thereof can bring us.

What I’m seeing so far looks sometimes like open lesson plans, sometimes like open link farms, sometimes like open syllabi, sometimes like an outline for a textbook. Where’s the commenting, the student feeds back into the main feed, etc.? Where’s the recursion? Maybe I’m missing something here. I’ll look again. But so far, what I see isn’t blogging (not narrative or provisional enough, not enough of what Bakhtin terms “addressivity”) and it isn’t the mind of the classroom made visible and part of the meta-stream. And without the context of the advanced learner–the teacher–as he or she moves through the shared experience of the course, it’s just not all that interesting to me. When I click on “Using This Course,” what I see is “here’s how to get the materials” and “dive into the Syllabus.” When I dive into the blogging assignment, I see the blogging assignment and the resources, and these are great, but where are the links to the student blogs created as part of the assignment? Where do the students go to see their work entering the datastream of the course? Every course uses prepared resources and generates a datastream during the experience of the course of study, and I’m interested in ways in which the experiences of the prepared resources and the generated resources become symbiotic and mutually augmented.

In his comment on Chris’s first, more skeptical post, Brian Lamb argues there is something genuinely new here:

if there were examples of blog-based courses that were structured so clearly, in a format that will be immediately grasped by even the most mainstream audiences, I wish more people would have linked to them…

My own skepticism goes like this: the clarity of structure means that it isn’t really “blog-based,” and the format that can be immediately grasped can be immediately grasped because it looks like a more creative and pretty and easily-republishable version of what we’re already doing in an CMS like Blackweb. In some ways, it’s like RSS feeds for Powerpoint slides, except in this case they’re pages or posts in WordPress. That’s not nothing, and I’m sure happy for things like Slideshare, but they’re incremental gains at best, and don’t do much to rethink the activity of publishing the process and materials of learning as experiences and not as containers.

Trying to keep an open mind here….

Catching up on my back blog reading, when what to my wondering eyes should appear than this magnum opus from Alan Levine. What’s one level up from alpha dog? Whatever it is, he is it.

For anyone who wants a thorough and wonderfully graded approach to customizing WordPress, look no farther. Alan’s come up with some gems lately, but this one combines all his strengths: storytelling, experimentation, encouragement, and sheer smarts. I’m overdue for a WP upgrade–and I need to fix that silly footer-spam issue so I can get my flickr badge back–but I’m going to study Alan’s post long and hard for ideas and inspiration as I work on Gardner Writes.

Did I ever tell you about the first time I saw Alan at a conference? New Orleans, 2005, ELI Annual Meeting. A truly fateful meeting for me, as it was also the first time I saw Croquet, the first time I took a team from UMW to an ELI/NLII meeting, and the first time I did live blogging from an ELI conference. I heard John Bransford at that meeting. It was Diana Oblinger’s first annual meeting as the new Director of ELI. Martha did a poster presentation on bots and intelligent agents, getting that gig after her wonderful participation in the Cyberealspace experience at EDUCAUSE 2004.

And where was Alan? In Phoenix, of course. But also at the conference, by way of webcam hookup, gloriously on display during the Horizon 5 minutes of Fame event. (I miss those.) Little did I know that this guy would play such an enormous role in my own development. It’s been three years since, and only two years since we finally met face-to-face at ELI, San Diego, 2006 Annual Meeting–but Alan’s the kind of teacher who can put thirty years years of education into three years of friendship and collegiality.

So I figure I’m embarrassing the CogDog right now, but them’s the breaks: when you’re doing the kind of work he’s doing, you’ve got to expect some fanboys.

Thanks, Alan. I’ve got a lot more to learn. I couldn’t ask for a better teacher.

The book arrived from ILL today. (Carla Bailey, Queen of ILL, comes through once again. Please do not hire her away from us.) I ran across the title in a Google Book search on “cognitive resonance.” I’m starting more or less from a dead start here, but from a quick read of the first chapter the book looks quite promising: education, intuition, experience, and reason are the four pillars of a theory of abstraction, learning, and communication author Ben Lieberman builds up from the beginning. Art and modeling are coming up in chapter two. I love the synthesis, the eclecticism, the boldness with which this writer moves through disparate fields to pull together a book that seems to be about software, but at a deeper level promises to be a treatise on human understanding.

More as I move along.  Here in the meantime is the summary printed in the book:

Modeling complex systems is a difficult challenge and all too often one in which modelers are left to their own devices. Using a multidisciplinary approach, The Art of Software Modeling covers theory, practice, and presentation in detail. It focuses on the importance of model creation and demonstrates how to create meaningful models. Presenting three self-contained sections, the text examines the background of modeling and frameworks for organizing information. It identifies techniques for researching and capturing client and system information and addresses the challenges of presenting models to specific audiences. Using concepts from art theory and aesthetics, this broad-based approach encompasses software practices, cognitive science, and information presentation. The book also looks at perception and cognition of diagrams, view composition, color theory, and presentation techniques. Providing practical methods for investigating and organizing complex information, The Art of Software Modeling demonstrates the effective use of modeling techniques to improve the development process and establish a functional, useful, and maintainable software system.