Ruminate

After an immensely frustrating conversation a few days ago in which various stereotypes were thrown about w/r/t techies, women, leadership and more, this frame from Clint LaLonde’s fabulous intro video for a Brian Lamb keynote (hey, where’s the archive of the presentation?) caught my attention.

I won’t pretend to understand most (much!) of Beckett’s Nohow On, but there are two phrases in it that have stuck with me since the dizzying experience of reading those three slim volumes. The opening of the third movement “Worstward Ho”:

“On. Say On. Be said on. Somehow on. Til nohow on.”

Coupled with its famous closing:

“Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”

This extremely loose couplet is Beckett’s exhortation to the tune of “try, try again” or “outwrite the bastards” but with higher stakes than a good poem or story… Beckett is reminding us that to say and do– repeatedly– is to be and and it is imperative that we keep at it until there is nothing else.

I was reminded of this extremely loose couplet while reading “Quantity Breeds Creativity” at Lifehack. There are two obvious educational aspects here which sometimes get overlooked (particularly if you believe, as I do, that the creative process is one of the most important parts of learning):

First, creativity isn’t efficient. There has been a lot of focus in the past few years on network effects, collectives and connectives, learning community and collaboration, much of which has explicitly or implicitly embraced a desire for efficiency. In my experience, creativity is most often fuzzy, vague, messy and characterized by a feeling of not really being sure what one is doing until they have done it. Creativity is driven by a variety of overlapping and sometimes partially opposing forces of experience, knowledge, and desire. In between making something great and making nothing lies a whole lot of making the mundane, mediocre, inessential, and irrelevant. Making something finally real– and thus being in the world– is harnessing the wisdom of the crowd of one… our multiplicitous self.

Second, creativity depends on repetition. This is really an extension of the lack of efficiency. We know from other aspects of our lives that where there is less efficiency there must be more effort to achieve the same goal. There’s a limited– but important!– amount that can be achieved by waiting for the intersection of the perfect moment and the muse. I’m not discounting the inspired stab in the dark, but most creative thought emerges from repetition, and most of that repetition will be, if not failure, something other than success.  Flannery O’Connor once said that she wrote every day because who knew if a day she skipped might have been the day she would choose well?

I see ramifications of ignoring these two facts at work in the classroom all the time. As educators we try to find the most efficient way of teaching, the combination that– when right– will facilitate a particular learning process, frustrated when it doesn’t “work.” It’s not wrong, of course, to want to be efficient– we all have limited time and resources– but I wonder how often we go too far or simply hope for too much clarity in a process that is so individualized. Educators and learners alike often don’t put the tools, concepts, or techniques to work often enough and for long enough to really understand them. If lightning doesn’t strike immediately or consistently enough, promising and productive paths are abandoned.

There’s a bit of magic in the process where wholes become more than the sum of their parts and tools and creativity are melded. No matter how clearly and often I try to explain the value and nuance of blogging, for example, it must be engaged regularly and for a length of time before those lessons become real. It was the same with regular paper journals before and it will be the same when we have cyborg monkey servants in the future. It isn’t luck that these proven models work for some but not for others, it is a product of practice (of the repetitious kind that leads to the Zen kind). To end with a sports analogy to complement the video, think of Arnold Palmer’s famous response to the accusation that a tough shot out of the rough he had just made was luck: “All I know,” Palmer answered, “is that the more I practice, the luckier I get.”

[linktribution: Doug Belshaw]

I have to admit: I’ve never been a big fan of Dave Eggers. Planks of jealousy, I suppose– hard not to be jealous of his juggernaut ride to fame, positive critical reception as a genius author, brilliant and beautiful wife, and the general perception that he is cooler than all the rest of us combined– reinforced with a thick paste McSweeney’s cliquishness and and my annoyance at his barefoot appearance on some C-SPAN BookTV panel. Puhleeeze. But this speech genuinely moved me. Not only is the 826 Valencia project simple and amazing, but the obviously nervous Eggers was endearing, even earnest. I feel guilty at my smallness when it comes to Eggers and how it has colored my feelings about his writing and other work when he demonstrates the passion and sincerity I sorely need to cultivate in myself!

If I had to pick a single teacher from my past as the “best” (I feel fortunate at having more than one!), it would be Dr. Doom, teacher of a senior-level class in Romantic Literature that I took as a freshman because I could get away with it and because I thought I was quite a literary hotshot.

I vividly remember Dr. Doom teaching a poem I’d been hearing and reading since I was a child (Blake’s “The Tyger”), a poem that, in my youthful arrogance, I thought I “got” already. That day taught me different. Dr. Doom blew the doors off the room, teasing out hidden nuance in seemingly every word, spinning a captivating explanation of the Romantic impulse, the industrial revolution, marginalization and factories, religious ritual and the Romanticized view of animals, the evolution of philosophy of self leading to Blake’s time… and reading the poem itself. By the time he reached the third stanza he was tense with energy, by the fourth he was up like a rock singer belting out a crazy tune bellowing, and by the end he had assumed this strange, almost tortured position half-standing/half-crouching on the seat of a desk, declaiming each word like it was the last poem in the world.

I was riveted and awestruck by a poem that, until that moment, I considered to be a diversion for children, and by the way Dr. Doom taught it. You have to understand that Dr. Doom was unimaginably old in my 19 year old eyes (he was probably in his very early 60s), and a pipe-smoking scholar of Victorian era poetry in general and Robert Browning in particular. I was astonished at his knowledge and erudition, but I was most amazed by his obvious passion.

I think of Dr. Doom often, particularly the glowing grad-school recommendation he would later write for me, suggesting a belief in my promise as a literary scholar that I still regret never really pursuing. It haunts me.

Today I thought of Dr. Doom again after listening to Gardner Campbell’s moving reading of Coleridge, because listening to Gardner made me realize I’d been wrong about Dr. Doom’s influence this whole time. I thought he was a my favorite teacher because of his infectious passion. I thought he was my favorite teacher because I realized at that moment that this was someone who loved poetry as much– maybe even more– than I did, something I didn’t think possible at the time.

But that was only half of the story. The part I didn’t realize until today was that by sharing some of his passion for words with me, I also intuitively understood that this was someone who would not just hear me when I spoke, but who could actually listen and understand. Many people talk about teachers needing to listen to their students more, but not a lot of thought is given to the fact that listening means nothing if the student doesn’t believe they can be understood… and we have to provide that reason rather than just assume it by virtue of knowledge, position, authority, or even our own passion kept to ourselves.

From a flickr set of scans from the book 1975: And the Changes To Come by Arnold B. Barach. Depicted above is the:

Film Based Teaching Machine. Student pushes one of four buttons to give answers and his score appears on paper slip at upper right. Teaching machines, expected to boom in the next decade, usually operate on the principal of repetition until the pupil understands. They aim to speed up the learning process and relieve teacher of much paper work in the classroom.

The official followup to Did You Know: Shift Happens, Did You Know 2.0 is worth the 8 minute viewing time for anyone involved in technology, culture and education.

Discussion, sources, and reactions can be found at the ShiftHappens wikispace.

Jonathan Kozol is nearing his 70th day of fasting to protest “the vicious damage being done to inner-city children by the federal education law No Child Left Behind, a racially punitive piece of legislation that Congress will either renew, abolish, or, as thousands of teachers pray, radically revise in the weeks immediately ahead.”

The cause is a good one, I’m not so sure about the action. I can’t decide if it’s inspiring (someone with pretty high visibility “walking the walk” that the problems with the educational system are as important as other causes worthy of serious protest) or a bit ludicrous (”semi-fasting” sure sounds a lot like “eating less”– and are we supposed to consider Kozol’s protest in the same league as protests against human rights abuses and for civil rights by such famous hunger strikers as– as– well, those other people, some of whom actually fully-fasted?)… so I’ll stick with considering it a bit of both.

David Warlick is wondering whether to cite a Wikipedia entry and posits that the important question to consider might be “what would happen if it’s wrong.” My short answers: yes and that’s always the question that should be asked, whether it’s Wikipedia or not. Now my longer answer:

I will generally use a Wikipedia reference with no more worry than a reference to any other resource… after all, most books and journal articles that people will defer to without question are authored by individuals, with books often encountering no gatekeepers at all and journal articles most often “approved” by institutional affiliation and the existing social network of academicians clucking positively about the tone and use of inside vocabulary than any stringent review of content. Is there any form of traditional publication that isn’t really the result of a social process?

I consider Wikipedia just another information resource, as flawed and potentially suspect as all the rest. The potential problems with its information are more obvious to us and we accept them less readily than we do critical problems with the origin of information in other mediums that we have had more time to accept and/or that have had more time to wear us down. At least at Wikipedia when there is discussion, debate, and controversy it is all there in the Talk pages (which I am coming to believe are one of the most undersung and revolutionary aspects of Wikipedia) for people to make their own judgments about.

It’s hard not to laugh at people in my own original field of education– English Lit– snarling about Wikipedia while unquestioningly accepting political views from the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and Washington Post (not to mention The New Republic, The Nation, etc) or literary views from the Chicago Review, the American Poetry Review, etc. Do they really believe these publications are without slant and ideological motivation, that they publish “just the facts, ma’am?” Which isn’t to say these are “bad” publications, only that citing them should logically entail no less hand-wringing than citing Wikipedia.

The real “problem” with Wikipedia is that truth by consensus and the quest for NPOV can lead to a version of representing the facts that is essentially an appeal to the lowest common denominator. Which is quite acceptable when discussing the chemical composition of sugar, but potentially a problem when trying to portray an “accurate” picture of the politics of sugar and corn syrup in foods or the sugar wars in Uganda or California in the 30s. But again, paying attention to the Talk pages is a must, just as paying attention to the editorial pages and other work by authors is a must when considering traditional media.

Thanks to a timely Twitter from the Good Doctor himself, I was able to tune in to Ustream.tv and watch some of his Intro to New Media Studies students presenting their final projects.

First up was Sarah, who talked about photography, still images and video as evidenced by YouTube and Flickr:

You can view the incredibly cool video (”Metaphor Sandwich“)she made on YouTube that combines her photography skills with video (watch the knife):

Unfortunately I lost the chat window so I don’t have links to any of the products, but a shout-out to Amanda who gave an overview of the social music media phenomenon from traditional commerce to recommenders, Pandora, and my own favorite Last.FM:

And Shelly, who made a moving presentation using Flickr to share photos of her and her father who died a few years ago:

It was great not just because I could easily watch the presentations from my office in Alaska, but to share for a few moments the joy of the learning experience facilitated by social network media. Listening to Gardner’s facilitation and leading questions, catching the edges of the inside jokes, and watching the students making connections, synthesizing, and responding to questions on the fly… it was Learning 2.0 in all its occasionally glitchy glory.

I’ve really been struggling personally with the “where do I go from here” question… with so many necessary failures and so much time spent fighting the same old roadblocks institutionally and personally, this was a timely reminder of why I do what I do. Kudos to Gardner and his great students. I wish I could have stayed and watched the rest!

Will Richardson has a post about the difficulty of changing teaching practices that directly addresses things I have been thinking about a lot for the past 6 months or so. From Will’s post:

And even as I sit in this session with Tim Tyson at Building Learning Communities, one principal says “I want to learn more about these tools so I can help my teachers use them in the classroom.” I want to jump up and say “No! You are missing a step! You want to learn more about these tools for yourself so you can help your teachers learn from them too.”

So what’s that all about? Is it just habit? Is it just such a focus on curriculum delivery that “learning” is all about how to do that job better? Is changing the way we do our own business just too darn hard? Or is this such a huge shift, this idea that we can actually learn through the use of technology that most people just don’t think they have to go there, that they can just keep using it as a way to communicate without the surrounding connective tissue where the real learning takes place?

We’re beginning to have more discussions about these issues at work as we start to seriously reflect on our initiatives and try to figure out how we can be more effective as educators ourselves and how we can help others evolve their practice in light of the changing technologically mediated, socially connected environment. It’s important enough to my daily work that I have been considering whether I should be teaching and involved in education at all.

I’m in complete agreement with Will–and have been saying so for quite a while now–that the only way we will see changes in the practice of teaching will be through the adoption of the participatory tools by the educators for themselves as learners and professionals. More directly, I don’t think it’s possible to “walk the walk” in the classroom unless you live in the new world that–until you actually live there–appears to be outside of your own.

There may be examples out there, but I am unaware of anyone who is successful in changing the way they teach to operate in this emerging world who doesn’t live there themselves. To put it in terms of the old model, I don’t know anyone who is successfully using the tools to teach who doesn’t use the tools themselves. Everyone in the room nods their head when I talk about being a lifelong learner in this new connected network of knowledge and about having to participate in the environment rather than try to use it as an external device, but very few people actually do these things.

It is possible to share content knowledge in a domain that you are no longer active in; it is possible even to be very effective in doing so. The best physical education instructor I ever had was too fat and arthritic to do any of the activities I learned so well from him. The best writing teachers I have had have not been the most often published… in fact I have learned some of the most important lessons from those who were hardly published at all. But sharing content and the practice of education are different activities. The revolution that is happening around us is about the way students and educators learn, interact, share and create. The effects on the content–the knowledge domain–is dwarfed by this critical cultural evolution.

Unless (I used to say “until” but that implies that I believe it has to happen, and I no longer do) educators are willing to be learners themselves, unless they are willing to be active in the participatory environment of learners, peers, and pro-sumers, they will not be successful in meeting the goals and expectations they themselves express during faculty development activities, conferences, etc. As one who is involved in faculty development efforts, I know that those efforts can’t be successful without this professional and personal involvement… and the semi-successful outcomes will last only as long as I and others like me are directly involved in the activities.

The semi-successful outcomes are those which resemble enthusiastic beginners’ drawings and poems–they have recognizably beautiful features and productive phrases. Someone reading or observing these artifacts will get something from them. But as a whole they are misshapen, they don’t cohere, and they are only minimally effective. An educator that has never blogged seriously or participated significantly in a community of bloggers will have minimal success at best in making blogs a useful part of the learning environment. It’s better than nothing, but much less than it could be. The same can be said for most of the applications people talk about. Mashups look cool and are a powerful learning method, but if you’ve never created one yourself you really have little to base your teaching on. The same goes for creating wikis, sharing resources, podcasting, vodcasting, Twittering, and all the rest. Twitter is a particularly fascinating application because it foregrounds the proximity of practice to understanding. A recent Wired article about Twitter reveals the amazing insight that Twitter is useful in practice because it gives one a new sense of social proprioception. This is true of all participatory applications and those applications as a living environment.

Let me put it succinctly: I’ve learned far more about the power, potential, and use of social software, the participatory web, and Web 2.0 applications through my existence in that space as a writer, avid reader, and music enthusiast than any amount of training could ever teach. As a professional I have already learned more from being a participant in the blogosphere of educators as reader/writer/commentator, a contributor to wikis, a sharer and usurper of bookmarks, and Twitter-ing fool than I will ever learn through direct training in “how to use” the tools.

I realize that a fundamental issue is time. Presumably an educator is already spending time outside the classroom keeping current in their field(s) and working on curriculum development. In that case I am not proposing adding to that time; I am proposing using that time differently and, in many cases, more efficiently. If an educator is not spending time doing these things in their discipline, then they are probably still spending time pursuing their other interests and/or hobbies. In that case I suggest that they would find it beneficial to engage this vast, wondrous mechanism in pursuit of learning more about whatever they are passionate about and in connecting with others who share in that passion. I can’t think of any discipline, hobby, vocation, or avocation where this would not be possible.

And I know–I know–from ongoing experience as educator, student, and lifelong learner that change is not easy. There is an entire literature of resistance to change and where it comes from. The issues of resistance range from the most crass and material to the deeply philosophical and ethereal. But for change to happen at all it must first be possible and I think that possibility is contingent upon engaging ourselves as agents within the new knowledge framework that is encompasses and builds upon the old.