[photo by drp]

My intentions list (label stolen shamelessly from Dave Pollard) has many items, but they could all be accurately gathered together under the dual imperative do right; be better which itself is just as accurate in its wonderland form: be right; do better. Actually paying attention to this list has a variety of effects, but I’m feeling a few of them keenly right now.

First is the natural consequence that approaching the world with more humility seems to result in having much less to say. If I honestly examine my thoughts and am deliberate in the process of figuring out whether something I am about to share out with the world is something that comes from a good place borne of good intention– even if highly speculative– then not much survives. Too much of my speech consists of subtle (or not) attempts to get attention and/or elevate myself in some way. Too much ego.

[photo by Christi Nielsen]

Then comes the reality that, in a medium that invites debate that I don’t want to– and more importantly am not ready to– engage in, anything I say becomes more akin to the disembodied voice that comes out of a  one-way public address system than an invitation to discussion. Debate can be healthy… it just too often isn’t when it’s in (and on) my hands.

[photo by me*voila]

Finally, anything that makes it past those considerations, necessarily making it something that is truly of and representative of me, feels less and less at home in the split personality embodied by the division of my “twittering ed tech geek” and “writing art design wannabe” blogs. The “does it go here or there” question gets vexing when it’s all just me. I realize that many readers of Ruminate would probably be annoyed if I moved all the furniture of Cosmopoetica back here… but who am I writing for anyway?

Put the emphasis on whichever word in the title works for you, but a small listing would have to include:

• That being open to learning often means being challenged, being surprised, being overwhelmed, and being wrong. Sometimes all of these things at once. And it’s OK.
• That some of the best learning experiences come from being vulnerable– a key part of being open– and vulnerability’s OK.
• That vulnerability– even the good kind– often involves fear. And fear’s OK.
• That none of these things matter if you don’t care and the fact that you don’t care isn’t always– or even often– your fault. It’s not a permanent condition. It’s OK to care.
• That the upper register of caring is in harmony with passion and while we can’t all be passionate about the same things we can respect it when we see it, hold onto it when we discover it, and look for it everywhere. Go ahead: dig through the drawers, go for dessert first, wonder aloud, and ask big questions. It’s OK.
• That being passionate can make us strangers in our own skin– not to mention our world of friends, acquaintances, peers and family– and that’s OK.
• That wonder is just one down-stroke past wander, you can’t have the first if you don’t do the second, and wonder isn’t only wanting to know something you don’t, but a state of being, as in being awestruck or being in love.

Over the course of three years, the O’Reilly Emerging Technology conference has become an important part of my yearly techn-bio-rhythmic schedule. Etech is not only an event where I can recharge my technological batteries and catch whiffs of truly new and shiny geeky stuff, it also allowed for an annual meeting with a couple of my best friends, Link and Gabby.

Sadly, I couldn’t make it this year due to a conflicting engagement… which, while a positive opportunity, created a circumstance that hasn’t improved my disposition. I’m starting to skim through the etech posts aggregated on Technorati and flickr pics and look forward to the more colorful commentary (I hope there’s a planet-style aggregator out there somewhere). But it’s just not the same from the outside looking in, and I have nothing to replace being with my friends… or the ritual boxty and beer, nighttime kite flying, and the philosophical, Keith Richards fueled, conversation at the Hill Street Cafe as the sun goes down over the waves.

Brian makes a good point about our oh-so-human reaction when something receives an unexpected negative response… and the thought his words provoked in me are important enough to be brought to the front.

I realized that I took a number of recent events far too personally. I assumed a certain perception of who I am and where I’m coming from, things like my shared belief that there is much about our learning environments that can’t be taught, that I don’t want to create new monoliths to replace the old ones, etc.

When that understanding turned out not to be the case, it felt very personal, as if this group of people that I barely feel qualified to be considered a peer with in the first place was reacting with disdain… not just to something that I’ve been giving a lot of thought to and sincerely want help with, but to me personally. It triggers all my deep-rooted emotions of insecurity and powerful and painful feelings of being alienated from the most important part of my network of friends and colleagues.

It’s enough to despair of ever being able to communicate at all.

Unfortunately, in that state of mind, even– perhaps particularly– my attempts to set things right haven’t come across as clearly as the mea culpa they mostly are. Which makes it hard to lighten up (or what passes for lightening up with a philosophically inclined person like me… finding clarity).

then that last post was the one-sided rant at the end of the night after drinking a few too many. My wise friend rightly said, in part:

More to my point is those are relatively fresh relationships, perhaps worth a little more kid glove time than you would spend on me or xxx with whom you have ample history. NV was clearly an emotional experience for you, and this feels, way over here in my admitted ignorance and separation from the context, like something of an emotional over-reaction on the heels of a really emotionally rewarding set of experiences. In particular, the “facile bullshit” and “disingenuous” strikes me as angry and, potentially, needlessly harmful to new friendships.

He’s right… something has me by the heart. It has opened me up but left me vulnerable in a way I’m not handling very well. While I believe a circle of friends has to be capable of sustaining one of their own storming out mad and returning sheepishly, it might have been a bit soon to subject new friends to the full mercurial force that is me, and a couple of people I alluded to in my post didn’t deserve to what I vented out. I apologize.

I’m afraid to even look at the comments on that piece, so I probably won’t for a while.

[photo by Kris Krug]

I’ve long used this famous quote from Leaves of Grass to explain (and explain away) my rather marked inconsistencies:

Do I contradict myself?
Very well, then, I contradict myself;
(I am large—I contain multitudes.)

I feel a need to justify my inconsistency because most of the people I follow and admire could be fairly grouped together based on their amazing surety. If they knowingly contradict themselves or, as I sometimes do, forget their former position and come to something new, it’s not something a lot of them (with some obvious exceptions) choose to share with the rest of us. For reasons that aren’t relevant to this particular discussion, my mental model has been one that not only equated consistency with being “right” but put changing one’s mind in the same class as intellectual weakness.

So I found myself glued to the monitor when I discovered that the Edge World Question Center’s annual question for 2008 was “What have you changed your mind about and why?”  Seeing so many incredible thinkers sharing details of sometimes sweeping changes of mind was inspiring. If they’re OK with it, why shouldn’t I be? This thought, in combination with my recent experience at Northern Voice– where I had the opportunity to learn from so many peers, colleagues and intellectual idols whose passion is clear and strong without being dogmatic– has proven to be a heady and unnerving potion. Some part of me has been opened up that was formerly barely open a crack. If you know me, you might find this literally unbelievable, but I was actually hugging friends– and not just as a barely-tolerated gesture, but the real thing– and making sure I got my share of the hugging action. I hadn’t willingly hugged another person in that way, recognizing deep, Platonic kinship, for years (except for one glaring exception that happened at at Northern Voice last year)!

So here are some things I’ve changed my mind about relatively recently– some exceedingly large and some small and unremarkable:

• It’s OK to need people. I have a lot of weaknesses… refusing the benefits of friendship doesn’t have to be one of them. Even lone wolves and introverts can have friends… they probably need them. Ultimately tied to this is the realization that:
• I have something unique to offer. I’ve done a lot of teaching and given a lot of presentations. I know I have a minor talent for it. But only recently have I begin to believe that my work has lead to a powerful and unique (or very rare) combination of skills, knowledge, and obsessions.
• Tackling the big problems directly isn’t necessarily an act of hubris. What do Lawrence Lessig, Barack Obama and Barbara Ganley have in common? They’re all willing– in very different ways and approaches– to tackle the big, abstract problems. I have to reconcile my  belief in transformation and innovation with the acts of the individuals that can make that happen.
• The power of individual talent and genius shouldn’t be overlooked. I believe in the power of collective intelligence, social networks and group sense-making (thus it follows that Andrew Keen and Lee Siegel are dorks). That being said, many of the things I love most– such as great works of art– are the product of immense individual effort by often less-than-admirable individuals. In our understandable rush to realize the power of the social, let’s leave more than just room for these misfit impulses to operate… let’s embrace them. Then each of us can embrace them within ourselves.
• The possibility of the Divine… and my need to make sense of that possibility even if it means uncomfortable changes follow in my life.

What have you changed your mind about?

At one of the HICSS sessions today a paper was presented analyzing personal blogs. The research question was whether personal bloggers brought the same expectations and norms of reciprocity and attention to the strong ties in their blog network (family, friends) that people typically do in face-to-face communication. So the research team took a random sample of 1000 personal blogs hosted at blogspot.com and did a content analysis and a short survey and found that, indeed, bloggers had the same expectations of their family and friends online as off… they tended to share intimate information and expect similar intimacies in return. Further, men and women both shared equally about all the topic areas (don’t remember them all, but a few were: relationships, sex, family) except health, where women tended to share significantly less than men. Political discussions tended to occur so infrequently as to be statistically insignificant.

So far, so good. Like a lot of quantitative research that lags behind practices, it wasn’t news but confirmation of what many of us already intuited to be true.

Then the speaker made a strange statement that caused me (and pretty much only me– most of the folks here know a fair amount about blogs and blogging but do not themselves blog) to just about jump out of my chair in agitation. He said (quoting as exactly as I can recall):

I don’t really know why anyone would maintain a personal blog for any amount of time… the more you share about yourself, the more limited you are in what you can do.

For clarification he said:

For instance, if I wanted to come off as a literate professional but then blogged all kinds of personal details, I wouldn’t look professional.

And, yes, he did use the phrase “come off as”…

This phrase, and the general agreement with which it was received, illustrates the huge gulf between blogger and non-blogging observer. And I think it represents a difference in mind-set that explains a fair amount of blogging (and other blog-like) activity. On the one hand is the traditional culture of scarcity, of defaulting to not sharing information, of selective disclosure and executive privilege. On the other are those who recognize the value that returns from sharing, the value of network effects, of participation and the presence that emerges from them.

Of course we all share traits from both “sides”– these aren’t absolutes. Still, I can’t help but think that the limits that come from sharing and participating in social networks are essentially limits on deceptive practices. It foregrounds a fundamental issue of character that remains a deep concern of educational practice because it is a significant part of learning and becoming who we want to be: authenticity. Perhaps the researcher should be more concerned with what he actually is and less with how he “comes off.” Perhaps we need to be more concerned with the things we really do and say, with the person we each– in all our beautiful conflicting, contradictory constituent bits– are… rather than who we could, by holding back, pretend to be.

[As I compose this, the final numbers aren't in, but Obama is on his way to winning the Iowa Caucus. The Iowa caucus isn't that meaningful. However...]

Part 1. George W. Bush is elected. I consider moving, but we haven’t colonized any further planets yet.

Part 2. George W. Bush is elected again. I wail and rend my garments… consider a hunger strike but I can’t give up bacon.

Part 3. Democrats, riding a wave of idealistic fervor and campaigns to turn out new voters, push Obama into the general election where he is beaten by [insert Republican candidate here-- they are all equally terrifying to me]. In a despair the likes of which have been unseen since the time of the Ancient Greeks, our lives become a new level of purgatory.

My reasoning: the problem is that Clinton and Obama are both basically unelectable because a) few new voters come out for the general election, b) many voters stay home, c) too many “moderates” will never be able to bring themselves to support either a relatively inexperienced, shape-shifting black candidate or a hard-edged woman with the last name of Clinton… when it comes time they will either not vote (advantage: Republicans) or vote Republican.

I’ve got nothing against Obama. I think he’s under-experienced and I don’t love the way he has wholly changed his persona… but the former can be overcome and the latter is just politics. I think Hillary would be individually a better decision-maker, but the power of the presidency is not solely in the office, but in the apparatus that they create around themselves.

No, what I fear is that neither of them are finally electable, and since Democrats and Independents don’t vote strategically (John Dean? Ralph Nader?) we will get stuck for another eight years (and make no mistake, Bush has shown that even the worst incumbent can be RE-elected) with some Republican knob…

This is a blog. That fact means nothing. It is not a peer-reviewed journal, a final archive of my writing, a sponsored publication, or the product of gatekeeping and editing. That does mean something… it means that while the ideas and thoughts are often vital and the product of a long gestational period, the writing itself is not. It is essentially as it came from the keyboard: spontaneous, unproofed, unrevised, and corrected afterward only when necessary to address mistakes that grossly effect the intent. Where such changes have been made they are explicitly noted.

It would be distinctly unwise– not to mention uncharitable– to play connect-the-dots with my physical life and work and my “life of the mind,” as scanty as either might be. My attitude at work, my reaction to ideas, your grade (good or bad), the length and tone of my discussion at the coffee pot, the intensity and duration of my lovemaking, the time it took for me to return your letter or email, and the quality and quantity of my response to you in any medium are probably not tied to anything you read here… at least not in a way that you will be able to confidently assume without sharing years of psychotherapy and the bills that come with it. And even then, keep in mind the next (and last) paragraph.

Opinions and characterizations of fact here are my own and represent no one else. They do not represent the University of Alaska, my family, my friends, my children, my ex-wives, the baristas at the coffee shops where many of the longer entries were written, the irritated owners of said coffee shops who want tables to turn over, the repressed or “the man,” alien life forms, any movement (political or intestinal), the women I want and can’t have, the women I’ve had and shouldn’t have wanted, or a coherent and consistent philosophy or aesthetic. In fact, it’s quite possible that by the time you read the words here they won’t even represent me. If I contradict myself, very well then, I contradict myself. I am not Whitman, but like him I am large and my girth contain multitudes. Catching me in a contradiction is probably not the result of your steely grasp of logic and it’s almost assuredly not a product of hypocrisy. I’m a human being and my blog reflects that humanity.

I’m not sure who my anonymous benefactor is, but whoever you are, I appreciate the gift of a copy of Full Catastrophe Living.

I hadn’t heard of it before, but I have become interested (again) in meditation. People who know me will shake their heads in disbelief, but at one time I meditated every day and I miss the practice. This book looks extremely interesting, particularly in conjunction with another book I recently picked up called Self-Directed Behavior, which provides research-supported methods for modifying behavior. Look out for the new and better me!