Dr. C.’s Learning Web

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 [...]

Original post by Gardo

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 [...]

Original post by Gardo

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 [...]

Original post by Gardo

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 [...]

Original post by Gardo

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 [...]

Original post by Gardo

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 [...]

Original post by Gardo

Interesting two days, in this respect anyway: I did a presentation on Brian Wilson for Elderstudy yesterday, then explored “I Get Around” all the way through “Caroline No” for my Rock/Soul/Progressive class today. From senior citizens (I really don’t like that term much) to 18-19 year-olds. Brian spoke to all of them. This of course reinforces my sense that yearning, vulnerability, and an awestruck sense of the divine origins of beauty are trans-generational in their appeal.
Don’t worry, baby. Everything will turn out all right.
Don’t worry, baby.
The woods echo, and their answer rings.
Happy St. Valentine’s Day, everyone.

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Original post by Gardo

Interesting two days, in this respect anyway: I did a presentation on Brian Wilson for Elderstudy yesterday, then explored “I Get Around” all the way through “Caroline No” for my Rock/Soul/Progressive class today. From senior citizens (I really don’t like that term much) to 18-19 year-olds. Brian spoke to all of them. This of course reinforces my sense that yearning, vulnerability, and an awestruck sense of the divine origins of beauty are trans-generational in their appeal.
Don’t worry, baby. Everything will turn out all right.
Don’t worry, baby.
The woods echo, and their answer rings.
Happy St. Valentine’s Day, everyone.

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Original post by Gardo

There’s a lot of great blogging going on in the Intro to New Media Studies class (always room for more, of course), much of it sparked by Ted Nelson’s Computer Lib/Dream Machines. We’re moving from Nelson to Alan Kay and Adele Goldberg next Tuesday, but before we go, I thought I’d share a recent response that gladdened this teacher’s heart.
According to Nelson, “we live in media, as fish live in water.”  According to my anthropology professor, “we exist in culture like fish in water.”  So I guess this means that culture = media.  I never thought of this connection before.  To me culture always meant customs, vernacular, superstitions, and religion.  But never computers or the Internet.

You can read the rest of this fine post at The Jeshire Cat.

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Original post by Gardo

ELI’s just published an interview with me and Serena Epstein at the ELI 2008 Annual Meeting, held in San Antonio just a few weeks ago. Interviewer/producer Gerry Bayne did an amazing job of corralling me into coherence, both during the interview and (especially) in post-production. My thanks to him, and also to Serena Epstein (heard later in the interview) for joining me at the microphone. I’m also grateful to Serena for all the engagement, creativity, and inspiration she contributed to the New Media Studies class this summer. Equal thanks also to David Moore, our co-presenter at the preceding day’s presentation and another star from this summer’s class. It’s easy to do great work with students like Serena and David.

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Original post by Gardo