Chris Lott

[photo of Gutenberg statue by Robert Scarth] 

This Thursday, October 22 at 3:15p (Denver (MDT) time, check for your time zone) I and my compadre Jared Stein will be in Denver at WCET presenting on the Gutenberg Parenthesis, secondary orality, and information literacy & fluency. If you are attending WCET, you can just show up at the room: Colorado GH.

If you’d like to participate remotely, we will be broadcasting the session via U-Stream (http://www.ustream.tv/channel/ruminate) and monitoring the live U-Stream chat as well as the Twitter hashtag: #ruminate

I’d love to make this session as interactive as possible because it really is about high-level rumination on something that represents emergent thinking (for me, at least)… so the more I can hear from you the better.

The basic idea behind the session is to explore the potential for the thinking of Walter Ong on secondary orality (the Gutenberg Parenthesis) as a lens for conceptualizing and teaching new media literacy and information fluency. Along the way I’ll dip into a couple of sidestreams, such the “problem” of so many different ideas of digital literacy and the changing role(s) of memory in the context of new media.

There are many things I like about the Kindle—particularly the Kindle DX, which is amazingly readable—now that I have access to a 3G network. For various reasons, the Kindle’s not a suitable device for me to read fiction, poetry or other creative writing. But it could be perfect for disposable reading (magazines and newspapers) and much of my nonfiction needs. Could be.

I’m not talking about the larger issue of lack of Kindle content outside the most mainstream—I can count with just the fingers of both hands the number of times a Kindle edition of a book I am looking for has been available—but a much simpler problem: the horrible production quality of so many Kindle edition books. It’s one thing when a free, public domain book is the victim of poor conversion, but when I pay very near the paper price for a book and Amazon (or whoever create the Kindle edition) can’t be bothered to even take care of things like formatting paragraphs properly… that’s not cool. And with no way to preview a Kindle book, you essentially roll the dice each time you buy one.

For example, here’s what my recently purchased Kindle edition of Walter Ong’s Orality and Literacy looks like:

Notice anything missing? Having sufficient leading between paragraphs—or even indented first lines—might seem like a small thing, but not when you have thousands of screen to read. And this is just one example of many. The books I download have problems more often than not.

Two more examples that clearly stem from faulty conversion and absolutely no effort put into correction:

A couple of us were batting around the idea of Education movie trailers ala the fantastic example created by Alec Couros for his Open Access Course. There really should be more of these.

Even before I saw Alec’s example, I was never able to read George Siemens’ phrase “A World Without Courses” without hearing it in one of those great Movie Trailer Voices, like Hal Douglas or the late, great Dan LaFontaine…

In a world without courses. One man. Stands alone. Connected. Disruptive. And with a pedagogical score to settle…

I’ve seen activities from his open class activities in the past, but meeting Alec Couros in person at Open Ed strengthened my resolve and I’ve signed up to participate as a (non-credit earning) learner in his Open Access Course EC&I 831: Social Media & Open Education. The amount of time I’ll have to participate is unclear—and subject to forces outside my control—but enjoying the freedom of participating at my own pace and in the way(s) that work best for me is one of the great things about Alec sharing this experience with the world.

Check out the EC&I 831 course wiki for more information and, if interested, to sign up.

[Ken Freedman at Open Ed 2009] 

I was excited to hear Ken Freedman discuss the idea of the gift economy in his Open Education 2009 Keynote. Freedman cited gift economics as a fundamental mechanism driving the ongoing transformation of legendary WFMU from a free-form radio station operating in the traditional mode to a modern-day web media entity that works in the contemporary environment where so many other fail… all the while not only retaining, but enhancing, the station’s unique identity and philosophy.

In The Gift (perhaps the single greatest influence on my understanding—such as it is—of art and creativity), Lewis Hyde shares an insight that is at once obvious and profound w/r/t gifts and gift economies: a gift is no such thing unless the recipient can in turn give it away. This characteristic differentiates giving a gift from merely passing something to someone else and also from an exchange or transfer that incurs a debt, even if one that is implicit and possibly protracted.

Implied by this is the necessity of understanding what one has in order to have the ability to share it with someone else. Otherwise it’s like having a (possibly elaborately wrapped and decorated) box with unknown contents. You can hand the box off to someone else, but without knowing what it is you are sharing nothing. And from this we can derive that the knowledge and understanding that I must possess to give a gift must also be present in the recipient else they can’t share it and, again, no gift has been given.

The layers that comprise this simple concept of the gift are, I think, at the heart of the discussions happening about open education, open education resources, and content. In creating content we are creating an essential stuff, but the quest for bringing to this wealth of content a sense of context and process is the transformative activity that makes the content resources shareable at all. There’s no gift economy without gifts, naturally, which means actually giving rather than merely transferring content…

[Gardner Campbell & Jim Groom, OpenEd09]

Day Two of Open Education 2009 and I can honestly say I’ve yet to see a presentation that wasn’t at least as good as the best presentations I’ve seen at any conference anywhere.

Gardner Campbell’s “No Digital Facelifts: Thinking the Unthinkable About Open Educational Experiences” is one of those that had me repeatedly saying to myself “every teacher needs to watch this.” In true Gardner-esque fashion—the model I aspire to—he weaved together the invention of the alphabet, Brazil, Shakespeare and the music of the spheres, and much else besides into a (there’s no other word for it) compelling whole.

I came to this conference seeking hope… hope that despite the brokenness of our educational institutions, good teachers can elevate the profession; hope that despite the toll exacted by the daily grind of working within those institutions, excellence can be had. Gardner’s presentation restored some of that hope… his excellent (and funny) analogy to being given a bag of gold is what I need to keep in mind when I return to the other part of my real world.

My question is, how to maintain that hope? Gardner puts forth a premise that we should be teaching using narrative, curation and sharing. We all like to talk about the regressive factors that hold us back: institutional lethargy, recalcitrant educators, simple fear, technological complexity. But worse still is that as much as those factors exist, progress towards this vision of education is impeded by people at the front. Creating narrative is thwarted by concerns about community building and identity. Curation is pushed back by far-leaning constructivists and discovery-based educational theory promoting leading from behind. Efforts at sharing crumble and dissolve beneath the weight of arguments over licensing and which space should be used. Despite the clarity of these three simple concepts—narrate, curate, share—the world feels exceedingly dark.

Gardner used the example of a quotation that feels like it was written yesterday but was actually the words of Marshall McLuhan from over 40 years ago. I’ve used similar examples from the work of Baltasar Gracian (300 years ago) and Michel Montaigne (500 years ago). The wise words grab our attention and confirm our intuitions and desires… but they cut sharply the other way. Go back 40 years, 300 years, 500 years—go back to Plato and Haraklitus—and the relevance of their words also demonstrates clearly how little progress has been made. How do we keep the faith if the answer to that lack of progress is wait, wait, wait, it’s coming, but not yet?

Every session I’ve attended here at Open Ed 2009 has—seriously—been great. I will surely recognize many here specifically in days and weeks to come. But I have to refer you to Alan Levine’s Amazing Stories of Openness without delay because it speaks for itself and should really give you a jolt of electricity, reminding us what this education game is really all about.

The video of the session is great too, because Alan is always engaging and funny. At the end of his presentation he made a comment to the effect that he “didn’t really know what these stories led to.” But that’s the beauty of the shared experiences: they don’t lead to anything. In the same way that we don’t have conversations at a table (or tell stories around a campfire, virtual or not) and wonder where they will lead. Those stories are the destination… those experiences are what it is about.

Following (and during) Dave Cormier’s Open Ed presentation: We Are Not Your %@! Resource:Sustainable Use of Established Communities, Jennifer Jones and I had some Twitter conversation that resulted in her sharing the points shown above.

Community becomes increasingly important as one realizes that open education (if not most education) uses content but involves community. And that was at the heart of Dave’s presentation—conversations about education too often speak about using community and people as if they were content resources.

Jen and I appear to differ in our understanding of community in a way that isn’t uncommon. Let me get the simple agreement out of the way first: I agree completely with her points #1, 2, 4 and 7.

But #3, 5 and 6 get right at our differences in approach. It’s true, though phrased very negatively, that a novel course community is “silo.” But what if it isn’t a silo, but an intentionally short-lived community? I don’t see that any of us belong to “a” community—we belong to many. Our community memberships and affiliations come and go. Some lost a long time, some last for a very short time, maybe only a few days. I not only don’t see a problem with that, I think it’s a positive characteristic of contemporary life… as it has been for as long as people have gathered in groups, but amplified and magnified by the availability of technology that removes some physical limitations to communities we can be part of.

Given that, then lack of sustainability of a course community isn’t necessarily a bad thing. And as I believe that trying on roles and experimenting with positions and philosophies is a critical part of learning, it might sometimes be a highly desirable attribute. Which isn’t to say that I don’t see clearly problematic issues from the simple (resources that are used while part of a community can be desirable long after the community itself no longer is) to the complex (community membership doesn’t have to be a zero-sum game where belonging to community A means withdrawing from—or negatively effects—community B, but it can happen). Learners don’t stop existing in their existing communities when they start existing in those inspired or required as part of an educational experience… a fact that is, in fact, implicit in point 5, which recognizes that learners already exist in multiple communities that co-exist just fine.

Underlying this is also a philosophy of community and education around which Darcy Norman and I were Twitter-debating at the same time: community requirements. If I thought all communities and community engagements operated at the same level, then I could see where requiring participation in a particular community (and thus requiring the same technology) would be much more problematic. But I don’t believe that’s the case. Requiring a student to participate in a particular community is artificial… but time and time again I see what starts as a requirement blossom into an authentic experience that is sustained, either exactly so (when taking part in existing communities outside the class) or in function (when participation in a class community—a flickr group, diigo community, group blog, ning community is continued by students in like form in other places, often using the same tools). This isn’t an unfamiliar practice nor is it limited to community—teaching the arts, for example, often starts with “artificial” assignments which turn out to be precisely what was needed for the learner to become “authentically” engaged.

And requirements—even those that can only be refused at the cost of a grade or whatever mechanism of assessment is being used—aren’t necessarily a bad thing. I don’t see requiring participation in a community (constrained, limited, or not) as being any different from other required activities and performances that are part of the teaching and learning process, whether those performances be writing, reading, interviewing, making, building, or what have you.

All that being said, point #7 is very true. When possible/conceivable and desirable—not just technologically, but pedagogically and in light of what I am trying to help students learn, discover, and achieve—taking advantage of the eduglu concept to weave preferred tools and existing communities into the experience is a wonderful thing to do. But I have to push back on the zero-sum approach to community and the idea that "real” (useful, authentic, etc) engagement can’t happen in a constrained and/or required experience.

In “Diminishing Returns in Humanities Research” Mark Bauerlein—as part of a larger discussion I may take up over at CosmoPo sometime—asks an important question:

“In light of 50 years of vast research production, backed by substantial resources and subsidies, is not a redistribution in order, particularly toward teaching?”

After outlining the problem of overproduction engendered by the “publish or perish” system he makes two recommendations for change, including the notion that:

“…subsidizers should shift their support away from saturated areas and toward unsaturated areas, in particular toward research into teaching and even more toward classroom and curricular initiatives.”

Can I hear an “Amen?”

Granting even my significant reservations with “education research,” Bauerlein’s recommendation makes sense. Not only do higher education institutions marginalize the practice of teaching in a variety subtle and not-so-subtle ways, but they’ve created an advancement mechanism with a process that works actively against good teachers, creating an artificial zero-sum environment pitting teaching against research and administrative activities.

Of course the entire system of traditional publishing as a measurement of anything (it never had anything to do with teaching, of course), let alone one’s value to an institution, has become epically problematic given that it evolved—in large part—as a way of determining value in an environment where access and distribution were greatly limited by physical and fiscal constraints. But without trying to eat that whole elephant, is recognizing teaching as an important, core part of the institutional mandate not a manageable and reasonable request?

[image by Carissa GoodNCrazy]

Slate has a new review of web-based task management (to-do list) programs. You might want to check out the details, but just so you don’t suffer from heart-palpitating suspense, the top two applications were:

• Google Mail Tasks from Gmail Labs (30/30)
• Remember the Milk (which I use) (29/30)

While I like the minimalism of Gmail Tasks (as the review notes, the decent design + a lot of capability can make RTM a time sync, particularly if—like me—you find getting ready to do things much more fun than doing them), I spend too much time in different Google mail accounts, and tasks are tied to individual accounts, resulting in two wholly separate lists. That doesn’t work for me. So, RTM for win!