I think you raised the issue of the digital divide (or digital inclusion, as it is now more often called) and community activism and that Jon Udell engaged with you and that the complexity of the question and answer were drawn out for all of us.  As a member of the audience, I think Jon was responding to your concerns (and I didn’t pick up on anyone appearing to be offended).  What I heard was that there are now, with the advent of networked knowledge via the web, a wider range of ways to inform community participation.  Whereas in a pre-internet world, F2F meetings (one-on-one conversations or many-to-many in a community center) and the distribution of info in one technological medium—paper, for example, via a flyer or pamphlet—may have been the only option, the web offers an additional means of information creation, aggregation, and distribution.  Jon’s example about the aggregation of resources with tags that allowed for increased open evaluation and interpretation of, as well as responses to, those resources (re: newspaper articles archived digitally, land survey reports, blogs, and such, given his specific example of the issue of the dam in the town) was to show but one example of how increasing access to information and creating additional forums for more voices to be heard can work.

What I took from the exchange you had with him was the importance of always considering ‘both/and’ vs. ‘either/or’ possibilities via new technologies.  Different technologies can work to broaden the kinds of access and input and thus enrich and expand the participation that would still occur among members of the community able to attend a scheduled town council meeting.  Such technologies needn’t replace the open town council meetings, where community voices are also heard, which I think was the concern you may have been articulating. It just adds to the process by increasing access in other ways, which is what I heard Jon suggesting.

(Dang, but it would’ve been great to have had such a networked participatory engagement with our own town council last year when they voted against bike lanes in the newly redesigned downtown Blacksburg.  So many of us concerned with bicycle commuting and safety issues sure could have benefitted from a viral network that aggregated data about the number of bicycle accidents in the downtown and national data on how bike lanes increase community members’ choices to commute via bike and so forth.  Instead, community members attended town council meetings, but not everyone could make every meeting, and not enough voices were heard, in my view, and we ended up with a new roundabout at Prices Fork and Main St., a traffic light at Alumni Mall and Main, and nice new brick sidewalks, but no bike lanes for our beautiful new downtown.)

So, I thought the Q&A between you and Jon was a useful exchange.  I do think we need to be attentive to, and continually work toward increasing, digital inclusivity.  According to a report commissioned by the FCC, “[a]ccess to the Internet is not a choice: It is a necessity.”   As far as feeling “threatened by this technological control,” I’m not quite clear about what that means exactly.  Perhaps I have less comfort with the institutions you name, such as the government or the academy.  I tend to celebrate the watchdog groups and academics who work to keep the “elite” in any institution from having the only voice, or the only interpretation, or all of the power.  I agree with you that the “pathways to interactive communication available to us online are definitely much more open.”  Indeed, our current technologies often allow more of us to speak truth to power with more speed and efficacy than many other avenues of communication.  I’m not arguing for replacement of previous venues, but I do get excited about the expansion of interactive communication via current technology.   I think we may have more agency and control than we tend to think.  In “The Machine is Us/ing Us,” Mike Wesch reminds all of us of the power we have in using and shaping our tools, too.

I guess I lean toward a curiosity about what technology can do to empower me, what it can do to empower learners, community members, and broaden participatory culture.  I am curious about what it can engender, even while I work to recognize, understand, and disrupt digital exclusion.  I just learned from a colleague with whom I work of a town in upstate New York that apparently does not have adequate broadband access much beyond the public library.  While that certainly shapes our choices about how we will choose to communicate and work with the citizens there on a particular community-based project, it also makes us equally committed to working actively with that community to address and solve the problem of digital exclusion (via organized community activism).  If knowledge is power, and access to all kinds of resources makes us more powerful, then access really is not a luxury or a privilege, but a right.

Like you, Kim, I also enjoy “having a cuppa joe with a person.”  So many rich conversations and sharing of knowledge can occur in that kind of interactive communication, too, and I don’t expect that to end.  I find that online interactions also enrich my convos over coffee.  And, yes perhaps we can’t always know “the various consequences of our actions before we leap into new things.”  Perhaps sometimes the leap is part of the process of our exploration and curiosity.  I agree with you that being reflexive is also an important part of the process.  Speaking of a cuppa joe, we can always continue this exploration that way, too.  It’s been an interesting dialogue thus far, and no offense taken, nor apology necessary.

I’ve been on a blogging hiatus.  It has been awhile since I’ve written a blog post, and I’ve been pondering why that is.  Being busy and having this platform not rank as high as it could and should in the academic hierarchy of work-related tasks is likely part of it.  Someone who is not a blogger, but who knows me pretty well, recently suggested to me that blogging seems like a very public ‘personal’ forum and I probably don’t just jump in on a regular basis because I’m a bit of an introvert at my core and shy to boot.  Maybe.  But I think there’s a little more to it than what either of those easy explanations proffer up.

The weird thing about my self-imposed hiatus is that I like this platform for engagement and exploration.  I really do.  I actually enjoy blogging, and when I give myself permission to go enjoy myself and do it, to go for a blog, so to speak, it feels good.  It feels authentic and useful and important to do.  And, oddly, that feeling is not necessarily based on the response the blog does or does not generate.  The act of blogging itself, of discovery, of reflection, of engagement, of narrating and curating and sharing is empowering and interesting.

While I don’t know all of what might be behind sporadic or hesitant blogging for academics, I have a hunch that it has to do with being present and vulnerable and open and excited and passionate, and that, sadly, those are qualities we seem to become self-conscious about sharing as we become enmeshed within our academic identities.  It’s as if we somehow learn that controlled and contained intellectual pursuits (and even intellectual posturing) are more valuable.  In many of our institutional forums and arenas it seems that a well-groomed penchant for sharp-tongued critique and criticism alone inform the de rigueur posture of an academic.  (I have too many colleagues who might be much more comfortable with the form and content of that last sentence than with the form and content of blogging, and that troubles me.  It is the fear and loathing of blogging that perplexes me the most.)  I guess we worry that we may be perceived as weak or as an amateur or a neophyte if we share our excitement about ideas, our passion for our areas of inquiry (whether old or newly stumbled upon), our delight about teaching and learning with colleagues (young or old), our curiosity.  If we are too worried about that exposure or that misperception, we won’t let our uniquely individual and interesting intellects and authentic voices out for a walk, or a blog, in the hallways of academe.

Yet those are the very qualities required of anyone who is being (or in the process of becoming) an active and engaged participant in learning, discovery, and engagement.  An open curiosity and an excited focus on, and excitable delight in, the adventure of discovery are exactly what should be driving our critical engagement with our research, our teaching, and all of our learning whatever our academic position, whether undergrad or grad student, faculty, staff, or administrator.

There are many ways to be curious and engaged in the process of learning and discovery, and I think blogging is one of them.  It encourages a voice less staid and formal than those we use in other formats–the academic journal, or the term paper, for example.  It practically begs us to celebrate the first person pronoun, rather than erase it from our prose.  At our best, blogging requires of us ‘being present’ and authentic.  I think the blogging platform challenges all of us to be inquisitive and vulnerable–not a vulnerability that is borne from feeling like a victim, but rather the kind of vulnerability that Brené Brown suggests comes from an awareness of our strength.  That is the place of openness from which innovation and creativity and change can emerge.  Blogging that welcomes and explores innovation and insight can, I think, impact the power of our academic voices in other formats in a good way.  Academe should be encouraging more of it from all of us–students and faculty, alike.

So, I have been reinspired to reenter my blog space and narrate, curate, share.  I have been inspired by all of the HRCuleans who are blogging their hearts and minds.  I get to learn from them on a regular basis.  One delightful first-year student with the wisdom, insight, and courage of someone four times her age ‘schools’ me each time I read one of her posts.  Her treatise on learning embedded within her most recent post does so in the most generous and encouraging of ways for all of her readers.  I am also continually inspired by former GEDIs, who are blogging with the compassion and openness and creative exploration that inform, teach, and role model what critical engagement and critically engaged optimism in blogging can do.  I am also inspired by the current GEDIs who are blogging, all of ‘em.  I am inspired by all of them because they are challenging themselves to step outside of their comfort zone to see what else they can discover.  And, in particular, I am inspired by those who are exploring and blogging with an open curiosity and are exhibiting what I’d call the strength from which true vulnerability is always an asset and never a liability.

On a recent dive into the GEDI blogs, I stumbled upon a wonderfully powerful entry on vulnerability—it was open, inquisitive, and pondering if we in academe mask our vulnerabilities because of a fear of failure, and how messed up that is because we need to learn from failure, not be afraid of it.  And at the end of the post is a link to one of my fave TED talks, and I got excited and celebratory and it made me “simply pause” and take my feet off the pedals indeed and glide for a moment on the idea of it.  Wow.  And, then a post that reminded me, and all of us who teach, not to participate in the negative banter we too often hear about student motivation.  It made me think about how the dynamic we set in our own classroom determines so much about what kind of learning does or does not go on in those environments.  Rather than lament what seems too hard or too difficult to tackle, or fixate on binaries, so many of our posts focus on discovering better methods.  Not all pedagogical approaches work for everyone, of course, and we are reminded to be critically engaged as we choose our pedagogical praxis in any context.  Some approaches may be newfangled.  Some approaches may work as an effective creative innovation in another course or learning context.  Flexibility is key here, as is recognition that our choices and decisions for engaging learners should be guided both by the specific contexts/courses in which we teach and our own comfort level with our pedagogy.  Encouraging our students to “actively engage and seek knowledge/wonder” and understanding that perhaps we need to be willing to be temporarily uncomfortable in order to figure out what our next best pedagogical steps might be make me optimistic about the continual evolution and upward progress of teaching and learning in the 21st century.  Today’s most recent post brings up Stephen Shapiro and Sir Ken to ask me to think about stress and creativity, as well as to remind me that one of the productive ways to engage with blogging is to remember that it can “allow for a creative cultivation.”

Yes, that’s right.  That’s exactly right.  This is the kind of platform that allows for a kind of Freirean critical hope and critically engaged optimism that can foster effective change.  It allows for the kind of optimistic, forward-looking, problem-solving engagement of hearts and minds that John Boswell’s remix of TED 2012 captures for me.  I think a critically engaged optimism and strength are crucial for exploring how our ideas can help higher education remain one of the “birthplace[s] of innovation, creativity, and change.”

Thank you, GEDIs, for inspiring me to reboot and reenter the blogosphere.  You are all full of the “wonder, insight, ideas” that will continue to invent and reinvent the new academy of the 21st century.

http://www.ala.org/news/pr?id=9485

Note paragraph 3, where the announcement indicates that many library “book groups” are already using this book as a guide

Congrats, Char!  We’re definitely looking forward to reading this book as a group this semester.

Soon, many other reflections will be posted here.  I can’t wait to read them!

(p.s. Ignore the posts that came before this one–they were posts that I wrote on my “information litany” blog for another community)

A cautionary salutary song for a Monday morning, for all who, like me, can use it:

Some folks see the world as a stone
Concrete dashed in dull monotone
Your heart is the big box of paints
And others, the canvas we’re dealt
Your heart is the big box of paints
How coloured the flowers all smelled
As they huddled there, in petalled prayer
They told me this, as I knelt there
Awaken you dreamers
Adrift in your beds
Balloons and streamers
Decorate the inside of your heads
Please let some out
Do it today
But don’t let the loveless ones sell you
A world wrapped in grey
Some folks pull this life like a weight
Drab and dragging dreams made of slate
Your heart is the big box of paints
And others, the canvas we’re dealt
Your heart is the big box of paints
Just think how the old masters felt, they call…
Awaken you dreamers
Asleep at your desks
Parrots and lemurs
Populate your unconscious grotesques
Please let some out
Do it today
Don’t let the loveless ones sell you
A world wrapped in grey
And in the very least you can
Stand up naked and
Grin

“Wrapped In Grey,” by Andy Partridge, from the XTC album Nonsuch

The other day, i was preparing for the class I’m teaching this term, a new variant of my Intro to New Media Studies course that I’ve renamed and focused on what I feel was its true subject all along (and it only took me 4 1/2 years to find the focus): “From Memex To YouTube: Cognition, Learning, and the Internet.” The eerie thing is that once I found that focus, more discoveries began falling from the skies into my eager arms. Preparing for the class on J. C. R. Licklider’s “Man-Computer Symbiosis,” I re-read some material from Mitchell Waldrup’s epic The Dream Machine: J. C. R. Licklider and the Revolution that Made Computing Personal. I’ve read this book about three times all the way through, and I dip into it habitually to relive those defining moments of the emergent digital age–including the defining moments of rank unbridled idiocy that almost strangled the revolution in its cradle, such as the British Postal Service’s refusal to let the team that developed packet-switched communications develop their innovation, in any way, for any purpose. Too disruptive, you see; an entrenched bureaucracy and its reliable revenue streams were at stake. Precious years and opportunities for transatlantic collaboration were lost as a result. I have to think that the bureaucratic self-preservation also meant some spirits were bruised or even broken. Perhaps I’m just projecting.

Anyway, as I read The Dream Machine again, I fell upon a lovely Licklider quote that I’d seen before. This time, though, because the pupil was ready (at last–I’m running hard to catch up), the teacher appeared. Did he ever:

No one knows what it would do to a creative brain to think creatively continuously. Perhaps the brain, like the heart, must devote most of its time to rest between beats. But I doubt that this is true. I hope it is not, because [interactive computers] can give us our first look at unfettered thought.

The letters glowed as if lighted from within. “Where do you find time for all these Internet things, Dr. Campbell? Don’t you think we’re in danger of being overwhelmed? Don’t you think Google is making us stupid? Aren’t you a little bit, well, zealous about all of this? Don’t you think all the junk on the Internet is just time-wasting drek?” And just about half a century ago, Licklider dared to give the radical answer. “No one knows what it would do to a creative brain to think creatively continuously.”

But of course if we want to find the answer, we have to take care to help fashion and nurture and value creative brains. We have to think of unfettered thought as a worthy ambition. We have to acknowledge what Blake called our “mind-forg’d manacles” and yearn for them to drop away.

This time the words were on fire in that quotation from The Dream Machine, and I had to find the source of the flame. So I checked the reference, and found that the quotation came from a volume called Computers and the World of the Future, the proceedings of a 1961 conference at MIT held in their School of Industrial Management. Such a provocative title! And such an ironic occasion: as the rest of Licklider’s remarks made clear, this great man championed the digital multiuser computer as the device that could take education out of the industrial management paradigm and into something new, something as rich and bold and full of emergent potential as the human brain itself:

The impact of the digital computer upon university education, it seems to me, will stem mainly from the changes the computer will produce in intellectual activities generally. The pedagogical responsibility of the university is not to lecture or assign problems or grade them. It is to create a situation within which most bright students will automatically learn. The multi-user digital computer opens new horizons for anyone eager to create such situations. (my emphasis)

Licklider was greatly interested in artificial intelligence, and I part company with him in his over-valuation of the idea of teaching machines. Yet the core of his ambition is, I think, exactly right. I say “is,” even though Lick uttered those words above over fifty years ago, because I have many colleagues who share the ambition, the eagerness, to create those “situations in which bright students automatically learn.” Perhaps “automatically” is a bit too strong. Students need nudging, encouragement, a few jokes and some tough love to make it through some of the more arduous roads to understanding. Yet I take the spirit of Licklider’s words to be that when we aim to perfect our lectures, assignments, and grading, we may (and typically do) neglect our own eagerness, our own continuously creative brains, and the prime pedagogical directive of education: to create situations that stimulate curiosity and self-directed, intrinsically-motivated learning.

And let’s not get distracted by the word “bright,” either. Lick may have meant “highly intelligent,” but even if so, I’ll expand that to mean “any student whose eyes are capable of lighting up.” I’ve seen those bright eyes, and so have you, no matter what the Gf scores report. I’ve also seen the lights go out when school forgets its pedagogical responsibility within the compliant “industrial management” strategies of the so-called “learning management system.” We don’t need any more “learning management systems.” We need “understanding augmentation networks.”

Lick gets the last word:

The conclusion at which I arrive is that the present problem is not to assess the role of today’s digital computer in today’s university. It is to get to work on tomorrow’s computer and tomorrow’s university.

If we “get it” about computers and education, it’s because we were “given it,” decades ago, by the people who envisioned new horizons and the continuous creativity that those horizons could stimulate. So forgive me if I’m eager to create the situations Licklider describes above. The waiting is the hardest part–and I swear that I’m just about done (i.e., fed up) with it.

Works cited:

“Computers In the University,” in Computers and the World of the Future. Martin Greenberger, ed. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1962

Waldrop, Mitchell. The Dream Machine: J. C. R. Licklider and the Revolution that Made Computing Personal. New York, NY: Penguin Books, 2001.

I do not much like to take the tone of a moralist. But the danger of the baobabs is so little understood, and such considerable risks would be run by anyone who might get lost on an asteroid, that for once I am breaking through my reserve. “Children,” I say plainly, “watch out for the baobabs!” Antoine de Saint-Exupery, “The Little Prince.”

I’ve long thought of blogging as a way of unschooling or deschooling within the framework of schooling. Why not simply deschool entirely? Edupunk it all? For me, that’s a waste. The framework of school can be a helpful point of focus, and at its best can convey a sense of occasion that would not be so strong or inviting without the lovely intensity of an expert imaginatively convening a group of fellow learners, or a group of learners imaginatively convening themselves around an expert, a wise expert who knows how to prize students. I am painfully aware of how seldom one finds wisdom, love, intensity, strength, and prizing within the structures of school, especially these days with the almighty gods of assessment and accountability and so forth installed in a pantheon that has little to do with cognition or relationship. But the abuse of an institution does not necessarily mean the institution itself has nothing to offer. School at its best gives a shape and a collegial society to my yearning for betterment. “Do It Yourself” doesn’t mean “do it by yourself.” School ought to give one a way to find the former without concluding that the only way forward is the latter route.

But sometimes I wonder whether schooling’s distortions can be overcome–or to put it another way, whether school can create within itself spaces for deschooling, moments of release from the dead hands of “rigor” and professorial imitation. Where is the recess for the mind, the space in which freedom within a general sense of direction and purpose can elicit self-surprise, emergent phenomena, essayistic discovery?

For me, blogging has been that recess. Its rigor arises from the non-trivial effort it takes to focus on something while one is exploring it, to focus on it by exploring it, and then to try to create an enjoyable, interesting experience for the reader.  Joy, interest, and focus are rare in the land of college writing, even when one requests or invites them. Instead, at least in my experience, one gets book reports, meandering attempts to ape authoritative writing, or rushed slapdash vacuity that can’t have made much sense even to the desperate writer during the overnight frenzy it took to produce it.

I began using blogs in my classes because I was very tired of papers beginning like this: “For hundreds of thousands of years, men and women all over the world in society have….” I was tired of my best writers producing stilted academic prose. I was tired of my worst writers either stressing so much over the mechanics that their papers got worse, or paying so little attention to what they were thinking and writing that any spark of interest or joy or wisdom that lurked beneath the awkward diction and inept sentence boundaries was snuffed out long before the comma splices began.

To use blogs in this way, I have had to develop an entirely new vocabulary of encouragement, nudging, framing, and evaluation. I have had to examine my own allegiance to the academy (frankly, I find myself working harder to justify the academy surrounding me than I do to justify the blogging within it). And as I have worked within the academy to help my colleagues understand the value and nature of this essayistic endeavor–and to recall that the word “essay” means attempt, not accomplishment–I have had to meet, greet, and push back against many objections. How will I grade it? What justifies this terrible invasion of the student’s privacy? Why should I endure–even encourage–sloppy informal writing that’s not up to academic standards? These questions and their many kin imply assumptions I no longer share, a separation that makes it difficult for me to find persuasive replies. I find we may no longer speak the same language–and given the pervasiveness of these assumptions within school, I feel like the foreigner. But I still try.

Several months ago, I was talking with a colleague about an opportunity for his students to blog, and I tried to explore the new vocabularies and conceptual frameworks I’ve tried to develop as I seek the recess of the mind blogging affords. (Yes, I hear you: “recess” signifies both what I advocate, a kind of cognitive playfulness and inventiveness, and what my colleagues fear, or say they fear, which is a receding emphasis on rigor, formal argument, etc.) I advocated blogging as a place in which Carl Roger’s “freedom to learn” is vividly present as an ongoing source of strength and inspiration within the course of study, even over a lifetime of learning. The blog offers a space, I said, in which the teacher can exercise the humility and delight Heidegger recommends as the highest and most strenuous calling within education, the teacher’s willingness “to let learn.” My colleague replied, ”It may be learning, but it’s not academics.” I’d never heard that distinction made so sharply and explicitly. I was amazed by the implication that learning alone wouldn’t make the grade.

In my mind’s eye, I could see the baobabs of academics surrounding the little asteroid of learning, a little asteroid soon to be split into pieces, its fragments sent spinning through a void that must one day, in an ultimate irony, consume the baobabs themselves. But not until those sad and wandering little spheres are reduced to rubble.

Colleagues, I say plainly, and to myself as well: “Beware the baobabs!”

Last week two examples of these baobabs came into my view. In both cases, I’m sure that the professors meant well–and I do not mean that at all condescendingly, since not every professor does in fact mean well. Yet the awful pressure of academics upon learning is everywhere within these articulations, dismayingly so. Even as I write, I feel my own failures and struggles emerging, but I have to say it anyway: it’s probably better not to require blogs at all than to require blogs that are strangled by the baobabs of academics. Save the academics for term papers and other more formal assignments! Instead, preserve a zone in which we can “let learn,” in which there is genuine freedom to learn.  I won’t link to the authors’ websites, as I do not intend to attack them, and because what I believe to be the problems with these specific examples represent a far wider set of attitudes and practices. I single out these two assignments as examples only, ones I happened to run across. It would be unfair to hang the entire weight of my critique on them alone. I also want to salute both these teachers for actually putting their syllabi online instead of trapping them within a “learning management system.” But I feel I must speak plainly.

Here’s the first example.

Blogging (15%): One of the key aspects of your work this semester is our course blog, on which you’ll write frequently, using your posts to respond to our course readings, to draw your classmates’ attention to articles and artifacts you’ve found, and so forth. You are required to post at least one entry each week, which should directly engage with the week’s readings, before the start of class on Monday; this entry should be as formal as a printed reading response would be, paying attention to the quotation, citation, and explication practices involved in close reading. Other entries are greatly desired; these can be as informal as you like. You can explore issues that have been raised in previous class discussion, but you must significantly expand on that discussion and not simply rehash what’s already been said. You can skip two of these reading response posts with impunity. You are also required to read your classmates’ posts and leave at least two comments each week, before the start of class on Wednesday. (Note that you don’t have to post the the two comments at the same time; just make sure that week-to-week you get those entries and comments in.) This weekly requirement is meant as a minimum acceptable level of participation; I hope that you’ll all contribute more, creating an ongoing, engaging dialogue.

Some observations. The tone veers between encouragement and a kind of hectoring, with occasional instances of what feels like peremptory insistence on what the students “will” do, what “is desired” (by the teacher, presumably), and what kinds of behaviors will not be punished (skip two posts “with impunity”). I have no problems with requirements when it comes to blogging, as I’ve written elsewhere, but I do think it’s unwise to try to require commitment by specifying all the forms it must take; one gets commitment to specifications, not to values, and it’s almost certain that the fundamental desire for “an ongoing, engaging dialogue” will not be fulfilled. Instead, one is most likely to get, at best, a simulacrum of such a dialogue geared to what students believe the teacher will find engaging, not what the students themselves find engaging. There can be overlap there, of course, and I fully believe the teacher can and should lead the students into much deeper engagement than they are likely to encounter or realize on their own. But that requires detection and extension of what they’re already engaged by, and this blogging assignment doesn’t appear to be framed in that way.

To state it more simply, the item missing from the initial catalog of what students will use the blogs for is “to explore your thoughts, interests, and puzzlements in relation to this course of study.” Then the reader’s response is over-specified, and we end up with an academic assignment, not a blog. At what point is “what is desired” awakened within the learner, not simply imposed upon him or her? Such awakenings need canny nurturing and all the arts of intellectual seduction.

Even more seriously, the required reading-response post is a formal assignment whose strictures are so definite and school-familiar that I can’t imagine the completion of that required post will feel like an invitation to more informal posting afterward. That’s not to say that a formal reading-response exercise is not valuable. On the contrary. But I wouldn’t call it blogging, and I think the assignment inadvertently conveys a set of values and expectations that is antithetical to the real power of blogging within a course of study.

The professor must judge the difference between significant extension and rehash, between committed effort and lackadaisical coasting, between emergent insight and irrelevance. No question. But blogging provides a space in which that judgment can be rendered flexibly, lightly and joyfully, as an invitation to exploration and quality of commitment.

Here’s the second example. Given that there’s a list, I’ve commented item-by-item.

Blog Participation

1. Comments of 500 words or less on the class blog that are helpful to the class will be worth 10% of your grade.

 2. You may make as many comments per week as you like. However, you will only receive credit for up to two comments in any given week. The real goal of the blog comments is to help you internalize and think about the material on an ongoing basis. Cramming comments does not help you with that, nor does going back to comment on old subjects . I will have random cut-off dates for participation grading throughout the semester. They will not be pre-announced. Therefore, you should consider every day to be a possible cut-off date.

I understand that commenting doesn’t work if students either flood the channel with thin and thoughtless material just to get “extra credit,” or bunch their comments together after several weeks of ignoring the ongoing dialogue. I certainly agree with the “real goal” as it’s articulated above. That said, the idea of random cut-off dates brings in a note of surveillance and gotchas (every day’s a hangin’ day!) that doesn’t invite commitment so much as it inspires either a) dread or b) a desire to find another way to game the system. It’d probably be better to discuss these issues in the class meeting without trying to over-engineer an airtight system of discipline in this way. But then I’ve never agreed that a syllabus should be a contract. The commitment needed for a rewarding course of study is too big and too delicate to be specified exhaustively within a single document. If one tries to do so, the result is legalistic behavior on the part of the students, in my experience.

 3. I expect to see at least 5 well thought out comments, with links to other sources, posted over the course of the semester by each of you. Less than 5 that will result in a bad Blog Participation grade. , but sheer volume of comments will not get you a good grade either.

Along those lines, I also miss, here and in the first example above, any thought that linking to other bloggers and commenters is valuable and encouraged. That’s a shame, as such links are part of the soul of blogging. They demonstrate a valuable way to “think like the web” and participate in the care and feeding of the noosphere. They also encourage an ampler, more imaginative view of what libraries and books are all about in relation to that noosphere.

4. You must sign each comment with your first and last name. If you prefer to use another identifier, like a screen name, you may discuss with me.

Every time the teacher speaks or writes, the students encounter not only information but a meta-statement about the nature and purpose of the relationship between teacher and student. A syllabus loaded with lists of desired-by-the-teacher behaviors sends a powerful meta-statement that in the case of blogging robs the medium of its primary value for learning. Ditto over-engineered and over-specified assignments within a student blogging requirement. Once again, learning has been transmuted into academics. Sadly, that’s the philosopher’s stone in reverse. Or to return to my initial metaphor, it’s a growing asteroid done to pieces by the destructive, voracious root systems of School Baobabs.

For my students, I hope blogging will be that visible, share-able space that records and thus feeds their own curiosity–and that of their peers as well. Blogging should be like Steve Crocker’s “Request For Comments.” For a moment, the learner can think aloud without so much fear and without striving to be a bon élève. For a moment, we can remind each other that On ne voit bien qu’avec le cœur. L’essentiel est invisible pour les yeux. There will be time for all the rest of what we should do or believe we should do in school. Blogging is a time for something else.

A funny thing happened to me during a seminar that was focused on ‘new media’ (or ‘digital media’) and its influence on education, collaboration, creativity, science, art, and culture in general: I ended up enjoying a distinctly non-digital experience.

The best part of this seminar was sitting with other people and talking to them, face to face. We did use Skype (or G+ ‘hangout’) to include out-of-town participants several times, but the foundation of the interaction was people sitting in a circle in a room. This is the first time I’ve had such good discussions about how people connect and collaborate using the internet while not being on the internet at that moment. I’ve been blogging and interacting with others (mostly geoscientists) on the internet regularly for over five years. I’ve had some great discussions with numerous people, typically using comment threads of blogs and, more recently, via Twitter. Having conversations about the internet outside of the internet was powerful for a reason I can’t put my finger on.

The other aspect that added to the analog-ness of the seminar was reading text out of a book. I know, a physical, tangible book! How fantastic — we were reading about the lineage of ideas and technology of this astoundingly complex ‘machine’ that we’ve both built and has emerged/evolved through a much older text-delivery device. I loved it. As with the discussions with others about the internet, the vast majority of my reading about the internet has been on the internet.

I did try to write blog posts throughout the semester, a few times. But, when I sat down and opened the New Media Reader to consult my scribblings in the margin — whether it was before or after we met to discuss — I simply wasn’t feeling it. ‘It’ being that feeling of ideas, thoughts, revelations, epiphanies even, swirling about in your head — that exciting feeling of mental or intellectual discovery. That happened during the seminar. Not associated with or because of the seminar, but during it.

Perhaps this all sounds very obvious. This is why people enjoy seminars — the collective mixing of off-the-top-of-the-head statements and ideas, it gets our intellectual blood flowing. But I didn’t anticipate that the seminar experience would barely intersect with the experience of interacting online.

This is a quite the out-and-back trip, two days of traveling for one day of meeting, but I did have some free time this morning and got my bearings on foot. Here is what I found:

keeping my MacBook virus-free

right across the street from my hotel and WOW! do they have a nice gym for their employees

right behind my hotel

and they let me inside!

Intel was the best because they have a museum that depicts the history of the development of the semiconductor chip, with great stories of the people behind the inventions and an eye toward the future. I read many inspiring quotes from Robert Noyce. Here is my favorite: “Optimism is the essential ingredient for innovation. How else can the individual welcome change over security, adventure over staying in safe places?”

And guess what else I found smack in the center of this hubbub of technology and New Media? The Shrine of Our Lady of Peace.

Our Lady of Peace

This is a bona fide shrine, the kind to which people make pilgrimages. Our Lady stands 32-feet tall and is constructed from a gleaming metal. Somewhat ironically, the metal reminded me of Rearden Metal from Atlas Shrugged, and Our Lady was so magnificent, she may have made a convert of even Ayn Rand. I found Our Lady of Peace as inspiring as Robert Noyce. Here, in the middle of Silicon Valley, I found my brand of Catholicism. Not the scary Santorum variety that probably drove Illich away, and persistently threatens my own commitment to the Church, but rather, the message of peace, and the inspiration of a strong (and VERY tall) woman. What a great morning and hopefully, I can inspire people just a little bit during my workshop this afternoon.

A parting post for 2011, unrelated to education or technology, except for the recording, playback, and transportation technologies that helped with my “edification by puzzlement,” to use the evocative phrase of James Fernandez…. It’s an elegy for one of my favorite musicians, but for me it also stands for many other things, as all deeply felt things do.

Reposted with a few revisions from a burst of writing I did yesterday on the Steve Hoffman forum:

You know, I was really so wracked about Alex Chilton’s death, and then Andy Hummel’s right after it, that I haven’t been able to think straight about any of it until recently. I too was (and am still) one of those Alex fans people complain about. My brother and another close friend used to kid me (ok, mock me) in the late 80′s because of my Alex/Big Star fixation, then in full flowering because I’d seen Alex eight or nine times in that decade. I didn’t have to go too far to find him. For awhile there he was gigging the mid-Atlantic area three or four times a year, it seemed. He played Charlottesville at least three or four times while I was in grad school at UVA. I saw him in Roanoke once and put my wife up to asking him about “I Am The Cosmos,” which I’d just heard courtesy of a friend at Back Alley Disc in C’ville. I figured Alex might open up a little more to a beautiful woman than to me at that point, and he did–he told her he thought it was a really great song, and told her the story of how he first met Chris back when he’d go hear him play in the Jynx back in Memphis.

So many memories of that decade, finally getting to meet and occasionally interact with someone whose music had been so important to me.

Sometimes Alex would be prickly, or would say things that made no sense to me at all. He seemed so casually dismissive of the best of his own work, and would spend so much energy on what seemed to me then like hipster piffle, songs like “Volare.” That song still seems like hipster piffle to me, I have to say. But in that same show, at the 9:30 Club in D.C., he did a breathtaking electric version of “Goodbye Pork Pie Hat.” How could someone go from the sublime to the ridiculous and back again so quickly and perversely? I was deeply puzzled and in truth torn about it all. In my mid-20′s, seeing this musical hero every few months it seemed, and trying to figure out my own artistic and professional story: I could feel broken-hearted, inspired, and deeply intrigued at every show he did. And of course mixed emotions are perfect fuel for any obsession….

Other memories: Going up to Alex the first time I saw him, at the C&O Club in C’ville, and getting him to sign his new album, “Feudalist Tarts” as well as “Radio City” (photo above).  My friend Robin McLeod, the fellow who’d introduced me to that Big Star record about ten years earlier, was standing next to me. Alex was slumped in a chair–he’d been battling the flu–but was very polite. When I praised the sound of “Radio City,” he said “Well, that’s because of John Fry; he’s the reason the record sounds so good.” When I told him how much the record had meant to me, he said, “Thanks–I want you to listen to some of the material in the second set tonight; there’s some real melodic stuff in there.” I remember Alex with his three piece (Doug Garrison, drums and Ron Easley, bass) playing “You Get What You Deserve” (also at the C&O club in C’ville)–only time I heard him play that. When he got to the bridge and the “oh, oh-oh, ohhhh” part, I was dancing madly and grinning like a fool.

Once I went up to him during a set break and asked him why he didn’t play more of his Big Star material onstage. (Before the Big Star 2.0 reunion, I heard him play “September Gurls” and “In The Street” most every gig, “When My Baby’s Beside Me” two or three times total, and “You Get What You Deserve” exactly once.) He said, “well, the music’s pretty good, but the lyrics just lay an egg for me.” I asked, “Even something like ‘O My Soul’? I love those lyrics.” He said, “Nah, Chris didn’t finish that song before he left.” I said, “Well, I guess it’s also pretty hard to play a song like that live.” (I was really fishing at that point–plus the 1974 WLIR concert hadn’t been released yet.) He looked at me and said, “It’s not the hardest song on the album.” I asked, “What is the hardest song?” He said, “Daisy Glaze–we tried to learn it in rehearsal this afternoon–heh, forget it.”

I just couldn’t help myself. I knew his power pop radar was intact. I could tell it from the way he played Lou Christie’s “I Wanna Make You Mine” and the melancholy, soulful “Nobody’s Fool,” a song written by his former producer and vocals mentor Dan Penn. But then he’d riff on something interesting but ultimately unsatisfying, like “Boogie Shoes,” and I would try to resign myself to enjoying what I could and giving up on the bigger hopes.

But other times, the hope flared up again, very intensely. I remember Alex coming up to me out of the blue at the 9:30 Club to chat; we talked about record stores and radio stations in Memphis, and I told him I had made it to the short list for a job at what was then called Memphis State University. He said “Hey, that’s cool, maybe you’ll get it and move to Memphis and I’ll see you around there.” I tried to stay calm throughout the conversation, but it was tough. I gave Alex a cassette of some Son House after one of the shows, and he said he’d never heard any Son House before. I hope he liked it. I met Anna Lee Van Cleef, his girlfriend at the time and photographer for “High Priest,” after another show, the one Chris Stamey opened for. Chris was showing folks his new Wurlitzer electric guitar (a beauty), and Alex was holding court across the room, sitting next to Anna Lee (also a beauty).

Alex smoked a lot of pot those days, or so I was told, and it wasn’t like we were going to have a real intense or focused conversation anyway, but still, every one of those short little fanboy encounters was very important to me, as well as deeply puzzling and strangely worrying.

There seemed to me to be something about the deep structure of the universe that the music of Big Star communicated, something sad and powerful and joyful and melancholy and wry all at once. To me, Alex had been a channel for this communication, and I was trying to figure out how all that happened, trying to explain something to myself I suppose. Later, as I began to discover the heart and soul that Chris Bell had given the band, as well as the crucial roles Jody and Andy had played in the whole undertaking, I began to understand how complex that channeling really was. But I never really changed my mind about what was being channeled. I don’t think I will ever change my mind about that.

The last time I saw Alex was in 1994 at the Fillmore in San Francisco, where my friend Robin was living at the time. The reformed Big Star was playing there at exactly the time my family and I were traveling back east to my new job in Virginia. Robin and I got to the Fillmore early so we could stand near the front. We heard the opening act (can’t recall the name, alas), then heard Counting Crows (playing under a false name, for reasons I can’t recall–probably contractual). Then we saw both bands helping to set up the equipment for Big Star. I thought at the time that this was their way of paying tribute to the band. It was a moving sight. Then Big Star came out. It was an amazing set, start to finish, and I was in truth more than a little shaken up to hear all those songs that had shaped my life, songs I never imagined I would hear live. But the moment that sticks in my mind the most is the moment the band came out on stage. For a second or two I made eye contact with Alex, and I thought perhaps he recognized me when he nodded slightly. Robin saw it too, and thought the same thing. I can hope it’s true.

The recent box set got way under my skin, absolutely. The photos are truly magnificent. The bookended photos of Chris and Alex on the CD portfolio are especially poignant.

Three days ago, Alex would have been 61 years old. Almost two years later, I’m still saying goodbye.

How strange, or maybe not: writing the above sent me back to Bruce Eaton’s blog, which I had not visited since just after Alex’s death, and where I found a ton of great stuff, including fantastic interview material from Andy that didn’t make it into the book, as well as a post with a link to a completely fantastic tribute to Alex.

There are tortured artists and then there are conflicted ones. Alex was definitely the latter. He lived off of – and simultaneously tried to destroy – his own legacy. The guy was a monumental talent and an honor to work with. He was also perverse, arrogant and a provocateur extraordinaire. And sometimes an utter sweetheart. A Sphinx without a riddle, as former Chills guitarist Steven Schayer described him. [emphasis Mitchell]

December boys got it bad.

Happy New Year.