Dr. C.’s Learning Web

The tourist who carves his initials in a public place, which is theoretically “his” in the first place, has good reasons for doing so, reasons which the exhibitor and planner know nothing about. He does so because in his role of consumer of an experience (a “recreational experience” to satisfy a “recreational need”) he knows that he is disinherited. He is deprived of his title over being. He knows very well that he is in a very special sort of zone in which his only rights are the rights of a consumer. He moves like a ghost through schoolroom, city streets, trains, parks, movies. He carves his initials as a last desperate measure to escape his ghostly role of consumer. He is saying in effect: I am not a ghost after all; I am a sovereign person. And he establishes title the only way remaining to him, by staking his claim over one square inch of wood or stone. Walker Percy, “The Loss of the Creature,” from The Message in the Bottle.

Since I first read it eighteen years ago, Walker Percy’s “The Loss of the Creature” has so occupied my spirit that I find my work circling back to it in ways that both surprise and instruct me. Case in point: I recently gave a presentation at the SUNY-Oswego “Celebration of Meaningful Learning,” sponsored by the Center for Excellence in Learning and Teaching (and ably led by the redoubtable economist John Kane). As I prepared my talk, I kept thinking about the ways in which Web 2.0 can restore the “title over being” Percy imagines in the essay I’ve quoted from. Not on its own, of course: Web 2.0 is that perfect learning environment that is only as good as one makes it. Yet there is a good, or many good things, into which Web 2.0 can be made, and which can be made by means of Web 2.0. By contrast, LMS’s like Blackboard make it difficult, at times even impossible, for the learner to leave any lasting imprint on the learning environment of his or her sovereign personhood.

Percy’s alienated tourists (not a bad description for a lot of our students) leave their marks as graffiti. Though I didn’t think of it in these terms until the Percy essay re-emerged in my memory days afterward, I wanted to take the idea of alienation and turn it around to the teacher as well. If the teacher can’t see the traces of the learners’ sovereign personhood in the learning environment, the teacher is every bit as alienated and deprived as the student. Even worse, the teacher cannot see the very thing upon which she or he must meditate and with which he or she must commune for authentic learning to happen. It’s almost as if we’ve constructed avatars of ourselves and activated scripts that move them, herky-jerky, through the environments we’ve created, while we look on, mourn, and grow increasingly frustrated as our agency (and thus any hope for real change) vanishes.

The metaphor I chose was not that of graffiti but of fingerprints, and I tried to frame the argument by analyzing how traces of the learners’ attention and addressivity could be of use to the teacher. What learning environments have textures that retain cognition prints? How do we “dust” for such prints when we try to infer the learners’ minds? I told some stories, and tried to establish a small but precise set of terms that would help us understand why and how cognition prints (if the metaphor was helpful) might matter.

I kept returning to three main ideas: attention, addressivity, and intimacy. I’ve been working on them for awhile now, and I find they’ll work (for me, anyway) in a number of different contexts. Attention is the foundation (there’s obviously some phenomenology at work here, though I don’t invoke philosophy–rather, commentary tracks on LDs and DVDs). Addressivity is the social and ethical dimension. Intimacy takes the social and ethical and brings in the idea of personal change, as well as the ways in which our tightest bonds actually constitute our personhood (a shared sovereignty implicit in Percy’s oblique strategies in even writing and publishing “The Loss of the Creature”).

My talk on that October afternoon was followed by an extraordinary dinner in which several teachers were recognized for their outstanding work in the classroom and as advisers. They were young and old. They were well and ill. They were from varied disciplines. They all had a chance to speak, at length, about who they are as teachers and why they do what they do. (It struck me that this should happen at all awards dinners for teachers.) They all spoke of their passion, their curiosity, the strong (I would say intimate) bonds they felt with their students. I have never felt prouder to be a teacher than I did at that dinner on that night. What a noble, humbling, and needful calling we share. I felt myself missing my students, thinking with a pang of those I’d left behind at the University of Mary Washington, and also looking forward to the students I’ll meet at Baylor next term in a freshman seminar. Mostly I felt honored, thrilled in fact, to be in the room and learning from these teachers.

Earlier in the evening, the provost had come up to me with kind and warm words about my afternoon’s presentation. She said the folks who’d attended had enjoyed it and were still arguing over some of its main points. Which ones? I asked. She replied that the word “intimacy” had given them some pause. It’s a loaded word, I thought to myself, especially for those in professions like teaching–presumably because learning is such an intimate activity, but that gets us back to the initial topic, doesn’t it? But I didn’t say that aloud. I just mulled over the provost’s remark, thanked her cordially and sincerely, and turned to the professor with whom I’d walked to the banquet hall through a brisk Lake Erie evening. She’d listened to the conversation, and now she leaned toward me as we continued to move in the food line. “I think intimacy is what we most crave, and what we’re most afraid of,” she said to me. I felt the words deepen inside me as she spoke. Then she said, “I think you’re a philosopher, and I think you should write about intimacy in that book you’re going to write.” I hadn’t told her anything about the book I’m writing. I suppose I didn’t need to.

And then came the meal, and the marvelous testimonials from the honored teachers.

A remarkable day.

John Kane and his crew made a DVD of my talk. I had it in my bag about three hours after I finished speaking–truly amazing turnaround. Within a day it was on the web, the source from which I uploaded the talk, in seven parts, to YouTube. Here’s part 1:

The entire talk in one part is on blip.tv. The slides for my talk are in Google Presentations, and embedded in a page on my blog here. I’ve put the audio-only version (with audio from my trusty Edirol R1 and essential Giant Squid external clip-on mike) up here as a podcast.

My thanks to John Kane and all at CELT and SUNY-Oswego who made my stay so pleasant and gave me the opportunity to think about these topics. I hope my remarks are useful.

Today at 1 p.m. CDT, the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching (actually, the Carnegie Commons branch) sponsored a WebEvent featuring Toru Iiyoshi and Vijay Kumar, the editors of the new MIT Press book Opening Up Education: The Collective Advancement of Education through Open Technology, Open Content, and Open Knowledge, as well as John Seely Brown, who wrote the foreword. The webcast, which I mistakenly thought would be live, is available on the WebEvent’s home page. You can also find the webcast in three parts on YouTube:

Part 1: Toru Iiyoshi

Part 2: John Seely Brown

Part 3: Vijay Kumar

The book promises to be a great resource for this urgently needed conversation. It’s available in several formats. You can buy the print version from MIT Press. Other versions are free. The 18-page executive summary is here. The full download is here. The page with chapter-by-chapter downloads is here.The contributors are heavy hitters indeed who’ve been tireless and highly influential in their devotion to the cause of educational transformation for the 21st century. I hope the book reaches a wide audience, and I applaud the Carnegie Foundation, the authors, and MIT Press for putting out a pdf version with a Creative Commons license for free download. That’s walking the walk!

I confess that I was a little disappointed by the “WebEvent” today. The webcast was not live. The “chat” was really a discussion forum, and participants couldn’t start new topics (or at least I couldn’t–perhaps we were supposed to register for an account). It was great to see an international audience on the forum more-or-less synchronously, but it was in my view not a good decision to use a discussion forum, as its strengths are largely in asynchronous participation. Given that the webcast itself was not live, perhaps Carnegie figured a synchronous chat room was not appropriate, but given that many folks including myself logged onto the chat at the same time, I think there was a missed opportunity here of significant proportions. (It was also misleading on the event page to describe the e-discussion as a “chat.”) I am pleased to see that Toru and Vijay have addressed many of the participants’ suggestions along these lines in some of the later posts in the forum–though I note that full openness, here in the sense of full opportunities for the participants themselves to organize the discussion, still presents some imaginative challenges to the organizers. My hunch is that the organizers were concerned that a chat would be too disorderly, and that it would not allow for a persistent conversation. The solution, surely, is to put together a page that mingles a live chat, the archive of that live chat, and an ongoing forum for asynchronous discussion.

But in a stunning example of what Web 2.0 affords, and what those affordances inspire in its most passionate and expert users, here’s the del.icio.us feed created by forum participant Michelle A. Hoyle, a tutor in the UK’s Open University. Actually, I’ll copy in her entire post:

I have finished posting all Twitter, blog, and web links that I saw, including to the YouTube videos, to my Del.icio.us feed tagged as “openuped”: http://delicious.com/Eingang/openuped I did not include e-mail addresses.

I attempted to add some useful (but quickly done!) annotations to the “notes” field for each one to help provide some context.

Michelle

To which all I can say is “wow” and “thanks!” Show me something in a so-called LMS that can allow a smart, creative, willing participant to step in and render such a great service so quickly and easily, and I’ll eat my trackpad. She’s even smart about the tag: “openuped” is perfect. Oh, and don’t miss Michelle’s own personal links on the del.icio.us feed, particularly her blogs: H810: Accessibility Ahead and E1N1VERSE.

As we move forward into a world augmented by these telecommunications technologies (and I was *very* pleased to hear John Seely Brown use the word “augmented” on several occasions), we will, I suspect, continue to see uneven distribution of these technologies and especially their most effective application, even at events like today’s. To be fair, the editors and at least one of the chapter authors were present in the forum, but the forum was still an awkward place for synchronous communication. I also can’t help contrasting today’s event with the launch of the MacArthur/HASTAC Digital Media and Learning event, which had a huge sense of occasion in its simulcast between the NYC press conference and the New Media Consortium amphitheatre experience in Second Life. Not every launch needs to be of that Woodstock proportion, but the more we can get to that level, the more influential our work is likely to be.

For what it’s worth, and for the record as I pursue Jon Udell’s goal of “conservation of keystrokes,” here’s the response I posted to one of Toru Iliyoshi’s forum questions today.

——————————————————-
> I believe we have a number of teachers, faculty,
> teacher educators, faculty developers here. Do
> any of you see open education as a change agent to
> transform teacher education/faculty development as
> now educators start seeing how others teach and
> learn?

Hi Toru,

Gardner Campbell here, formerly at the University of Mary Washington, and now at Baylor University as Director of the Academy for Teaching and Learning and an Assoc. Prof. of Literature and Media at the Honors College. My answer to your question is yes, but I’d want to amplify the word “seeing” to get at what I mean. I think that “seeing how others teach and learn” is a difficult and complex task that involves many factors: being there in person during a class meeting to pick up on all the nuances of personal interaction, having access to materials used in preparation and execution and assessment of the learning experience, tracking both teacher and learner over time to have some idea of the longitudinal effects of the experience, and especially having the opportunity for teacher and learner to “narrate the process” by blogging, etc. And these are just a few examples. Anything that leaves a “cognitive fingerprint” in the processes of teaching and learning should be available for thoughtful reflection–assuming any necessary privacy is preserved, of course. As Jerome Bruner observes, education is also a process of intimate change.

For me, the idea of openness means that more of these things will indeed be out in the open and available to us to study and reflect on. I don’t mean to downplay issues of access–these are crucial too. But your question asks about transforming faculty development and teacher education–two transformations that must be accompanied by transformation in the way we think about educational experience and educational resources.

Thanks for putting this book together, and for the interview with John Seely Brown. I wish the event were live and this forum a true chat, as I think that would add to a sense of occasion and greater opportunities for emergence (and perhaps even transformation). But I know these things are difficult to arrange, and I very much appreciate your efforts on behalf of this crucial initiative.

One of the lovely and somewhat daunting aspects of a new job is all the new “first times” in what is inescapably a rookie year. Thank goodness for beginner’s luck, which I certainly had when Steve Davis, winner of Baylor’s 2008 Robert Foster Cherry Award for Great Teaching, invited me to visit his seminar in science education. This group of undergraduates and graduate students is spending the semester thinking about improving science education in higher ed. and in K-12. They’re also thinking about the exciting possibilities opened up by undergraduate research, an area in which Steve has accomplished great results at his home university, Pepperdine. I saw Steve’s presentation on his SURB (Summer Undergraduate Research in Biology program earlier this month, roughly ten days into my new job, and I was deeply impressed by the program and by Steve’s wise and passionate presentation. (More on both of those in a future post.) So I was excited and honored by the chance to be in his class and lead a discussion among his students.

The primary purpose of my visit was to tell the students about the new Baylor Academy for Teaching and Learning that I’m directing, and to field their questions and lead a discussion. As I often do, I decided to start with a provocative prompt and proceed from there. The prompt was Mike Wesch’s “A Vision of Students Today.” A couple of the students had seen the video before, but most hadn’t, and even the ones who’d seen it before seemed to find its energy and vision compelling. When the video was finished, I asked them to take out a piece of paper and spend just a few minutes jotting down what they would like their teachers to know about them as learners. You can see the results, just as they wrote them, here.

I found the class and the discussion very stimulating, very thought-provoking. I loved the students’ energy and openness. (Can you tell I’m pining for the classroom? Next term!) We spent a little time talking about the Academy directly, but most of the time we talked about the Academy by talking about their experience as learners (and for the grad students, as teachers) in higher education. I articulated the connection as best I could by explaining that my vision for the Academy was of a place that brought together many stories: from students, from faculty, from staff, all of us learners, all of us in some sense teachers as well. I told them I would tell their story on my blog. (I would have done this anyway, but the theme of telling the story has been much on my mind lately as I finish Orson Scott Card’s truly remarkable Speaker For The Dead.) I told them that I hoped their story would be only the first of a long series of stories that we would tell each other at Baylor, thereby knitting ourselves together into an ever closer, ever more effective learning community.

For the record, I think that if we get that part right at the Academy, the rest will follow–though that’s not to say there’s not a lot of work involved in getting “the rest” up and running, for there surely is.

A few highlights from the session:

One student had Googled me and found my blog. Another told me about how cell phones had become education tools in India. Another student talked passionately and knowledgeably about the need for authentic assessment. And these were only three of many memorable moments–memorable moments to follow up.

We spent a good while discussing the price, role, and effectiveness of textbooks–no surprise, given how central they are to science education. In the Wesch video, one student holds up a sign about an expensive textbook that she’s never read, and her statement resonated with the group in a big way. Their questions spilled out. Why do we have textbooks? Why do we need textbooks? What kind of textbook is best? Can teachers not assign textbooks if they don’t want to? (One student noted that teachers at Central Michigan are required to assign textbooks.) Why are they so expensive? Why does one get so little money on buyback? And so forth. I tried to talk about textbooks as a technology, one embedded with a curricular, financial, and teaching system, and one that embodied a great many assumptions about all of those systems that might well be challenged, or at least rethought. I was also mindful of the fascinating conversation on K-12 textbooks Mike Wesch had recently opened up on his blog.

The textbook discussion was merely one aspect of our larger discussion, however. That larger discussion was of course about learning: what constitutes real learning? how do we know when it’s happened? how do we foster understanding and insight and what Steve Davis so forcefully calls “transformative ideas” instead of concentrating almost all our efforts on “coverage” and factual memorization? Not that facts are unimportant–far from it. These are scientists, after all. But facts alone do not lead to transformative ideas. Steve Davis insists that other qualities matter as much or more than the ability to memorize facts: careful observation, fresh perspectives, “the eyes of an 18-year-old.” Steve also insists that data aren’t real unless they’re shared, presented, even published. He tells them that if the data aren’t shared, it’s as if the research never happened. Hence the writing assignment for the term is a grant proposal. He tells his students that some of those proposals could well be funded. In other words, he asks his students to write for a real audience, to work hard, and (this is the truly inspiring part) to prepare themselves for results far beyond their expectations.

I’ll be following the class’s progress for the rest of the semester. I am convinced that their energy and insights will lead to some of those transformative ideas, and I’ll be cheering for them when that day comes. I have a stake in their success. Actually, we all do–but my visit made my investment more visible to me, as I hope this brief report has done for you.

My heartfelt thanks to Steve for inviting me, and to the class for making my first time in the classroom at Baylor so rewarding.

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A new office, a new computer (a nifty Dell Latitude XT tablet PC–my apologies to those who were thinking I might jump to another platform), a new job, a new address–if it’s news you want, then it’s news I’ve got. I won’t get to all of them (yes, “news” used to be plural) in this blog post, but at least I can send up a flare to let you know I’m fine and settling in.

What am I settling into? Baylor brought me here as founding Director of the new Academy for Teaching and Learning. It’s a major strategic initiative that many good people here have helped to realize after many years of planning and hoping. The Academy, and the position I occupy within it, testify to their vision and persistence. That I’m the one fortunate enough to set the program in motion is a very exciting and humbling turn of events.

The Academy exists “to enhance teaching and learning and to promote the scholarship of teaching and learning,” thereby helping Baylor to “demonstrate its historical commitment and ongoing support for excellence in teaching, scholarship, and service” and “to be a leader in the important national dialogue about the roles of teaching and scholarship.” The Academy for Teaching and Learning also figures-forth an important part of Baylor’s mission: “At the same time, Baylor’s ATL will be a tangible representation–to alumni, potential students, and other stakeholders–of our commitment to excellence in the integration of teaching, scholarship, and service.” (I’m quoting from the executive summary of the strategic proposal that was approved.)

When I saw the job ad, from the word “Academy” (a refreshing departure from the more usual “center”) to the way the position had been framed (75% admin, 25% faculty responsibilities–yes, I will be teaching) to the breadth and integration of the Academy’s portfolio (scholarship of teaching and learning, integration of information technologies into teaching and learning, serving as a University focal point for conversations about teaching and learning and faculty development generally), I was very taken by the possibilities of a position touching so many areas at the heart of the University’s mission. That it was a brand new program was also exciting. That there were many great programs already in place to support and encourage deep and serious engagement with teaching and learning was also impressive.

So here I am.

More importantly and more to the point, here you are. All of you from whom I have learned so much, and from whom I continue to learn just as fast as I can. You who have encouraged me, helped me understand what I can do better, kept me thinking and dreaming big when the small things one must (and often should) sweat pull my chin down and my focus too close. I bring to this job what you have shared with me. I bring my yearning for real school, my experience both painful and exhilarating, and my keen appetite for “wanton heed and giddy cunning.” Most of all, I bring my gratitude for you, and my drive to continue learning, writing, growing.

As we say in the biz, any remaining errors are my own.

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A little over a month ago I was privileged to attend and speak at the 2008 SUNY Conference on Instructional Technologies, splendidly hosted this year by SUNY-Genesee Community College. (You’ll need to use IE to get to the program pdfs; at least, I did.) The theme was “Are We There Yet? Teachers and Learners in a Digital World.”
I met some extraordinary people there and once again was encouraged by the way imaginative faculty and staff have persisted in their visionary efforts to make sense and good use of computers in teaching and learning. As I listened to folks’ stories and learned something of the history of the conference and of FACT (Faculty Access to Computer Technology, the primary sponsoring group over the years) I was struck by the commonalities with my own experience, as well as with the stories I’ve heard from similar groups: early adopters, early resistance, the slow [...]

Original post by Gardo

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,” [...]

Original post by Gardo

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 [...]

Original post by Gardo

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.

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Original post by Gardo

An abstract for an upcoming talk–sort of an extension of the “digital imagination” material I’ve been working on lately:
Emily Dickinson once wrote, “If I read a book [and] it makes my whole body so cold no fire ever can warm me I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry.” Can that experience be true of computing as well? Can the experience of computing reveal metaphors, compelling forms, rhymes, even meter in our encounters with knowledge, virtual worlds, and each other? Do some people resist a deep exploration of computers for the same reason they shy away from poetry? In A Poet’s Guide to Poetry, Mary Kinzie writes, “I believe the craft of writing is actually to entice readers into the same domain as the creative imagination.” Is there a similar craft of computing, a [...]

Original post by Gardo

Perhaps “nettled” is too strong, though I did detect a surprising and not unwelcome amount of challenge in the questions today.
“Introduction to Literary Studies.” Two sections, one at nine and one at eleven. During my travels to the ELI Annual Meeting, I scheduled films for the classes to watch during the two class meetings I’d miss. The early class watched Fast, Cheap & Out of Control, half each day. The later class watched Alain Renais’ Providence, though I found out this morning that they hadn’t quite finished it (they were about twelve minutes or so from the end).
Last Friday, I asked them to watch the movies with Plato, Aristotle, and Longinus in mind, and told them we’d spend some time talking about Longinus in particular upon my return.
Today, both classes wanted to know just what these movies had to do with our classes, and their questions were not just about [...]

Original post by Gardo