For the session this afternoon
I have the distinct pleasure
To introduce two of my good friends
Gardner Campbell, from Baylor University
and Jim Groom from the University of Mary Washington.
They require absolutely no introduction beyond that.
That's why we'll let them get on with the show, so
please help me welcome these two guys
Thank you, Cole
Thanks everybody for being here after lunch
This is always the great deadly zone
where your blood sugar and my blood sugar
the biochemistry, the neurons
but we're going to force through this
we're going to make it
I have a good feeling about this
every presentation I've been in
has something very striking in it for me
sometimes it has been ideas
sometimes it's the level of innovation
just the sheer energy of innovation
sometimes it's a little more close to the bone
the session that Leigh Blackall did
I don't know if he's in here now
but the session he did before lunch
really struck me with the sense of frustration
that I feel...a lot...maybe you do...
that we live in an age of marvels and wonders
that don't seem to be making
a substantial difference
in the most serious activities
we engage in as human beings:
Education
There are a lot of reasons why that's no-one's fault
There are a lot of reasons why that's everyone's fault
and there's a lot of people
we can point at and blame
sometimes justifiably so
but rather than round up the usual suspects
I have this sense of
What a waste!
Why is this not happening?
We've had the Internet
We've had computers
We've had all these amazing conversations
at conferences like this
about the possibilities
Is this making a difference?
I mean we can say:
Sure, we have success stories
but we keep thinking
when does the tide turn?
when do we get to the place
where we can say
Yeah, we're on the upswing
Clay Shirky in 2008 wrote:
" We are living in the middle of
the largest increase in expressive capability
in the history of the human race."
I think that's true
except that probably we're at the beginning
and not the middle.
But this increase in expressive capability
and the history of the human race
ought to be the abiding
transforming concern of all education.
Higher Education is the place
where we train people to be able
to take advantage of this to the fullest
and surprise us with things we have not discovered
about what this can mean
but whatever it means
we may disagree about what it means
Look at that!
I believe that that is true
It makes me do what I do
and yet it is as if
day after day
I sa: " I have a bag of gold.
Would you like a bag of gold?"
and people say:
"Where do you find time for bags of gold?"
"Oh, no ..another currency to master."
"Gold, is that sustainable?"
Like: "No, you spend it..."
Well..."What would you spend it on?"
"What would you like to spend it on?"
"I don't have time for your philosophical questions, Gardner".
It's a bag of gold
What part of that do you not understand?
I love this
This is the Cortex A9,
a chip that is in production,
and I'm afraid that the audio here
is not going to be sufficiently loud
so I'll just tell you what Adrian Cockcroft says
but if you really wanna to get the full spooky ride
go to the IT conversations podcast.
Have any of you heard him talk about Millicomputing?
He defines millicomputing as a computer
that consumes less than one watt
and it'll fit in your pocket
and it will not burn your leg
This chip is in production
It will appear in devices probably the next year or so.
It has four graphical processing units
each of which independently can process
a full H.264 high definition stream
and coding, decoding
He talks about the way we're not going to carry
computers in our pockets.
We're going to carry web servers
in our pockets
we're going to walk in to a context
and wirelessly link-up
with the things we want to do in that context.
There's usually where I stop
when I play this for faculty
because the next part is even spookier
in which he talks about the way these milling computers
will allow us to be in constant contact
with a society of avatars and a virtual world
who will be able to,
because of our wearable computing,
to tap us on the shoulder
and have a conversation with us
while we are here in real space as well.
Now to me that can be a real bag of gold
or maybe we don't have time to
amplify our beings that way
I'm not going to say this is going to be easy
or that's not going to have problems
or be fraught or spun a whole new wave of
milling cyber computing crime.
But if it's going to happen
and there are great possibilities it will
why doesn't it make a difference?
why hasn't that made people
stop and say
I guess I could recapture a sense of wonder
under these circumstances
What do we believe?
"Today's technologies and their consequent environments
succeed each other so rapidly
that one environment makes us aware of the next.
Technologies begin to perform the function of art
in making us aware of the psychic
and social consequences of technology...
We are entering the new age of education
that is programmed for discovery
rather than instruction."
We could, especially if we were an English faculty,
wordsmith this
tinker with it
if this were a faculty senate, it would not get out of committee.
Probably we all believe some variety of that
some version of that
or to put it another way from the Renaissance,
which is my favourite place to hang out
in the virtual space in my head
it's like the Music of the Spheres
in Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice
the young Lorenzo woos his sweetheart
with talk of the stars
Is that scalable?
Well, never mind.
"There's not the smallest orb which thou behold'st
But in his motion like an angel sings,
Still quiring to the young-eyed cherubins;
Such harmony is in immortal souls,
But whilst this muddy vesture of decay
Doth grossly close it in, we cannot hear it."
Melvyn Bragg , In Our Time,
in the episode of Music of the Spheres
"This is the music of the spheres
the idea that the stars and planets
as they travel through space
make beautiful music together
The Music of the Spheres
played out of the classical world
to the Medieval period
and into the Renaissance
it affords us a glimpse into minds
for whom the Universe
was full of meaning
of strange correspondences
and grand harmonies
I would like to graduate
a generation of students
who will help ME here
to strange correspondences and grand harmonies
that I have not yet imagined
that's what I'm in it for
But oh well,
how you are going to protect privacy?
This is a time of wonders
Usually the printing press is introduced as an example
of a disruptive technology
on the order of what we're seeing now.
No small disruption
The printing press started wars
overturned religious orthodoxy
The printing press meant that any fool
with a piece of machinery
could say anything
and how would you know?
Well, I think that the disruption is on a bigger scale
I think that the disruption we're witnessing today
is the disruption on the scale
of the development of the written alphabet
of the phonetic alphabet
This was a huge deal
This was a technology invented to communicate
with the Dead
so it's not like a tool
it's a meta tool
it's an alphabet
What will I say with that?
What do you want to say?
I don't know...
just tell me what you want me to write
It's a great book
Marianne Wolf, Proust and the Squid.
She talks about the science of the reading brain.
the fact that learning to read
is something we do deliberately
to re-arrange our minds
We make new connections
among the various perceptual centers in our brains
that are not programmed in there
we seem to have a speech center
as part of our revolved neuro anathomy
but not a reading center
we have to do things that do not happen naturally
but once we do those things
we find...
a bag of gold
Clay Shirky wrote a blog post
that really rocked me back on my heels
back in March, on Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable
did anyone of you see that blog post?
Yeah..he talks about the ways in which newspapers
essentially played Nearer my God to thee in the Titanic
and they thought they could nibble at the edges
because nibbling at the edges
well, you know you don't have to take a big bite
you don't have to worry of indigestion
you don't have to worry about anything
you just take a little nibble
well, newspapers were nibbling at the edges
in the 1990's
they stopped being a viable business model
this is Shirky's argument
his argument is not that journalism will go away
but that the coincidence of journalism and newspapers
was historically conditioned
and can go away historically
but the newspaper folks
like the professors, maybe like the edtech folks
maybe like any of us in the room
tend to believe that we're in the domain
because we're in the best of all possible domains
this is the way it has to be
not so much
and Shirky coined the term
which really scared me to death
"the digital facelift"
for what newspapers try to do
we'll just do what we did before
but we'll put it on the web
but it'll be what we had before
we'll have some hyperlinks
but it'll be what we did before, etc...
"The Digital Facelift"
Can that stand up against
these items of belief?
"As the means of input increase,
so does the need for insight or pattern recognition
your mileage may vary
I think that's true
The school drop-out situation
will get very much worse
because of the frustration
of the student need for participation
in the learning process
which is not a new need
but it's a need
that had to take some pretty distorted forms
during the industrial age
as we tried to figure out scaling
and sustainability
we did the best we could
but if we find that maybe
that's not the way to go forward
change has to happen
but it's not happening yet
instead we're getting the digital facelift
Now, I have to tell you first of all
this is from Brazil,
a film by Terry Gillian,
which I saw for the first time
when it came out
and I saw again it
it's probably ten or so years since I've seen it
but under the intoxicating effect
of the Reverend
I knew I would have to make a pilgrimage to see Brazil again.
and I found that it told the story
of my life today, maybe yours
Here's the thing that I didn't remember
about this scene
She is loving this experience
To us it looks grotesque
to her...well..she's getting off
She has multiple opportunities
to continue to examine
her increasingly grotesque self
in the pursuit of an illusion
and she's deriving intense pleasure from it
because see how it's framed
this is great!
What I'm doing to you is
I stretch your features out of recognition is great
in this digital facelift you look marvelous
You can't see it because of the light
but he's got these clips
he's holding her face back with
this is where she really gets excited
and finally to make sure it stays the way it should
he puts surround wrap around it.
I assure you there are no further problems
that digital facelift.
Problem solved
or perhaps the digital facelift
is like this poor lady in Brazil
who has immense faith in her doctor
who is a maverick
He's an innovator
He doesn't go along with the flow
He has a special chemical process.
Now it's taking a little while
as she is very delicately skinned
so her results are not coming out exactly
the way she had imagined
Notice the lovely seepage
around the bandages
the eye V
the fact that she is now in a wheel chair
and blind apparently
some kind of support for her chin
she's not in very good shape
but she's hanging in
she's a believer
maybe she's got the wrong guru
because eventually this is what happens
with her digital facelift
they have a memorial service for her
it's a relatively gruesome affair
because that's what's happened
in the end
it's just coming apart
it's a nightmare
I'm not saying that the LMS will necessarily
get us to this
I'm just saying
So what do we do instead of having digital facelifts?
I propose three recursive practices
These practices feed on each other
They're what we do in education anyway
but they can amplified
by information and communication technologies.
One is narrating
having the students
having the teachers
that's the real trouble
thinking aloud
willing to tell the story
of the process of the learning
of the investigation
you could call it blogging
Curating
how do you take care of your stuff
not to protect it
not to even make sure you can transcode it
those things are important
but how do you arrange it
for the people who will come to see it?
for yourself as you contemplate it
Now as scholars
we're pretty used to the idea of curation
and this has to do with dissertations
and scholarly articles and so forth
Many students in my opinion come to college
believing they have nothing to curate
and they will generate nothing to curate
during their time in school.
They'll have transactional exchanges
with professors who mark their work
and those pieces of paper get put in a box
I'd like students to think
that they began their life's work
when they come to school
and finally sharing
Now that I have done it
Now that I've arranged it
Now that I've thought about it
I'm going to put it out there
because it may be valuable to someone
because I may find the unmet friend
because as it was said
so memorably by John Todd in his presentation
"Meaning happens when the two people connect"
Very important
Much of the way education is set up
militates against each of these
let alone all of them together
and yet we all know
that one of the great things
about the technologies that we use
these information and communication technologies
is that they not only allow these things
they amplify them, they augment them
they turn them up to eleven
they make that feedback happen
and when I try to explain this to my students
I inevitably go to Jimmy Hendrix
playing the Star Spangled Banner
at Woodstock
and they say: "Why are you showing us this?"
and I say:
Because he knows how to control feedback
He knows how to play feedback
and that's what you need to know
The effects that get unleashed
in this recursive practice
I think are most powerful
on the open web
using Web 2.0 affordances
or whatever the web is going to be
as it goes forward
because the Web is not just a platform
for these things
it is the natural outgrowth of our desire
for these things
That makes the web itself recursive
And students have an intimation of that
you know,
they have a feeling about that
from their own use of social media
but they think that's somehow
I don't know
that couldn't be right
and they get to college and they find
that no, that really isn't right
we have a template for you, young man
but I think their intimations are correct
so what's the answer
I don't have it
however, here's a framework
for thinking about what...
this is what I use when I try to dream
as big as I can
I try to think about
helping students understand cyberinfrastructure
and how to build one for themselves
to be able to be architects of their own digital lives
which will mean as we go forward
that they need to be worrying about
the things we worry about
but productively together
narrating, curating, sharing
This is a definition of cyberinfrastructure
from the American Council of Learned Societies
in their report on cyberinfrastructure
called "Our Cultural Commonwealth"
Cyberinfrastructure is something more specific
than the network itself,
but it is something more general than a tool
or a resource developed for a particular project,
a range of projects, or, even more broadly,
for a particular discipline."
That's the sweet spot
It's not just the network
it's more specific than that
yet it's not so specific
that it's simply the tool you use
for a particular project or a domain
Something like an alphabet
Anybody here play Little Big Planet?
Little Big Planet people raise your hands.
OK, good
Little Big Planet people grab into the little sponge
Little Big Planet is a game done
by a company called Mollecule
for the Sony Playstation 3
So it's commercial
it's proprietary, etc...
That said, Little Big Planet is not the only game
to build authoring tools into the game
but it's one of the most conspicuously successful
at doing this
so when you buy Little Big Planet
you buy the game
and within the game
the tools to make more levels for that game
in other words
you're able to be within that environment
and be both a participant
and a producer if you choose to be
when you make the new levels
you can upload them
to the media Mollecule server
Oh yes,
they're getting great business advantage from this
but look at the way they're framing it.
You upload it to the server
then people can find you by author's name
they can find you by ranking
you can tag them
ingenious, fun, creepy, boring, brilliant, wow
right?
you can favourite the ones you like best
in about a year and a half
one million levels
have been uploaded
to the Little Big Planet server
at Media Mollecule
one million
let's say that the Theodore Sturgeon's Law is true
90%of them are piffle
there are still 100.000
and because my son is very patient with me
as a learner
though I am slow
the bonds of love mean that
he's going to be there for me
he has taken me through
some of these user-generated levels
and you know
they're really diverse
and they're really cool
and they're really interesting
they're examples of an outpouring of creativity
in what James Gee calls "the producerly mode"
in a subdomain of a larger domain
you could call it undergraduate research
you could call it service learning
you could call it situated cognition
you can call it any number of things
it's cool
it's fun
it's work
it involves the whole person
there's gotta be a way
that we can make it happen in education
more consistently than it does
or at least to think about it in these terms
so kids don't lose hope
Here's a Little Big Planet
It's the graphical user interface
called cPannel
for the hosting service
at Bluehost
which is where I've got my stuff
and my stuff is there
I have backups of my stuff
you know, I trust no-one
be a little skeptical
and yet I'm committed
Here are the things I can do with
the graphical user interface
at the level of systems administrator
or someone who plays one
through a GUI
Here are the things that I need to think about
Now look at this
this allows me to be producerly at the level of the server
for my own digital life.
There's a getting started wizard
okay that's fine
I need to know about changing passwords
I know sometimes my students think about
changing languages
that would be really cool, etcetera
email, managing your own email
you can have a thousand, two thousand email boxes in here
your file system
they've got to know about that
these are not terribly difficult things
but they are important
and taken as a system
they become more important
I like my students to have a digital presence
where they can track who comes to see them
it's an important part of the narrating, curating and sharing
and it can all be automated of course
and you've got a choice among several
security - we'd want our students to think about that, right?
but I'd want them to think about it as digital citizens
architects of their own cyberspace
not as people who have to find the website
that tells them what safe computing is all about
at our school
That should go without saying
because they're thinking about this already
They're going to have multiple domains
or they should.
Data?
Data Literacy is vital
Can they have a nodding acquaintance with databases?
Sure
and then the software down here
this is kind of interesting
software and services
one click: which blogging platform would you like?
try out several
groupware, livechat, utilities, content management,
client management
do we have to do all of those?
No
Do they have to read all the books in the library?
No
Do they have to take all the courses in the catalogue?
No
Why do we have more there?
To amplify the possibilities
To give them some room to roam
Some room for discovery
A place to play
I mean, those of you who've heard
either Jim or me or Martha Burgess talk about
The Bluehost Experiment
in Washington
where we essentially let the staff loose in this environment
This is the next step for that
in my Little Big Planet
put the students in this kind of sandbox
let them play, let them innovate, let them discover
what if you give it to 4000 students
and there are only 100 works of staggering genius emerging
oh well, that would be ok
more scripts, e-commerce
marketing, photo galleries
webmails, website builders
a couple of wikis
and you can get in there and install your own
they don't have a one click install for me wiki
which is a regrettable omission but
you can get in there
that's pretty outlandish
when we were South by Southwest
somebody very some high I'd say
at the end of the presentation said:
Are you saying that our students
need to be system administrators?
and I thought about it
and my first impulse was:
Oh No, not at all..that would be extreme
and than I thought twice and said
Yes, actually that is what I want them to be
system administrators
if it is easy enough to do
which the graphical front makes it
and if system is understood
not just as a particular installation
but as a metaphor for their digital lives
they'll have to be system administrators
for their digital lives
what are they going to do when they graduate?
what are they going to do when
they're raising children?
None of this is going to roll back as we move forward
Every book will be digitized
Every journal will be digitized
That's a good thing potentially
but only if people are able to think about this
in this personal way
"When radar was new it was found necessary
to eliminate the balloon system for city protection
that had preceded the radar.
The balloons got in the way of the electric feedback
of the new radar information.
Do you get that?
The advanced defensive capability
was stymied by the old defensive capability
Such may well prove to be the case with much
of our existing school curriculum...
I think that's true
Let's talk about openess a little bit
What does it mean to be open?
When we talk about openess we usually think
to be open to the world
Everyboy can see it
That's where you're going to be exposed to
the most massive network effects
So I like this, obviously
I think a lot of us here do
although there have been
some really good interrogations of the idea
but there are other levels of openness as well
or to put it another way
places that are closed where we can't see
the things are closed
What about being open to each other in a learning community?
What about the teacher to the learner?
and the learners open to each other?
To what extent does the Blackboard discussion forum
make the participants actually open to each other
To what extent are learners
ready to talk about their vulnerabilities to the teacher
and oh, maybe they're not willing to do that
because the teacher is not willing
to talk about his or her vulnerabilities to the learner
Vulnerabilities are fine
That's actually where the learning happens
To know as we are known requires identity markers
this is a non-trivial factor
Any adult that says this is a trivial factor
has forgotten what is was like to decorate a locker
or is denying the fact that they actually agonized
over the choice of the Welcome mat for their front door
These are non-trivial factors
and finally open to ourselves
To what extent do the learning experiences
we co-create or impose
open us up to self-awareness or meta-cognition
The thing about the personal cyberinfrastructure
is that once the students have begun to build it
it can then be the object of
narration, curation and sharing itself
at a meta level
let's get together and talk about
the cyberinfrastructure you built
why did you build it that way?
what does that represent about you as a learner?
or as an architect?
what the one I built?
what if we modularize
and start swapping it among ourselves?
like levels of a game.
where we can rank the efficacy of the various modules
we built on our own and together
then you learn something about yourself
that would be ok
This is a discussion forum in Blackboard
it looks like email
Why does it look like email?
That's a rethorical question.
It's perfectly transactional
It moves data from one point to another
The trouble is that's not a learning community
Where's the decorated locker?
Where's the doodle on the notebook?
Where's the marker of identity?
Well, it's here.
phpbb
one click install
from cPannel
Oh, you can have an avatar
Oh, you can choose a username
Oh you can have a SIG file
a non-trivial marker of identity
it looks nicer
oh yeah, this post was Wednesday January 16th 2008
January 18th 2008 while the class was going on
that forum kept active for about 6 months
after the class was over
Why?
I set it up but I did not choose the templates
for their expressions of themselves
and their identity in that space
there was enough openness
that they could decorate their lockers
some of the forum belonged to them
Well, that was kind of interesting
This thread belonged to them too, BTW
but that's another story
What do we believe?
"The aspiration of our times for
wholeness, empathy and depth of awareness
is a natural adjunct of electric technology...
The mark of our time is its revulsion
against imposed patterns.
We are suddenly eager to have things
and people declare their beings totally.
There is a deep faith to be found
in this new attitude
- a faith that concerns
the ultimate harmony of all being."
Strikes you as Utopian?
Strikes you as over-stated?
Is it the Music of the Spheres?
I think some kind of faith
Something like this underlies education
Unless we think we are just training Pavlov's dogs
We want people
who will find those strange correspondences
and make them audible
to each other and to us
Can a personal cyberinfrastructure do it?
I don't know
I've never got any chance to try that out
I know what happened
when the staff did it at Mary Washington
It was not uniform
and the story that doesn't usually get told
is that it took 2 1/2 years
of kicking, screaming, biting (that's a metaphor)
There was actually some screaming
of people saying:
How many minutes a day
do you want me to blog, Gardner?"
I got that, absolutely
I had to bite my tongue because
I was about to say
You know, I get that questions from my students a lot
but that would've been bad
that would've been very, very bad
but it's the same idea, it's like
Can I turn this into a transaction yet?
Can I make this job into just a job of work?
and you know, beneath all of that
there are all sorts of anxieties
they may be principle resistances
there could be a lot of things
so there was a long way to get there
but when we got there
well, we got there
and there are five more
sent back
who got there too
Perfect? No
Decisively different? Yeah
So is this our default?
Is this critical thinking?
I don't know
We live in a risky, dangerous environment
full of people who are trying to manipulate us
and pick our pockets
That's undeniably true
It is true that people acting in what they will say
will be your best interest.
so hoping that at some point
Stockholm syndrome kicks in
you identify with your capturers and go willingly
enjoying the digital facelift or whatever it is
but this for me can't be the default
and part of why it's so exciting
for me to be at this conference
is that there is another way to think about this
there's another way to think about confidence
Maybe narrating, curating and sharing
breeds confidence
"Western man acquired from the technology of literacy
the power to act without reacting...
Not a bad thing
as the write points out
it's important that the surgeon
not be overwhelmed when performing the surgery
In the electric age
when our central nervous system
is technologically extended to involve us
in the whole of mankind
and to incorporate the whole mankind in us,
(and make that human kind)
we necessarily participate, in depth,
in the consequences of our every action
That's what we all fear,
its what we all long for, I think.
that's somehow even the small things
can be meaningful
Anybody who watches a Twitter stream
in, during and on election,
wants to feel this way
It is no longer possible to adopt the aloof
and dissociated role of the literate Westerner
Overstated? Sure
Extreme? Maybe.
Aloof and dissociated role of the literate professor
Westerner?
Such is the faith in which this book was written
It explores the contours of our own extended beings
and our tecnologies
seeking the principle of intelligibility in each of them.
For me the idea of the personal cyberinfrastructure
is about the search of the principle of intelligibility
in our technologies
What the personal infrastructure would be
is a representation.
A creative representation
of that intelligibility
maybe of that search as well
In the full confidence that it is possible
to win an understanding of these forms
that will bring them into orderly service
I've looked at them anew
accepting very little of the conventional wisdom
concerning them."
I'm glad that a Canadian did that.
Aside from Clay Shirky,
the quotations I read
were from Marshall Mc Luhan
in Understanding Media, 1964.
I don't know what you knew about Marshall Mc Luhan
when you were going through school
what I knew about him was
how he had a cameo in any hall.
I was cheated in my education
Along with some genuinely bizarre things
there were genuinelly prophetic things
in this book
and I think they aligned very well
with some of the sense of urgency
and some of the scope of ambition
that we all feel,
that we all share
at a conference like this
The personal cyberinfrastructure
may not be the only way to learn this alphabet
but I'd like to try sometime.
Jim?
Rather than bore you with any of my details
let's not lose some of this thread to this
does anyone have any questions for Gardner?
Yes, please
So I was wondering
some of the examples of software that you
that's easily installed that you provided
are forums and things like that
if everybody has their own
some of these become more useful in agreggate, right?
so, have you thought about sort of
certain things being sort of you know,
individual elements of a presence in cyber insfrastructure
others aggregating or working across federation
Excellent question
In my dream world the student...
Bryan Alexander is a champion
I do not want your bread right now
but when you are well again, I'd like it
So the idea would be
the student's Baker Club gets together
and they talk about how they're going to organize
and of course something is going to be online
because it needs to be
because of these affordances
One student says:
I could put a phpbb forum
Another student says
Yeah, and actually did you know
there was this add on?
and then as a group they agree
1) it would be better to have one forum
rather than multiple forums
2) they aggregate their knowledge about
what would be the best instance of that
3) they put it together
and by doing that
the lights will go out,
the tables will rise
we will join hands and sing
In doing that
what they will be doing is discussing
a particular scripting affordance on a server
but they will be doing it strategically,
in terms of communication needs
and organizational excellence
Doing something other than on a surface level
That's the one of the way I imagine it , yeah
to a certain degree, yeah
in my experience IT departments
will not have thought in a sophisticated way
about how a blog or a discussion forum differ
rhetorically
or how they may be able to shape
student communication
and that's okay in a way
as long as they don't prescribe the tools
or limit the tools
I have an IT department at bluehost.com
and they're very good at keeping, you know,
things up to date and the backups
they're usually very good at that
and so forth
that's their work
but what they have done is to provide me affordances
that I can explore
so, yeah, I mean I think there is
ideally there would be some interest
in the rhetorical questions in the IT shop
and by building a cyber infrastructure
the students would begin to understand
something of what goes on mechanically as well
there would be a greater opportunity for conversation
you know, I think it would be ok
if the students made something that broke
They would learn from that, I think
I also think that
building on what Gardner said
as a response to your question
that the actual cyber infrastructure
as posed by an individual, a domain and a space
allows IT departments
to re-imagine this question
of aggregating, syndicating information
as it is happening
around space
so it does not mean like
the IT department disappears, or somehow the enemy
but it allows them to re-imagine this notion of flow
and this kind of property of electricity
that McLuhan is talking about so beautifully
and if we are talking about electricity and flow
we're talking about a new property
by which we can start to imagine space
through the students having their own
and so IT departments
should be as much excited about
the possibilities for this
rather than ....ing an age old against them
it's not, I mean
it's a kind of matter of us working together
to re-imagine the space
and I think that's why the immediate call back to that
doesn't capture, I think
what that model sets up
as a notion and a mode of aggregation
to kind of build into the syndication
You have your own cyber infrastructure
and then you re-imagine it
and then IT department think about
what that means
right, and
okay..how much time do we have?
okay
Great talk. I'm reminded of Larry Cuban's book
Teachers and Machines
which sort of talks about resistance
that the educational system has
to introductions of technology
and changing actual educational practice
wondering if you might comment on
your thoughts about how
the open educational resources movement
might make a difference
in overcoming that structural resistance
and well, this kind of loops into the IT question as well
it's very easy to paint faculty as stodgy
faculty as vilains
and sometimes it's true
and you know it's easy to say that IT is
the enemy because they can't think outside the box
sometimes it's true, you know
but there are plenty of people in both domains
who, if they are able to see compelling examples
of fresh thinking
will say wow..that's cool
I'd like to do that
I think that would have addressed
what I was thinking about with my students
just last semester
that would have gotten me past this point
where I wasn't able to get them
to read carefully
before they come to class
but that
and this is one of the great sorrows for me
as a faculty member
with regard to Learning Management Systems
aside from all the other sorrows
I can't see what my colleagues are doing
and I mean seeing it on the Web
so I can look at it carefully
and speak to them intelligently about it
Why did you design it that way?
What did you learn from it?
And I think the same thing is true for IT folks
when they go to..I've been to some IT conferences
and , you know, a lot of times
what they are hearing about
are anecdotes of spectacular catastrophes
or whatever
but you're not able to actually...
and there may be some good reasons for this
to some extent
but they're not able to see
dazzling examples of innovation
in a very easy and accessible way
so I think that open educational resources
is a lot more than about exposing content
it's about exposing these compelling examples
of other ways to do it
it's like being able to see multiple
performances of Shakespeare
Oh..never thought of reading the line that way
so the play transforms
I don't know if that answers your question
but, yeah...ok
So Gardner, is it too late for them to become curators
once they get into Higher Education
So, you know, cPannel for me
I could do that..I'm an IT guy
I think I think critically about affordances
but at the same time
is it too late?
I mean..my daughter's eight
she has a blog, domain of her own
shouldn't be starting there?
we get them for four years here, right?
maybe seven
how do we drop down?
somebody said it's too late...too late
I mean I don't know what that idea
of what too late means
I mean we're always in midias res with this stuff
we're always coming into it and imagining it
and Gardner, to refine Gardner,
in that whole of the IT is like
so many people that I have talked about it
and inspired back are right here at UBC
Andrew who is coming from an IT perspective
was just blowing my mind again and again
and Scott Mc Millan, I mean
These are people who are in that space
who are seeing these examples
and you're kind of rip and remixing it
from this space to kind of think about
wow, we can actually play with these modes
and re-imagine them
and I think, wouldn't students also experience that?
at any given point in that kind of narrative?
excuse me, how much further we would be pushed, right
in the academy, if our students were coming to us
thinking critically about it?
Yeah, that's right
so there are a couple of things I want to say
in response to that
One is that there is
a developmental aspect in education,
which is fine with me
What it means is that
at every point along the learning continuum
it will be advantageous for
a mentor, a guide, an expert, a teacher
to be there to coach the student
to their zone of proximal development
that's fine
another way to say that is
that I do not believe that students will make
automatically on their own
to their own innate drive for self-improvement
all the best, you know, choices
I think there is a role for teaching
Now, there's also the developmental capacity
of the human mind, you know
kids at a certain age are able to distinguish
like varying levels of volume
and different sizes of containers
and at an earlier age, they're not able to
so something actually happens in the brain
that makes that next thing kick in
ahm, so there's always going to be
it seems to me
some way in which
the particular developmental moment
will impose certain kinds of constraints
That said and if anybody knows about
Jerome Bruner's idea of the spiral curriculum
that's where it comes from
there's an authentic version of any concept
that can be taught to any child
who can read and write
you pitch it to the appropriate level of development
and you keep coming back to it
spiralling upward and upward and upward
until that magic hand off moment
which I think often happens and should happen
in the upper grades of high school
if it doesn't happen till college
it's still not too late
it's part of the great jolt I got when I got to college
I felt like they had handed the spiral to me
it's like okay - we've brought you around
we've brought you around, we've brought you around
it's your spiral now, you know,
keep finding the level of the concept
that gets you to the next spot
Be your own coach to your own zone
of proximal development
and this is something I left out
and I should put before you before we're done
This won't work until it's built into the curriculum
I don't want you to think that what I'm proposing
is that kids just get assigned these web spaces
and that's it and that they will magically
through tinkering come up with good stuff
This would be an amazing meeting ground
for digital experts in the discipline
librarians, advisors, student life people, edtech folks
instructional designers
Can you imagine?
My feeling is students would come in
and their whole first year experience
would be digital fluency
by means of building out
this personal cyber infrastructure
the first iteration of it
then at the end of your first year
let's have a ceremony
let's have a party
pick the domain that's going to be your domain
for the next three years
and make a decision there
it's all coming of age
it's an occasion
you have to have these rites of passage
but for that whole first year
they're thinking about narrating, curating and sharing
for the rest of their lives as learners
and I think it could be pretty neat
you know, a pretty interesting thing to do
I want to be on that team
that works with students
to say, hey..you're about to do work
that you ought to be able to care about
for the rest of your life
if you haven't done it already
and, I, to get back to your original question
one of the most gifted students that I've run across
in my career is a fellow
I just taught at Baylor last spring
he's got his own YouTube channel
you know, Stop Motion Lego Animation
its most popular stuff gets 40 - 50.000 views
that's been going on since he was 13 or 14
so yeah, what if that was baked into the curriculum?
in high school?
then they would push us, absolutely
Yeah, ok thanks