|
Archives: March 2005
Thu Mar 31, 2005
Chess Night
[This week's radio essay.]
Perhaps you’ve been there yourself, on a Thursday in the coffee shop of the local bookstore. Around 7:00 p.m. the players start filtering in, looking for empty tables, unrolling their chess boards, and setting up the handsome weighted pieces and the chess clocks. The regular players greet each other, the newcomers are introduced, and pick-up games begin. Usually Roger invites everyone to an informal tournament, and by about 7:30 the pairings are announced and the tournament games commence. If you walk into the coffee shop then, you find silence and concentration at most of the tables.
Once in awhile a game ends in just a minute or two – someone blunders, the opponent seizes the opportunity, and checkmate follows. But each player has ten minutes on the clock for the entire game, and many games use most of the allotted time. Chess games often grow more interesting and exciting as the minutes pass – first the center pawns and the knights and bishops come out, and the players set up their basic positions. Then the kings are shuttled off into safety behind a row of pawns, and the rooks and queens start looking for ways to throw their weight around. Positions grow more complex, traps are set, attacks are launched, and pitched battles commence. All of this while the chess clock ticks down toward zero. You have to be careful of the time – if you think too long about an early move, you might have to rush your later moves, leading to an error that your opponent can capitalize on. A close, well-fought game, especially if there are no mistakes, is a real pleasure. All the better if you win.
Like other competitive endeavors, though, chess night can be quite humbling. There are youngsters who can make a so-so adult player like me really sweat. The last time I played the most powerful of the pre-teen players, he assembled a huge attack against my king while I aimed all my forces at his king. It became clear that the player who could launch his attack first would probably win. I was lucky – I was able to make the first move, and after a series of captures and checks I trapped his king and won. His queen and rooks were still lined up and ready, just a move away from unleashing their devastating attack. So yes, I worked hard and defeated a player one fourth my age, but I should give the full context – for this sharp young man had won our previous two games. As I say, chess night can be a humbling experience.
Maybe that’s why there’s something oddly un-American about the whole thing. We could be sitting home watching the latest incarnation of Must-See TV, munching on microwave popcorn and flipping from channel to channel hoping to be entertained. I have in mind especially the younger players – there they are studying the board, thinking hard about complex positions, learning from their mistakes, shaking off defeat and starting the next game with a clean slate. No wonder when one of the kids makes an older player like me really work hard over the chess board, you usually find people gathering around the table, watching the moves, nodding their approval at the ten or twelve year old who’s pushing himself or herself to play well. These youngsters bounce back from the humbling defeats, they delight in the beautiful patterns that unfold across the board, the insights that come to players, the combinations of moves that suddenly break open a game and create checkmate. They shake hands at the start and say, “Good luck,” and they say “Good game” at the end, and they come back week after week to play. When you watch them, you get the impression that some of them may already know that chess, like life, is about character.
link
Wed Mar 30, 2005
Rewarding faculty who blog
At the conference today I saw that there was some slim hope of building in a recognition for faculty blogging at schools that value civic engagement.
If, for example, we want students to learn from teachers who are showing how to apply the knowledge of their fields to the problems of their community, and if we want this work documented so that it can be recognized, we might value a log. Make it public, make it interactive, make it a blog.
If we want civic engagement, we probably want faculty to write for audiences not limited to professional peer-reviewed journals. We'd want them to be able to write for general audiences too, and we might come to accept them writing in a blog.
If faculty promotion and tenure documents call for rewarding application of knowledge, civic engagement, public intellectual work, then these documents might in time come right up to the door that says "Reward faculty for blogging well." They might knock on that door. They might be willing to come on in.
link
Tue Mar 29, 2005
A history of our town
I'm at a conference on civic engagement, and the thought I've taken away from the afternoon's session is this: if we're aiming to break up the monopoly over knowledge that the university likes to try to assert, and if we want to get the faculty out of their towers doing work with the community, and if we want students to study from the base formed by those things that have some urgency in their lives, then....
why not ask students to write the modern history of their city, identifying its points of pride, its strengths, its struggles, its unresolved problems. They could do so for a local history version of Wikipedia, and faculty could help students connect what students know with the insights that the various disciplines help produce. Working together, they could take stock in the community. No doubt they'd come into contact with the power struggles, the hidden histories, the old wounds, but students and faculty might also find themselves agreeing that the disciplines have something to offer, outside the ivory tower. Students might find a new respect for the academy; faculty might find something to connect their discipline with their locale. We might all get past the job training version of college into something more powerful.
link
Mon Mar 28, 2005
Quick-response blogs and professional standards
A colleague and I gave a brief introduction to blogging and blogging software at school today, and I realized what a pleasure it was to be able to point to one thing in particular --
the way people in fields like library technology and law have been able to turn the software into powerful tools for quick response to their changing fields.
It's admirable, it's one of the essential kinds of blogging, and it's hard to imagine that this sort of practice is going to go away any time soon. It seems to bring out the best in the top bloggers, too -- creating worthy content several times a week, building an audience and a professional reputation, keeping up with the field....
So I can imagine a teacher and students working up a set up "best practices" or professional standards for blogging in their field by looking at these top bloggers, seeing what they demand of themselves, seeing what resources they use, seeing what they offer others, naming their practical and ethical values, seeing what kind of prose they write so as to communicate clearly and persuasively. They could become the subject of a case study in professionalism, yes?
The class could make a wiki of their findings -- a wiki on professional standards in blogging for their field.
Then you could turn to the combative political blogs and ask whether these live up to the same standards, whether different standards apply in politics, or whether it's anything goes in that territory. Can the standards of professional writing be used to illuminate the strengths and weaknesses of civic discourse? Maybe so.
link
Sun Mar 27, 2005
Books or not, collaborative or not
Will Richardson asks whether he should write a book and whether it should be an experiment in new forms of collaboration and copyright. I reply:
The Code v2 experiment is a wonderful thing, but it's not the only way to frame a project (see John Miles Foley, for example, at University of Missouri), and nobody knows what we'll learn from their experiences. We still need books as markers of the broad pattern of work that is being done, for later reference, but more importantly to mark the pattern of this field right now. We need people to take stock from time to time and make a serious stab at saying what's been accomplished. If you can do that in a way that advances the frontier of collaboration and copyright, so much the better, but we need some books. How-to books, theory books, history books, utopian visions, gloom-and-doom prophesies, encyclopedic volumes and thin suggestive essays. About blogging and learning.
I'm confident of this, and here's my reason. Look at the most radical collaborative sites we now know of -- wikis. It is, I believe, well known, that from time to time someone has to go through and wrap her brain around the promising disorder that has been built through collaboration and give a new shape to a portion of a wiki. Someone has to shape what's been building into a larger understanding. That's what books do, too. Without books, we have the valuable process of blogging, and the progress that comes of it, but we also have too much of the good work of many people slipping down the screen into the archive. Different genres do different cultural work.
And we need books because that's the best way to bring some kinds of readers in to take a chance as writers themselves.
And if you're going to experiment with a collaborative book, I suggest not repeating Lessing or Foley's model but adding a new model to the mix. That way we'll learn something different about the process of book collaboration on the web.
link
Is my blog burning? #13
The food bloggers continued their tradition of collaborative events this week with a day devoted to muffins and cupcakes -- dozens of contributions are linked at Just Hungry, who provided the event summary this time around and generously categorized the contributions.
IMBB continues to be an important model for bloggers who want to find ways to break out of the peculiar isolation of their domains, but I haven't seen other kinds of bloggers discover ways to adapt the concept to their fields. I'll brainstorm:
*Chess bloggers could devote a day to a particular opening.
*The users of a particular blogging software could devote a day to sharing page templates or other design tools.
*Library bloggers could devote a day to a particular technology or search problem.
*Education bloggers could devote a day to . . . what?
*Bloggers in any field could devote a day to drafting entries in their field for Wikipedia.
That last one suggests a different sort of coordinated event, over a few weeks, say, in which people sharing a topic draft and revise and update Wikipedia entries for their topic.
link
Sat Mar 26, 2005
Anthologizing the blog
I'm still looking for ways to grapple with the transience of the blog -- a writer's best work slides down the screen into the archive, most likely to be lost there. It occurs to me that we could take advantage of an intersection between the category feature of most blog software and the way the more complex of these products allow you to add additional text fields. Let's say you add a text field to your composing screen and call it "anthology" and when you're finishing a post you get in the habit of pasting a second copy of whatever seems most important from the post into the anthology field. This might be as little as a sentence or as much as a paragraph, say. Then you submit the piece and it appears on the blog in the usual way. In fact, nobody can see that anything special has happened at all.
But you create an additional page layout that offers the category list -- easy enough if the software works with categories. Maybe there are six or sixteen categories there. A reader clicks on the one that appeals and is presented with another new page layout, this one offering all the text from the anthology fields -- not the whole posts, then, but the highlighted anthology sections and including a link to the whole posts.
It's a way of trying to draw something out of the daily posts that will stand as a suggestive distillation of the broad project of the blog itself. Once you have the two new pages set up, you only have to have the discipline of choosing a selection for the anthology text field before you post any given new piece. Everything else is automated.
The results will depend on the quality of the category list, so you might find that you use the category list as a way of inquiring into the range of your own thinking -- that sounds worthwhile. And after awhile, you have these anthology pages that can serve the writer and readers as another, more focused way into the blog's project.
link
Fri Mar 25, 2005
Three or four sides of expertise
By chance I've been reading things that touch on the character of our relationships with expertise.
In the new book of interviews between Robert S. Boynton and notable heirs of the New Journalism tradition, called The New New Journalism, I started by reading the conversation with one of my favorites, Calvin Trillin. (Who, by the way, resists being called a new journalist and is quite satisfied to be called a reporter...) Trillin spent about fifteen years reporting on large and small stories from around the country for a New Yorker series called U. S. Journal. Every three weeks he handed in a 3000-word story on a new topic, which placed him squarely in contact with a reporter's problem of expertise -- he was often not an expert on some aspect of the story and had to rely on experts. In part, that is a problem of language -- getting from the expert or making your own translation of the specialized knowledge of the expert's field. It's a matter of access to the source of knowledge and power, and the expert and his or her specialized language are both the source and the barrier to the source. Trillin says,
Of course, reporters are always working in someone else's field of expertise. You obviously can't become a law professor or a scientist in order to write a story. So you have to trust your instincts. It's partly a matter of deciding which people actually know something about the subject. (390)
So there is the problem of authority, but also a very appealing sense that the generalist can go ahead and make a judgment. This has got to be the ethical norm of citizenship for our time, if we can work up the skills and the backbone it requires.
I was paging through a book of quotations -- I recommend owning a couple of these, by the way, including perhaps a book of quotations by women, as well as using Bartlett's on the web -- and I saw this from Emerson:
The best of all ways to make one's reading valuable is to write about it, and so I hope my cousin Elizabeth has a blank book where she keeps some record of her thoughts. (From a letter to his cousin Elizabeth Tucker, 2/1/1832, in Quotationary, 702)
No doubt blogs can serve as that kind of blank book, a valuable book indeed, if we can live up to the quotation from Emerson that appears just below it in the list: One must be an inventor to read well.
In his chess blog, Dennis Monokroussos recently talked about the mistake many players make of relying on books or magazine articles or computer programs to analyze positions for them. He believes that this prevents them from improving as much as they might:
And here's the thing: little if anything will improve one's chess more than doing serious analytical work! It is, after all, the chess player's fundamental skill; additionally, the content - what's analyzed - is far more likely to be mastered when one devotes his or her own elbow grease, rather than casually reading a book like a menu.
He's suggesting a weakness in approach or even a weakness in character that may be a widespread problem of our time. The consequences for chess players are merely personal, but our problem with experts and expertise goes much further. See, for example, the anecdote about Albert Camus criticizing the Pope about the Holocaust, recounted in a recent Counterpunch article on torture by Andrew Wimmer and Mark Chmiel:
A few years after the end of World War II, the French writer Albert Camus met with a group of French Dominican priests. In the course of their dialogue about the still unnamed Holocaust that had taken place in Europe, Camus was troubled that the Pope had not really addressed what had happened to the Jews. Camus acknowledged that some people said the Pope did speak out, but, Camus claimed "it was in the language of the encyclicals." That is to say, dense, dry, without passion.
I don't quibble with that last sentence, but another way of looking at the story is to guess that the genres of expertise always risk being at a remove from the urgency of the world, or perhaps from speaking in the way (the genre) that will reach those who need to hear and think and provide them with materials they can work with. Encyclicals have sometimes changed the world of Catholicism, for example, but the genre moves people differently than other genres do.
They are a perfect example of the problem of expertise, aren't they, since they are written in Latin and therefore every word asserts an allegiance to tradition bound up in the control of experts. They have to be translated to reach the rest of us.
It's a grab-bag of perspectives on expertise, sometimes locating the dangers in the practices of experts, the genres they use, the allegiance they keep to their own authority, sometimes locating the dangers in the bad habits, the lack of skills, the fatalism of generalists and citizens and reporters. All through these encounters, though, isn't it clear that the problem of expertise is one of the crucial ethical challenges of our time?
link
Thu Mar 24, 2005
Digest
From the 1662 Book of Common Prayer, this small theory of our proper relation to texts:
Read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest.
Then speak, then act...
link
Wed Mar 23, 2005
Blogs are
Blogs are distinctly powerful because they are content, marketing and distribution all rolled into one, says RCox in a posting with one of those rude and racy titles you'd only see on the web. I want to add process and product to Cox's list as an unpacking of the term content, and then I want to add use and refinement as an unpacking of the results of distribution, giving us this:
Blogs are distinctly powerful because they are process, product, marketing, distribution, use, and refinement all rolled into one.
link
Tue Mar 22, 2005
Decertification of the press
If Jay Rosen is right about the decertification of the press, the undermining of its traditional role, then we may each need to take on a Fahrenheit 451-like role -- in the novel about a society where books were illegal, individuals memorized one novel each and took responsibility for passing it on to another person. With decertification, we may need each person assuming responsibility for some area of inquiry and publication, not just preserving but also producing knowledge and passing it along to others. This may be an ethical category for active citizenship.
link
Mon Mar 21, 2005
How to read
I spent the whole period "close reading" a few pararaphs with a class today, on the premise that reading in college is a set of particular skills that can be named and practiced. Nothing profound, just practical, I hope. It's a writing class, so I don't care at all whether the students understand this particular reading, but I care quite a bit whether they know how to understand a reading. We talked about previewing the text, about the power of rereading in which you fill out the estimate of the text's ideas from the preview or the first reading. We practiced moving toward the specificity of the text, all the while knowing that we'd want to illustrate and test everything we found along the way -- no appeals to authority allowed.
It makes me wonder, though, about the "build it and they will come" flavor of the web -- in other words, this was direct instruction and practice, naming techniques as we worked our way along. There was no faith that students would "get it" simply by doing something. No webby utopia, but a particular kind of classwork that should make thinking easier in lots of circumstances.
link
Sun Mar 20, 2005
Foucault: an ethic of publishing
In the Forward to Michel Foucault's volume of lectures entitled "Society Must Be Defended," Francois Ewald and Alessandro Fontana describe an ethic of research and publication that is built into the sort of professorship he held in France in the 1970s. As part of a program of teaching and lecturing owed the university each year, scholars
are required to give an account of the original research that they have undertaken, which means that the content of their lectures must always be new. Anyone is free to attend the lectures and seminars; there is no enrollment, and no diplomas are required. The professors do not award any diplomas. (x)
You see a shift here from the expectations of many American college faculty. We should not idealize, however -- perhaps because of his fame as a scholar and teacher, and perhaps because of the structure of these public lectures which were held in huge halls, we hear that
Foucault often complained about the distance this could put between him and his "audience" and about the way the lecture format left so little room for dialogue. He dreamed of holding a seminar in which truly collective work could be done. (x)
At the end of the lecture, Foucault is, in effect, alone at the podium even though a crush of students huddle around him turning off their tape recorders. About this experience Foucault says:
We ought to be able to discuss what I have put forward. Sometimes, when the lecture has not been good, it would not take a lot, a question, to put everything right. But the question never comes. In France, the group effect makes all real discussion impossible. And as there is no feedback channel, the lecture becomes a sort of theatrical performance. I relate to the people who are there as though I were an actor or an acrobat. And when I have finished speaking, there's this feeling of total solitude. (xi)
Yet in spite of the limitations of the lecture format, Foucault spoke as though he meant to invite collaboration at every turn, an act which blurred the divisions between teacher and researcher:
Foucault approached his teaching as a researcher. He explored possibilities for books in preparation, outlined fields of problematization, as though he were handing out invitations to potential researchers. (xi)
We hear, also, that Foucault linked his research with contemporary events, showing the power of the scholar to explain and inquire into more than the past (xii).
In the volume's Introduction, Arnold I. Davidson renews this topic with a focus on the power relationship of teacher to listener. He tells an anecdote of Claude Levi-Strauss choosing a lecture hall that would allow him to resist the usual model of "the professor dispensing his words, and not receiving them [from] or even exchanging them" with his listeners. Foucault prefered not to follow a model of teaching that came down to "exercising a relationship of power with respect to an audience" (xv). In traditional teaching he saw three elements: the teacher makes the student guilty for not knowing, obliges the student to learn what is presented, then verifies that the student has learned what has been presented (xvi).
I have to imagine that Foucault's struggle with traditional forms of teaching and teaching's traditional genres must resonate with most educator-bloggers. He was looking for genres of exchange rather than genres of power; he was looking for formats where collaboration and dialogue might actually take place; he wanted a place for inquiry. And even though the formats he inherited were not satisfying, he seemed to relish the opportunity, even the ethical obligation, to make his work public in the broadest sense. Open lectures, not limited by admissions standards, for a general public -- this assumes that knowledge should be spoken so as to belong to all.
So we need formats and genres that give us room to try to live up to the ideals we have as educators and citizens. We need to keep refining and inventing the ways knowledge is made and exchanged, and we need to widen the pool of participants and the raw materials we work with. Bloggers know this -- you can tell by their occasional manifestos and their daily actions.
link
Sat Mar 19, 2005
Revising a book on a wiki
Tom Portante at wikiSquared points out Lawrence Lessig's plan to revise a book, already published, in a wiki format, with the public welcome to participate. Lessig provides instructions about the sort of revision he's hoping for, along with a team of chapter captains to guide each section of the book. There is also a wiki-oriented Creative Commons license, in which contributors
agree to waive attribution for [their] contributions with the understanding that copyrighted material made available from this wiki will be attributed to the wiki itself, namely the Code v.2 Wiki.
The goal for this is to
plan ahead and think about our exit strategies - have we made our work as free as possible to those who might carry on after we ourselves may fail?
And a blog runs alongside, tracking and commenting on the project. Each chapter is launched with a guiding statement -- the one for Chapter 10, for example, posits the chapter's thesis and sketches some of the main revising tasks ahead.
Surely this is a strong model for academic projects that last for a few years, involving students from successive semesters. Lessig's project grabs its audience by the force of the original volume; a teacher would need to help students find a project they would like to commit to.
link
Fri Mar 18, 2005
Nothing is excluded
Our campus's master of improvisational electronic music, David Barton, gave a talk on Wednesday about his work, and then performed as one of the (currently) two members of the elastic ensemble called Plato and the Western Tradition. In his talk David described classical music as being composed out of a database of accepted materials, a collection of materials that shifts and grows over time. He described his own work, using sampling, looping, and all manner of computer alteration upon keybooard and other instruments, as not being different from classical music except that it draws upon a larger database of materials -- little or nothing is excluded, perhaps.
Wednesday's performance was accompanied by a video of shifting images, beginning as photographs of crop circles but evolving into progressons of other shapes as the computer and improvisor riffed on the images. I noticed that David's collaborator, Boyd Nutting, often looked up at the video while playing the Theremin -- an electronic instrument whose pitch and volume is controlled simply by moving one's hands closer to and further from the instrument. (The original opening theme to the first Star Trek TV series was played upon this instrument.) So the music is responsive, improvisational, wild, familiar, and -- because it is created upon a wider database of sounds -- it stretches one's sense of the possibilities of music.
Along with the pleasure of the lecture, the music, and the video, then, I came away thinking that we need to look for ways, in every field, to stretch the database, the number of people who have access to it, and the ways they can improvise upon it.
link
Thu Mar 17, 2005
Concordance
I find myself once again wanting a concordance of the blogs I read most often. Just like in the back of the Bible, where you can see every time a key word is used, and the dozen or so words around it, and a link to the chapter and verse so you can read the whole passage. That would save steps in doing research.
True, this is more or less what Google does for us, except that with Google you have to think of the word you want and in a concordance you can browse and hope for surprises. And a concordance doesn't take up as much page or screen space per entry as a Google listing does.
Web-based Bible concordances resemble Google in the amount of screen space per entry, and you have to choose the words you want rather than browse.
link
Wed Mar 16, 2005
Other people's students
I've come across an interesting new problem, new to me, at least. Suppose you read a blog that you might want to respond to, and you discover it's written by a student at your school, but not one of your students. Suppose you would ordinarily disagree fairly seriously with the political content of this blog, and you might even consider it a sort of duty to try to speak against the content when you encounter it. Can you respond anonymously? Can you respond as vigorously, say, as you might otherwise, since you know that this is a student? I'm guessing that we're still "on duty" if we respond knowingly to a student's blog, and are obliged to be guided by teacherly codes of conduct. Hey, it sounds like something to send off to the Ethicist column. Any opinions?
link
Tue Mar 15, 2005
Visiting author Chris Hedges
I've just come back from a talk by Chris Hedges, who was for a long time a war correspondant for the NY Times. His book, War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning, has been up for discussion here on campus this year. He spoke to perhaps 165 people, first reading a powerful essay that seemed to be built of highlights from some recent pieces, and then he took questions, speaking carefully and well about the impact of combat, the mythology that protects the country from realistic knowledge about war, the squandering of the world's sympathy after 9/11, and the struggle to return to a normal life after the addictive thrills of war.
I highly recommend his writing, and if he should happen to speak nearby, do go and listen.
He disarmed some critics in the audience by his admission, late in the evening, that he is not a pacifist, though I have to say that he must have about the most restrictive views for when to go to war of any non-pacifist I've run into lately. He refused the term just war, saying that war is always immoral, but he acknowledged that there comes a time when one must meet a brutal threat to one's people.
There were people there who seemed ready to have an argument with him, but the Q & A session was highly structured so as to filter all questions on index cards through a moderator, and so only Hedges and the moderator spoke during this portion of the event.
I heard someone mutter about that afterwards, saying that the format wasn't very democratic, but let's look at it this way: if you want to test the guest writer's ad libbing and debating skills under volatile conditions, then have an open mike, but if you want to test yourself against the ideas of the guest writer, listen hard and accept a more tightly-shaped format at least part of the time.
Relevance to blogging? Hedges is a fine example for any of us who want to write well, crafting sentences, doing research, shaping extended arguments, telling powerful stories. The question of the openness of the format may help justify closing comments on blogs when the audience is too volatile -- ideas need some space, and a combative forum page may not do the trick. Anyway, if someone wants to speak back, they can get their own blog, yes? Maybe, too, we should expect writers to work on extended pieces from time to time, and we should give them a respectful space and time to present the finished work. The shouting match is not anybody's ideal genre.
Or shouldn't be, at least. In Sunday's Times magazine, there was an interview with a political leader who hopes to trash the AARP in order to discredit its stand against President Bush's Social Security proposals. He said that democracy is loud, meaning that combative rhetoric is normal and is fine by him.
link
Mon Mar 14, 2005
Mixed and remixed
In a substantial post about his decision to establish a Creative Commons license for his new blog, John Miles Foley used this lovely phrase:
living language -- mixed and remixed
This intersects with something I've been musing over today. I have been wondering about those blogs that maintain a list of highlights -- see Jay Rosen, for example. This seems like a good practice to me, since the writer makes an effort to bring material back from the oblivion of the archive. But it is a practice tending toward the fixity of the book, isn't it, rather than the fluidity of the blog?
One difference, I'm guessing, between blogging and oral tradition, is that the great stories continue to circulate in an oral culture, owned by nobody in particular but used by many, while in blogs a substantial portion of the work stops circulating, slips off the page, and is for all practical purposes gone. Sure, it might be revived by an intrepid researcher, but mostly it's just gone.
Now some elements of the blogosphere live on -- ideas catch on, terms become widely accepted, historical incidents are canonized in the lore of the bloggers. That sounds like oral culture to me -- what I remember of it from a long ago reading of Ong et al. The content of oral culture belongs to those who use it, rather than those who register at the copyright office, which doesn't exist because it makes no sense in an oral culture.
The lore that survives between bloggers resembles myth, doesn't it, in its generality, its universality, its beautiful storytelling? What of the writing that slides off the page into the archive? Some of it is forgetable, surely, even for readers with kindred projects, because it is not strong enough, but some of it is forgetable because it is too specific, too detailed, to be remembered in that form. It has to be softened into generalities or myths to be remembered by an oral culture.
But some of the work we are doing requires those specifics in order to be carried out. You can't create a rocket using the cultural materials of myth -- the science they offer is too general. There was a Star Trek: The Next Generation episode once in which Picard had trouble communicating with a captain from another culture until he realized the fellow always spoke in references to his culture's myths and metaphors. It was a lively episode, but completely impossible, since nobody can create a warp drive using figures of speech. Similes aren't wrenches; metaphors aren't calculators.
So I'm thinking that Foley's hybrid experiment, using a media suite to support a blog and book project, is all the more on track because the orality of the blogosphere is not sufficient for some kinds of academic work. That orality doesn't preserve for use the powerful specifics that make research worthwhile. So the orality of blogging may help us challenge the control of knowledge in our age of experts, may help us widen access to knowledge and participation in creating knowledge, but we should keep an eye on the fact that blogging is also writing being done in an age of literacy. That writing partakes of the powerful specificity that changes the world.
I believe that the Creative Commons license aims at some midpoint between the orality and literacy. It acknowledges the fluidity, the mixing and remixing, of orality, as well as the powerful fixity that we sometimes achieve with literacy. That fixity is related to ownership in our capitalistic system, but it may be at least as importantly related to the simple and profound specificity of language. You can't build medical centers with metaphors; you can't build cybercafes with similes; and so forth.
I wonder if the blogosphere has a chance to tease the ownership of ideas under capitalism apart, somewhat, from the specificity of language, liberating it from that other role at times? Can blogs become more powerfully literate without losing some of their essential orality? I don't know.
Another spark in that post:
It's striking how the new democracy of the e-agora more and more reflects the ancient and continuing democracy of the o-agora, the open marketplace of oral tradition.
link
Sun Mar 13, 2005
All rolled into one
Blogs are distinctly powerful because they are content, marketing and distribution all rolled into one, says RCox in a posting with one of those rude and racy titles you'd only see on the web. I want to add process and product to Cox's list as an unpacking of the term content, and then I want to add use and refinement as an unpacking of the results of distribution, giving us this:
Blogs are distinctly powerful because they are process, product, marketing, distribution, use, and refinement all rolled into one.
Now I feel like I know more of what we're talking about.
link
Sat Mar 12, 2005
Flash & audio chess
Chess blogger Dennis Monokroussos points out a lively and successful experiment by Chris Kilgore with annotating and playing through one of his best chess games so blog readers can watch and listen on a free Flash player. Kilgore describes his thinking at key points in the game, explores some of the options both players faced, and teaches a bit about chess at a higher level than I play, that's for sure. The combination of audio and visual is suggestive for other teaching purposes. He's using a screen capture program with audio called Camtasia.
link
Fri Mar 11, 2005
Parallel play
I ran across an older post by Michael Feldstein that challenges the idea that blogs are really suited to collaboration. Rather, it is parallel play we see in the blogosphere, he suggests. Parallel play, those who are parents know, is a stage in the social development of youngsters -- age one or two, I seem to recall -- when children can play near each other but not actually play with each other. It looks like they're playing together, and they might even be using the same set of toys, but they're actually just playing nearby.
Micheal is right that conversations on blogs take substantial effort, and I enjoy the effort he made to see the clumsiness of blogging as a virtue:
On the other hand, this lack of direct engagement may be precisely one of the features that make blogs work. To begin with, I don’t need to follow social conventions and respond within the bounds of what Denham wrote. I am free to go off on a long tangent, covering whatever his post has triggered in my thought process rather than whatever I feel that I have to say in direct response to him. Second, if I’m not entirely comfortable with direct conversation, then I can feel safe within the intimacy of my blog/diary and choose not to look around to see what other people are saying in response to me. (In my blog, I get to decide whether I want to allow comments or trackbacks.) This can be liberating and valuable.
So I dig the freedom, and I admit the tendency of freedom to overpower collaboration here, but those passages of real collaboration are too vivid a memory for me to be satisfied that parallel play represents a peak of blogging. I find it more persuasive to think of parallel play as a developmental stage, not just in children but also in blogs. Perhaps we should more or less expect it in new writers, and if we're teachers we should start thinking about how a person can be helped to move beyond parallel play.
link
Thu Mar 10, 2005
Google map, customized
The instructions for customizing one of the new Google maps looked all well and good the first time I read it, but the second time it sunk in -- not only can you annotate the maps, but you can add photographs. You could make a very snazzy campus tour. You could work with students on an illustrated historical atlas of your community. You could make an architectural tour of the old downtown. What else, I wonder, would benefit from maps wedded to photographs?
link
Wed Mar 09, 2005
Naive, curious
At an anniversary, perhaps it's fitting to look back at one's first blog entries. Some of mine are just plain naive -- what can I say? Not grasping the amount of work others had already done, too ready to make judgments, satisfied with painting in the broadest strokes . . . but at least there was some curiosity there, a willingness to take on a new challenge, a hopeful attitude toward the future. We have to allow our students beginner's mistakes -- most of us must have made them, too -- and encourage a beginner's strengths and pleasures. Let's not forget those.
link
Another media suite
Christopher Lydon has started work on a new radio show featuring what I've been calling this week, after Professor Foley, a media suite. Lydon says that the
new show will be more tightly integrated with the Internet, through streaming audio, podcasts, e-mail, and blogs, which will give him a potentially international audience right from the first day, and will lend Open Source an interactive flavor as well.
When Foley and Lydon get things really rolling, we'll have to stop and consider, from their examples, whether there are any advantages to centering one's media suite around the book, or the radio, or perhaps some other core medium. What difference does it make which is the central piece in the set? Radio is faster off the starting post, but books can have more staying power, perhaps?
Via Ed Cone.
link
Tue Mar 08, 2005
Two kinds of bloggers, or new horizons in intellectual exchange
Eric Nelson, writing a guest piece for Jay Rosen, breaks the world of blogging into two:
The truth is most bloggers are editors, picking the best bits of the web to show their readers; they are not reporters or architects of elegant policy arguments. The ones that are reporters and architects, usually have a pretty good non-digital resume to back it up.
That's interesting, but I wonder if it doesn't suffer a bit from his book publisher's bias. There's no clue that a third type might exist, a collaborator who links to and adds to the conversation others have started. That third type requires a process-oriented reading of the web, not a product-oriented one, and it imagines possibilities beyond the lone creator who leads other people who cannot create for themselves.
A couple of days ago I mentioned John Miles Foley and linked to his new site on oral tradition and internet tradition -- he's hoping to use multi-media web tools to bust open the static model of knowledge and research that makes up the academic book.
Writing this morning about the tools that make up his media suite, he said:
Combine them, mesh them, use each to its advantage for the sake of the ideas and their reception. This naturally means that the reader will be called upon to do more, but citizenship in the contemporary world, as cyber-linked and awash in multimedia as it is, has already equipped us to do more in nearly every aspect of our daily lives. And what do we purchase by ratcheting up our own processing power – for attaining fluency in media multitasking? Nothing less than unique fidelity, radically richer experience, and new horizons in intellectual exchange. All in all, a bargain price.
And to some degree we have already crossed over, we already live in the promised land, or we have at least glanced at those new horizons of intellectual exchange. But if Nelson is correct about most bloggers being editors rather than writers, then not enough of our fellow web citizens have crossed over with us -- not enough have become either Nelson's credentialed leader or the collaborator I sketched as a third type.
Many educators look at a handful of their students over the years who achieve Nelson's ideal; we often hear teachers admit that they have not created those students but merely helped them accomplish something they were heading toward already. We can only take so much credit in those cases. But maybe most of our success as educators comes if we manage to help the apathetic or disenfranchised move out of silence into taking note of the world's possibilities and fascinations, as a good editor-blog does, and then beyond that to the hopeful collaborations practiced by the third type of blogger.
In that case, active citizenship can have a chance of growing out of an education system that says at some point, "Find something interesting, find something you care about, start to learn and think about it with others who share your interest. Make new knowledge, share it, test it, see what it's good for in the world. See how knowledge works, how inquiry works, how collaboration works, because you'll want to be practicing those skills all your lives."
link
Mon Mar 07, 2005
Two years
Today is the second anniversary of this blog. There are more than 800 posts, including writing almost every day for the first 18 months, and then an irregular stretch of about five months, and now a shaky return to daily writing, a problem I've not entirely solved due to my general workload. The whole thing has been a pleasure, a great learning experience, and an opportunity to stretch that I have not come close to exhausting. I hope someday to meet some of the people I've enjoyed reading, too. I'm in awe of those who have written three and four and five years on their sites, but I'm happy to have come this far.
link
Sun Mar 06, 2005
Pathways not things
In three opening posts, John Miles Foley, University of Missouri - Columbia, announces a multi-media web and book project on oral traditions and the internet. He builds on the work of Walter Ong (the 1982 book Orality and Literacy, etc.) to link the two
... technologies [that] are radically alike in depending not on static products but rather on continuous processes, not on "What?" but on "How do I get there?" In contrast to the spatial organization of the page and book, the technologies of oral tradition and the internet mime the way we think by processing along pathways within a network. In both cases it's pathways -- not things -- that matter.
Foley promises to use a "suite of media including webcasts and podcasts, linked websites, streaming audio and video, blogs, bulletin boards, and an aggregator" to break out of the research limitations created by the technology of the book, such as the way it supresses the pre- and post-history of its ideas.
Professor Foley intends to stretch the model of academic research, then, using the process-oriented forms that are becoming increasingly familiar to us on the web. Best wishes to him on a project that should be well worth looking in on from time to time.
link
Sat Mar 05, 2005
The Jedi mind trick
At Learning Curves, there has been a discussion of a secret way to improve one's course evaluations. A particular graduate student, it seems, has the knack:
His secret, he told us, is the Jedi Mind Trick. He will say, in class, things like:
"I'm explaining this very clearly."
He does this all semester, for all the questions on the evaluation form. #
It makes for an amusing post, but the principle behind it is important to consider. Too often we assume that the reasons for our assignments and activities are clear to students; too often we assume that they see what we are doing as we hope they will. Instead, we should name the goals of our assignments, we should say why we are doing what we do, and sure, why not, we should link the class explicitly to a set of values and goals. If the course evaluation statement contains a good formulation of pedagogical values, so much the better. As Christine Farris wrote, don't hide the moves.
link
Fri Mar 04, 2005
Newspaper experiment
Starting on Sunday, the Columbia Missourian will be experimenting with a downloadable version of the newspaper that means to move beyond the norms of the scrolling browser window to a new sort of interactive display. I'll be taking a look -- free registration required.
It's called the Weekly EmPRINT Edition and requires Acrobat Reader 6.0 or later.
link
Thu Mar 03, 2005
Speaking in the key of we
The Shifted Librarian says that she's been concentrating on "using blogs to humanize libraries," which I take to be a way of reasserting human voices in the institution. Any institution is probably tempted to silence some of its clients from time to time, or perhaps wall them off with routines and rules and hierarchies. Libraries suffer from a ready-made stereotype of the silencing librarian as an example of that tendency in any institution. So like any other institution whose participants want the best and know what that means, a library can look for ways to strengthen the role of people's voices. Jenny Levine calls this "speaking in . . . 'the key of we'" -- a catchy shorthand for reorienting toward a collective vision.
This is the kind of post where I've tended to talk myself into a set of generalities lately, but in spite of that risk, let me at least contrast the generality of my first paragraph with this contrasting notion from William Tozier, via Sebastien Paquet:
The only people who value your specialist knowledge are the ones who already have it.
That is another compact formulation, this time about institutional practices that almost reflexively divide insiders from outsiders. One of the easiest ways to spot this in a university is the low number of faculty members who write and speak for audiences outside their professional journals. We don't give tenure to anyone who can't write for those journals, a fact not likely to change, and we also usually don't much encourage speaking to a wider audience. To some degree, university faculty don't believe, then, in speaking the Levine's key of we. You can tell that by much of our behavior.
We're not likely to give up on the current idea of expertise, but that wouldn't have to prohibit a more communitarian vision of the expert. We could tell that we've begun to speak in the key of we when we find ourselves saying to someone outside the institution something like this: "Let's see how we can help you turn this specialized knowledge to your own purposes..."
A further problem is that a substantial part of the university is given over to certifying the credentials of young people for industry -- serving a third party who has some rights in the matter but probably not as many rights as are currently handed over so readily. At first glance that serves the purposes of the students, but those purposes are set out ahead of time for them by others.
link
Wed Mar 02, 2005
Jorn Barger's law of linktext
He said it well five years ago:
The first law of linktext is that it needs to provide enough information to allow you to make an intelligent choice, to follow it or not. Anytime you follow a link and are disappointed by what you find, that link has been inadequately labelled. #
New writers, with an undeveloped sense of audience, have trouble making these and other writerly judgment, though. As I approach the second anniversary of this blog and look at the first pieces posted here, I easily see the lack of context that would make solid judgments possible. Still, each writer starts somewhere.
link
Tue Mar 01, 2005
Plagiarism experience
I was explaining to a student today why a passage was still plagiarised even though there was a link at the bottom to the source. The structure of the thought was borrowed directly from the source, but this was not indicated in the writing. The series of ideas were paraphrased, in the original order, without indicating this. A person who followed the link would realize, in time, that this was the case, but no clue was given by the writer.
The student seemed genuinely surprised by the problem, as if citation comes down to a sort of pointing to a site rather than an acknowledgement of the nature of the debt owed to the source. I explained that the series of ideas need to be credited explicitly: "The author sees four reasons....First....Second....etc."
I explained that without this kind of crediting a fellow researcher would not be able to tell the relation between the source and the new text, and so would not be able to tell whether to go read more. It's a kind of aid-to-judgment that a skillful writer offers a reader -- if I tell you this about the sources, you'll be able to know whether it would serve you to read further.
And so perhaps in many cases it comes down to this: if you never do research that has any urgency, any personal stake, then you never arrive at the experience of knowing how grateful you become for good source work, which saves you so much time as it helps you make judgments about what to follow up on. In this way, plagiarism is yet another clue of how often students find themselves as outsiders in the community of professionals who make and control knowledge. It's about power and access, then, when at first glance plagiarism seems to be about dishonesty. (And sometimes it is about dishonesty...)
link