Suspect Metaphor

I can’t help thinking that Camille Utterback’s Untitled 5 has a lot to do with my thinking about work, performance, and participatory learning. Sparked by a co-reading of the essay “Operating Text and Transcending Machine: Toward an Interdisciplinary Taxonomy of Media Works” by Kenny Chow in a recent issue of Leonardo and the essays in Joi Ito’s Freesouls , I stumbled upon Utterback through Text Rain, and was hooked by the visualization of collaboration to create dynamic and unique moments of art. Where “Untitled 5″ maintains persistent traces of ‘users’ on a constantly evolving screen, it layers subsequent exhibit visitors’ experiences into a visual representation, thereby emphasizing the collaborative nature of the art.

It’s more than the collaborative nature of the works - or, what I’m really interested in here - work (as labor) - the generative emphasis of developing texts or works of art (or works of art made of text as in Text Rain) is critical with regard to their sustained cultural / social currency. Pattern Language defines generative theory as a means “to generate a living world, with buildings, streets, rooms, neighborhoods that we can inhabit with hope.” Generative theory emphasizes development from within - and as I think about the place of experience / work / practice within both scholarship and learning experiences, some cloud of an idea is beginning to emerge…the development of narrative through work / practice in collaborative environments that follows an integrative, generative model can offer a more authentic learning opportunity for both students and teachers.

Not quite in the back of my mind (as it is still winter break) as I write this is my work with two college students who are spending a semester interviewing general store owners in Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom with an eye toward the stores’ roles in local and regional food networks. To my mind, the methodology employed by both me and the students - a semester of theory and ethics followed by another of field-work, interviewing, and survey analysis, all of which will be reintegrated into the participating communities - is a reasonable model for scaffolding and developing an authentic and generative community narrative in which the work of student fieldwork parallels the work of local informants and lends social currency to ‘academic’ scholarship.

I’m very much looking forward to seeing this project come to fruition and sow the seeds for continuing exploration with generative models of authentic learning to bridge the theory and practice of work.

The dialogue of questions, stories, and memory make a narrative - entwining in gyres of verse - the words of work within the work of words.

SAWMILL
from Greg Joly’s Hand Labor

When pitching boards
sometimes a knot
breaks free
we hold these out
for Joel who first
held one
clear against
the late spring
sun to show us
how the rosin-thick
edge blazed
a translucent corona
ravenous to flare
up on coals knocked
bright in the predawn cold

In one of my many jobs, I shepherd the College’s faculty advising program, and, as an advisor of a half-dozen students myself, I’ve certainly noticed a shift in our communication with students - both before, during, and after their enrollment. What was only a year or two ago a phone/email interchange has very noticably changed to Facebook-centered communication. Stories among colleagues both here and elsewhere show FB as a significant advising tool - particularly with respect to relaying information or intervening in a time-sensitive manner.

Sites like Recruiting Millennials have plenty of evidence to support assertions that using IM and web chat (particularly embedded in the host institutions website) in addition to content-rich blogs is paramount when it comes to reaching new and prospective students.The near-time or real-time immediacy of interaction is certainly more engaging than waiting hours for a response to an email or voicemail.

What I find interesting is not the shift from one app to another, but rather the differences in content between more traditional emails and shorter IMs or FB status, comment, or chat exchanges. The narrative content on a “friend’s” FB profile is far more diffuse than a pointed on-topic email or even a 140 character Twitter post, and often it’s only through the aggregate of status and associated comment threads, updated profile photo, wall conversations, and other commentaries in addition to a direct message or IM that a more complete picutre of student begins to emerge.

On Search Engine Watch, Erik Qualman writes, “People are no longer exchanging e-mails; they’re exchanging social media information.”

The job of the faculty advisor, then, is not to seek a single, unified narrative and become aware of shifts in tone, direction, or content on a social media site over time. In a more comprehensive view, FB linked to a personal blog and a consistently updated Twitter feed can provide a rich store of highly individualized social media information that proactive academic advisors cannot afford to ignore.

A self-professed academic (as an Academic Dean and humanities faculty member at a four-year college, I would be hard pressed to shirk the appellation anyway), my principal mode of interaction with the rest of the academic world (outside of conferences and face-to-face meetings) is through writing: articles, essays, book reviews, blurbs, comments on student work, blog posts, emails, wikis, Writeboards, IMs, twitter posts, forums, and various other media.

Although the study of text networks is nothing new, and communication media are always evolving, I was struck today by the way that “news” is shared via listservs and via twitter, and wondered if (1) there is a shift underway from one tool to the other or (2) if academics (wordy, hard to decipher ones like myself) are wedded to listservs as a practical tool for disseminating information.

3 Geeks and a Law Blog recently ran a post about the Twitter and email lists, concluding that there are certainly merits to both, but that Twitter’s structure as a social network (and indeed its limit of 140 characters) is potentially more conducive to at least beginning discussion that can continue elsewhere.

So, although it seems clear that neither can fulfill all the goals of constructive, generative debate, some combination of Twitter, forums, short-duration collaboration sites like Google Docs or Writeboard.

Maybe starting here makes sense: “American corporations spend $3.1 billion annually on remedial writing for their employees–and this expense doesn’t include the cost of law suits caused by badly written emails” (David Marshall, “A Dean’s Perspective,” MLA Profession 2008).

Or maybe here: “Writers envy visual artists their muscular activity. Writers sit at desks and die early.” (Donald Hall, Life Work)

Or again: “It is not easy to write in a journal what interests us at any time, because to write it is not what interests us” (H.D. Thoreau, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers)

Or, even better still, Hall again: “Finding a meter, one abandons oneself to the swing of it; one surrenders oneself to the guidance of object and task, where worker and work are one: There is something ecstatic about mowing with a scythe.” (Life Work)

So this week, the last of our fall semester, and the last of my son Orion’s third year, although also the last for a sizable handful of other deadlines, yields at least a few minutes to reflect on the work of writing and teaching -  a balance by which I make my living.

I concluded the last meeting of my fall class, “Region, Heritage, and the Politics of Platial Identity” (Only in a special topics course could such a title pass muster), with a wide ranging discussion of several weeks’ worth of theorizing about place, regional and cultural identity, and human relationships with the non-human world. As we distilled the work of writers like Kent Ryden, Doug Powell, Doreen Massey, Tim Cresswell, and others and emerged with - perhaps not a clearer - but more comprehensive - scaffold for the *work* of cultural studies. The fieldwork my students continue to be engaged in - looking at the historical and contemporary roles of general stores in local and regional food networks in Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom - is exciting to me exactly because of what it represents as an interweaving of scholarship and experience and of academe and community.

To my mind, what Donald Hall suggests in his meditation on the work that writing can be - and often is, as he describes writing 600 drafts of one poem over two decades - is that despite the writers’ occasional jealous gaze at the visual artist,  writing and work cannot be separated. Particularly striking is Hall’s recurring metaphorical nod to the actuality of farm work like hand mowing with a scythe.

As I look ahead to next year’s classes (all four of them!) and next summer’s Rural Heritage Institute, I’m realizing that I would not trade these obligations for anything. The ability, as I said to my students today, to teach the application of humanities from within the framework of an experiential liberal arts curriculum makes the teaching something I truly look forward to.

Having had a couple of days to reflect on the Campus Technology 2008 (#camptech08) conference last week, I’m seeing some threads resonate through my work preparing for the coming academic year. One of the themes I’ve taken from CT08 is the persistent, living eportfolio. Whether it was  Trent Batson talking about the utility of eportfolios for experiential learning or Gary Brown discussing “Worldware and New Person Learning Environments (PLE),” the sessions were inspirational to my own tasks of managing and developing more persistent learning experiences for our own students that are integrated with embedded formative assessment tools.

Trent pointed out that “In a knowledge economy, the whole world is a learning space,” which means that learning events can be messy, diverse, and difficult to place in a traditional framework for assessment. Gary Brown’s concept of worldware was similar in its emphasis on student experience beyond the institution and eportfolios of student work that both connect to the world beyond college and can persist as archives or student artifacts beyond matriculation.

A living, dynamic eportfolio draws on the lifestreaming tools over which many of our students demonstrate complete mastery when they walk through our doors, and which they are often asked to set aside in favor of institution-specific education software. The challenge might then be to develop a framework into which students and faculty could embed existing web 2.0 content from blogs, wikis, and other collaborative and dialogic applications to underscore the connections between social learning dialogue outside the classroom and course content and course-centered discussions. Such a media-rich eportfolio environment would ideally persist (as much as digital media can persist in any single form or application) for student use after graduation. The persistent link to the institution would also serve to emphasize college’s life long learning mission.

Thanks to all who offered excellent feedback for our concept poster at Campus Technology 2008 in Boston today. Throughout the day’s sessions - from a variety of voices (Helen Barrett , Trent Batson , John C. Ittelson , Eddie Maloney) exploring NextGen ePortfolios to Bethany Brovard’s Tech-Enhanced Strategies for Engaging Learners - and as I I have been thinking about how the other panels (naturally) resonated with the concepts limned in our own session. Among the marginalia in my notebook are notes I still need to synthesize, but among them is the suggestion to engage learners at a range of levels in the process of moving between experience, reflection, and synthesis. Doing this can (1) create a series of nested text/photo/video reflections that subsequently engage in a wider and wider dialogue with classmates, the campus community, and beyond; (2) the archival possibilities of pooling all learners’ reflections, aggregating them for class and community use, and embedding them in a lifelong learning eportfolio model would empower not only the students, but also faculty to modify curriculum based on very short feedback loops and engage in meaningful portfolio-based assessment.

More to come…

A further refined and/or complicated version of the 7.22.08 post, “From Nodes of Engagement to Community Narrative” can be found here:

Nodes of Engagement

Selected thematic nodes from a poster presentation for next week’s Campus Technology Conference in Boston.

N1: Community

A work-service-learning college such as Sterling College in northern Vermont is a learning community in which students and faculty engage in meaningful experiences each day as part of an integrative environmental liberal arts curriculum.

The experiential scholarship that undergirds the College’s curriculum enables countless moments of engagement between student, faculty, and place, but it is only with effective reflection that these moments coalesce and find their way into the larger dialogues and stories that make up the fabric of our community.

We are currently beginning to explore how technology can help to facilitate reflection on experience to both create a community timeline of layered narratives and help to support learning experiences campus-wide by sharing these boundary objects - or boundary events - and extending discourse across the College to support our integrative curricular model. The resultant archival wear can contribute to metadata that, itself, becomes the community story.

From nodes of engagement to community narrative.

N3: Hyperreflection and Storytelling

“Reflection from the midst.” Maurice Merleau-Ponty

Tools can complement real experience. Reflection is a critical aspect of experience as learning; however, technology can aid in the creation of boundary events during experience to empower later reflection. If we grant that reflection is itself a form of experience (Valera, Thompson, Rosch (1993)), then the reflective exercise becomes a graduated event, mirroring a process writing curriculum, from field observation and description to narrative and synthesis. Hyperreflection can help generate individual narratives of experience that can coalesce and create a larger community story.

“The real Logos,” asserts David Abram “is Eco-Logos.” Abram explores Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s ideas, expressed in The Phenomenology of Perception and elsewhere, about the dialogic nature of the body and the world: “language is everything, since it is the voice of no one, since it is the voice of the things, the waves, the forests” (Maurice Merleau-Ponty). Language, then, intervenes in the spaces between the body and the world - perhaps separating us from the Real.

N4: Windows on the Real

“What is crucial for us here is the place from which this real erupts: the very borderline separating the outside from the inside, materialized in this case by the windowpane” (Slavoj Žižek, Looking Awry, 1995)

Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life: De Certeau’s suggestion that individuals’ “trajectories form unforeseeable sentences, partly unreadable paths across a space” - although he is writing particularly about consumer culture - resonates with David Abram’s premise that language can be far more sensuous and experiential than our cultural scaffolding of mere graphemes enables us to be. Both de Certeau and Abram point both to the physicality of the Real and the challenges of representation. if language in essence gets in the way of effective reflection on individual or community experiences, what are the possible solutions?

N5: Participation

If the work/learning community depends upon learning opportunities, facilitation, experience, and effective reflective practices, it can be aligned with Tim O’Reilly’s definition of what he calls a Participatory Architecture, which points to “systems that are designed for user contribution.” Whether explicitly or not, working communities both create and are created by the architectures within which they function. Thus, the spaces working communities inhabit simultaneously define and are defined by the place and the work itself. As Tim Cresswell writes, place is “something producing and produced by ideology” and “meanings of place are produced through practice.”

N6: Pedagogy and Reflection

…In the high-touch environment of an experiential work/learning curriculum, experience becomes part of the learning experience only through reflection. High-tech tools that support such reflection can enhance reflective practice by creating a pace layered archive of experience from field notes, photos, and video streams that pool in collaborative archives and workspaces, which can then be tapped for continued co-creative learning through more refined and reflective applications such as weblogs, wikis, and pooled again by feed aggregation tools for summary and synthesis.

N7: Environment

The ecosystem has become as much a metaphor for collaborative technologies as it presents a framework within which to contemplate its development; however, as much as ecology may be an apt metaphor for digital community - in its dynamic development and organic integration of ideas in (often serendipitous) boundary objects, there continues to be a tension between the ubiquity of software and the reality of experience, a tension which is ignored by many.

Self, society, and environment always inhabit the same space - thus creating a layered topography of individuals and their context.

If knowing is defined as being “constructed through the engagement between bodies and machines within the world…this knowledge can be arrived at through a range of methodologies and voices” (Susan Kozel), how do we engage the palpable existence of the world we are trying to “save” without knowing it?

Returning to work (and web) from a 2-week hiatus, I nonetheless found myself steeped in the language and ideas of communication, collaboration, learning, and place. In particular, I have been mining the boundary moments (a term I find more dynamic than Peter Morville’s “boundary object”) between Susan Kozel’s Closer, Morville’s Ambient Findability, Tim Cresswell’s In Place/Out of Place: Geography, Ideology, and Transgression, and a host of linked works from Slavoj Zizek to David Abram to Maurice Merleau Ponty and Yi Fu Tuan.

Ideational Consilience comes to mind.

So does confusion.

Somewhere in this intersection of phenomenology, geography, ecology, and technology is a developing relationship between individual, experience, community, and place as mediated by the practice of physical work in the world and scaffolded by a collaborative network. Although I am beginning to question the diffuse definition of the term - social learning nonetheless can support the development of work/learning communities by building learning spaces that engage learners in the development of boundary events that are as close to the Real experience as possible. That is, one thing that portable collaborative software can do is diminish the physical and temporal gap between the Real experience of work in communities and the act of reflection (Kozel’s hyperreflection, or Merleau-Ponty’s meta- “reflection from the midst”), and, as I have commented at Learning is Change, the strength of digitally-enabled collaborative moments … is in their ability to prompt, archive, and, most importantly, perhaps, push reflection of experience beyond the immediate and connect beyond the discrete learning event.

Etienne Wenger’s notion of communities of practice, paired here with Tim O’Reilly’s architecture of participation, forges a path that is helpful for my thinking about the work-community-experience-technology nexus. More on this as this juggernaut of a thought process moves forward.

A touchstone from Henry David Thoreau’s A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849):

Can there be any greater reproach than an idle learning? Learn to split wood, at least. The necessity of labor and conversation with many men and things to the scholar is rarely well remembered; steady labor -with the hands, which engrosses the attention also, is unquestionably the best method of removing palaver and sentimentality out of one’s style, both of speaking and writing. If he has worked hard from morning till night, though he may have grieved that he could not be watching the train of his thoughts during that time, yet the few hasty lines which at evening record his day’s experience will be more musical and true than his freest but idle fancy could have furnished. Surely the writer is to address a world of laborers, and such therefore must be his own discipline. He will not idly dance at his work who has wood to cut and cord before nightfall in the short days of winter; but every stroke will be husbanded, and ring soberly through the wood; and so will the strokes of that scholar’s pen, which at evening record the story of the day, ring soberly, yet cheerily, on the ear of the reader, long after the echoes of his axe have died away. The scholar may be sure that he writes the tougher truth for the calluses on his palms. They give firmness to the sentence. Indeed, the mind never makes a great and successful effort, without a corresponding energy of the body.

A sentence should read as if its author, had he held a plough instead of a pen, could have drawn a furrow deep and straight to the end.

I began our final faculty meeting of the year with this passage from the “Sunday” chapter of Thoreau’s first book-length publication principally to underscore what we are already do by bridging work and learning in an experiential academic model - but also as a way to focus my own recent thinking about experiential learning in light of web 2.0 technologies. As worn as Thoreau may be among aphorism seekers, his playfully “labored sentences” here also seem an apt approach to a social learning curriculum.

Stumbling through tweets and blogs today as part of my morning work, I found myself reading a Wikipedia discussion about the definition of EduPunk, which is defined as “an ideology referring to educators and education strategies with a do it yourself (DIY) spirit.” The counter-cultural explicit in the term itself makes a discussion about whether the entry conforms to Wikipedia standards fascinating - thanks to David Warlick for both starting the WP page and pointing this out. Equally interesting are the term’s rapid dissemination and traditional media embrace.

Parallel to a comment of my own, Jim Groom writes, “Technology may provide new ways of delivering and accessing … information, and mark the basis of many a medium, but the idea of a community and its culture is what makes any technology meaningful and relevant.” This summary provides a kernel for recognizing the engagement, collaboration, and experience that web 2.0 technologies purport to provide are only (?) metaphors for the learning/teaching in which many of us are already engaged. Getting one’s hands dirty in the performance of literal, actual, meaningful work can be the scaffold for community, collaboration, and engagement that technology can potentially help facilitate. It is this very interface of ‘high touch’ engagement with students in experiential learning and the ‘high tech’ of collaborative technologies that has been challenging my thinking about technology lately - how to be sure that effective tech supports rather than replaces the meaning of experience.