New Media Faculty Development Seminar, Fall 2010

I have thoroughly enjoyed the seminar this semester!  Not only did I enjoy the readings and discussions, but I loved getting to know more of the Baylor family–oh yeah, and the Kindle was cool too.  While it has been a CRAZY semester for me, I am so glad I was able to participate this semester, and I would highly recommend this to other folks–although, without Gardner as the fearless leader, I’m not sure it would be the same.  Thank you Gardner for making this such a successful learning environment!

I wanted to give you all a follow-up on my health.  We have received an early Christmas gift–the latest tests show me to be cancer-free!  I will continue to be monitored, but for now, my treatments are over–hallelujah!  Thank you all for your love, prayers, and support this semester!  Times like these reveal just how fortunate I am to work in a caring community such as Baylor.

I have been wrapped in the posts of the final week of the seminar and caught under their spell.  They are a wonderful set of comments about our experience. As their spell loosens its grip there is one aspect of them I can’t agree with.  The sense of a summing up, of an ending,  Now that we have finished the weekly seminar meetings I feel, in a bit of Scott McCloudian reflection, that we have lost our skin.  There is no when or where for us now but there still is an us, as long as we continue on the web…in the blogosphere …as twitterati.  Before it was easy to ‘draw a panel’ around our meetings.  Not so any more. Just maybe now it can be even more interesting – at least fun to think about.  As we, hopefully, grow in our use of the new media in ways that are determined by us and our lives, professionally and as creative individuals,  I hope  we still return here to share our experiences.  Let’s face it there is no one else in my world I can tell I had an Englebartian moment and expect any sort of understanding.

Not surprisingly Gardner has provided us both a charge…You must change your life …and a path (the further reading at the end of the syllabus i.e. Tim Berners-Lee, “The World Wide Web”)

I have read the World Wide Web (WWW) and invite others to do the same.  My first impressions can be summarized in four observations.  First it is interesting given the changes in administration at Baylor that the rapid access the WWW provided to the Starr report was listed as an early major success of the WWW.  Second, it is always nice to acknowledge that physicists were first  Third, WWW was not the best technology .  At the ACM Hypertext conference in 1991 the author’s paper was rejected, relegating it to a poster presentation due apparently to the rudimentary use of hypertext compared to other hypertext ‘constructs’ presented.  It seems to be a repeated theme in the readings that the ideal and the practical aren’t in sync.  Timing seems to be everything.  Finally the terminal mentioned in the appendix puts this last comment into perspective.  Have you ever seen a VT-100 terminal!?!

Trying to use one of these to implement an advanced HTML system would be like putting stone tablets through a printing press.

Now for contemplating the Web, I believe in blogging but when something more visceral is possible I can’t resist.  There is a way to ‘surf’ the web.  If you have done this I hope you agree it makes you appreciate the complexity of the web. If you haven’t please give it a try. Go to the visualtrace website and type in your favorite website into the remote address box and click trace (proxy trace is my favorite) and hold on.  Note: DON’T end your address with a ‘/’

For example

‘www.google.com’ is good

‘www.google.com/’ is bad

If nothing else see what the web must do so you can check out the menu at the Pizza Hut in Moscow

http://www.pizza-hut.ru

or maybe the best museum in Florence Italy

http://brunelleschi.imss.fi.it

Visual trace is not the only or the best way to do this but it is easy and free (not the best but…… Hmmm where have I heard that before)

Share your surfing and maybe even suggest what essay in The New Media Reader you would like for us to read.

Right now, I’m going to a museum in Florence

‘Ciao’

That’s the stark dictum that closes this very beautiful lyric by the 19th-century German poet Rilke. It’s a poem worth reading:

We cannot know his legendary head
with eyes like ripening fruit. And yet his torso
is still suffused with brilliance from inside,
like a lamp, in which his gaze, now turned to low,

gleams in all its power. Otherwise
the curved breast could not dazzle you so, nor could
a smile run through the placid hips and thighs
to that dark center where procreation flared.

Otherwise this stone would seem defaced
beneath the translucent cascade of the shoulders
and would not glisten like a wild beast's fur:

would not, from all the borders of itself,
burst like a star: for here there is no place
that does not see you. You must change your life.

I love everything about that poem, particularly in this translation. The lyric manages to be awestruck, roguish, erotic, stern, and breathtakingly imperative all at once. It represents a very complex frame of mind indeed. And the greatest complexity comes at the end, with that command that is so direct and at the same time so dense with meaning. Is it a conclusion? A rueful or resigned admission? A command? Why does the inclusive “we” quickly morph to “you,” allowing the poet to address an unseen companion so very urgently?

Rather than get all lit-crit on you, dear reader, I want to say that the conceptual framework in this poem is one of augmenting human intellect, just as surely as Doug Engelbart’s vision for interactive computing was and is. When we are faced with the shared experience of beauty and meaning, or at least the potential for these things, we understand that we are challenged to be answerable to that experience, and to create within it those things we will in turn share with our fellow human beings. Not to put to fine a point upon it: I’m talking about bootstrapping, recursion, feedback and feedforward loops, symbols and metaphors and carefully noted observations and measurements, an integrated domain.

But to get there, even to recognize the “there” that we want to get to, we have to alter our conceptual frameworks. We have to change our lives. The change comes, not in response to coercion or lemming-like marches to the superdrumming of consumer culture, but in response to an unmistakable encounter with beauty, meaning, life. A conceptual framework that recognizes the augmentation inherent in learning, narrating, curating, sharing. An integrated domain.

I did my deepest dive ever into Engelbart’s conceptual framework just a few weeks ago, when at Brandeis University I led a group of librarians, faculty, and edtech folk in an Engelbartian analysis of a live performance by Jimi Hendrix of “Red House.” Nine minutes long, and I played it all. I had the folks organize themselves into five small groups and gave them all the same charge, though I didn’t tell them what was coming. I expected to get bafflement, resistance, incredulity, and maybe a few brave imaginations who’d at least try to engage with my deeply strange and ambitious idea. What happened instead took *my* breath away. Every single group rose beautifully to the challenge, teaching me things about that performance I’d never thought of before, with each group building on the preceding groups’ work, on the fly, and with a depth of commitment and beauty of expression that nearly brought me to tears more than once.

It’s all in the frame of mind, the invisible “largest organ” that Scott McCloud memorably compares to our skin in the chapter “Time Frames” from his Understanding Comics. When the conceptual framework is in place–and the framework is both an integrated domain and a platform for bootstrapping and augmentation–almost everything is possible. When the conceptual framework isn’t there, the deepest engagement forever eludes us. Worst of all, we never get to the deepest understanding of all, the one that brings us to the awe Rilke describes and Sherry delightfully imagines here.

Engelbart’s essay ends with these words, words that sadly are not included in The New Media Reader:

This is an open plea to researchers and to those who ultimately motivate, finance, or direct them, to turn serious attention toward the possibility of evolving a dynamic discipline that can treat the problem of improving intellectual effectiveness in a total sense. This discipline should aim at producing a continuous cycle of improvements–increased understanding of the problem, improved means for developing new augmentation systems, and improved augmentation systems that can serve the world’s problem solvers in general and this discipline’s workers in particular. After all, we spend great sums for disciplines aimed at understanding and harnessing nuclear power. Why not consider developing a discipline aimed at understanding and harnessing “neural power?” In the long run, the power of the human intellect is really much the more important of the two.

In many respects, Engelbart’s plea echoes through all the readings we’ve done this semester. It echoes in my own open plea for my fellow educators, faculty and staff and students alike, to embrace the challenge of making real school into that “dynamic discipline that can treat the problem of improving intellectual effectiveness in a total sense.” School should be the place where bootstrapping is at its finest, where conceptual frameworks for augmenting human intellect are explored and co-created by staff and students and teachers alike, where an integrated domain is constantly imagined, experienced, and invented anew. The astonishing, troubling, and inspiring power of interactive computing can make that possible, if we bring our whole new minds to the task, and if we have the honesty and courage to engage with the conceptual frameworks interactive computing represents and can, in turn, make newly possible. Alex Reid says it succinctly and eloquently:

Simply put, you cannot keep your non-digital notion of what it means to be an academic and become digital. It is a more fundamental transition than that. It means inhabiting a new academic space with new behaviors and expectations. Just like we all learned in graduate school what it meant to be non-digital academics, one must now learn those ethics anew.

Lance makes the same point from a different angle:

I leave this seminar being really excited about the future–what it holds for us as educators and parents, the possibilities for our children to live richer lives as a result of New Media…. As I think about all this, my minds goes back to Louis Armstrong’s “What a Wonderful World,” the part that says,

I hear babies crying, I watch them grow
They’ll learn much more than I’ll never know
And I think to myself what a wonderful world
Yes I think to myself what a wonderful world.

And then I think about my own children, and realize that this is what the New Media will make possible.

Or at least, what it can make possible, if we see that we must change our lives. Parenting makes that imperative very vivid. Perhaps the opportunity to bring a new academy into being can do this for us as well. Perhaps if we stop trying to tweak our tired industrial schooling processes, and instead change our conceptual framework to imagine a newly integrated domain in which we actually do co-create that augmentation we claim we want, the augmentation so many of these thinkers and dreamers invented computers to empower, we can keep our eyes on that wonderful world, not as techno-utopians, but as fellow laborers in the vineyard (to choose an old metaphor), fellow new medianauts struck with wonder at the possibilities this new language of interactive computing reveals.

I’ve never been much of a comic reader. The farthest I ever got was occasionally reading a couple of the Sunday comics from the Chicago Tribune when I was growing up, and of course I’m now an XKCD fanatic, but I’ve never bought a comic book or read a graphic novel (although I’ve been considering trying Watchmen – thoughts?). So I found it interesting to read McCloud’s comic about time frames in comics and realize that I totally knew what he was talking about, even when I considered myself unfamiliar with the medium.

This has happened to me time and time again throughout this seminar – I say, “oh, I’m really not a gamer,” but my definition of “gaming” didn’t include things like solitaire, Snood (the bane of my undergraduate study habits), or the computer games I grew up playing. Here again, I thought “oh, this is totally outside my realm of experience,” but again, I realized that Sunday comics and XKCD certainly “count” at least enough that I can enter into conversation about it.

I think that’s one of the biggest lessons I’ve learned this semester – I should stop shying away from topics that I feel like I know nothing about. I still always say that I’m really technologically illiterate, but here I am on my Wordpress blog, linking to things, embedding pictures, and notifying friends via facebook and twitter when there’s a new post up.

Anyway, back to the reading – I was again blown away by the simplicity of the debate that was presented (how time & motion are represented in comic books). He presented it in a way (a fun, engaging comic itself) that made me both very interested in the conclusions and a little sheepish that I hadn’t ever given any of this a second thought – it seems such an obvious and interesting thing to talk about.

I find myself trying to consider ways that this relates to storytelling in general (and yes, even storytelling in science – it happens) and it makes me want to make an entirely comic-based science book. Can you imagine how awesome that would be? Considering how easily (almost subconsciously) I flew through the pages of this reading, it seems like it could be an awesome format for teaching science (you could even use “zip ribbons” to show the movement of ions in and out of a neuron during an action potential!). Biological processes in particular are usually rooted in both time and space, just like the components of a comic book, and thus it seems a perfect medium for increasing interest and clarity!

Now all I need is some funding. Oh, and artistic ability.

Here’s a favorite of mine from XKCD. It’s funny because it’s true.

These are my rambling thoughts on a few of readings from over the past month.

First of all, after reading Illich, I was delighted to learn that my profession survives in his vision of a deschooled society:

The professional personnel needed for this network would be much more like custodians, museum guides, or reference librarians than like teachers.

As a librarian, I have heard every verse, chorus and variation of the “why do we need libraries when we have Google” song, but I believe that that protest has it exactly opposite: it’s the libraries (and librarians) that are exactly what’s needed in this information/media rich culture, and Illich sees this (after all “Reference Services” shows up twice in his list of approaches to a deschooled education). Finding one’s way among all the information on all the different media that are out there is difficult. I encounter students overwhelmed by information, not knowing how to evaluate information, etc. all the time. And a librarian is an information professional – they can point you in the way to go, can help you find the best information for your need, and the library structure (both physical and digital) can provide the access to what you need. Just the other day, a student I was helping in my office said to me “You know how like, long ago, librarians helped you find books and stuff? Well, I feel like you’re like that, but for the internet.” That was one of the proudest moments of my professional life so far.

—–

I get just as frustrated with the reactionary “libraries should be only about books” idea that gets tossed around in library-land as well. This gets repeated most often by the past-president of ALA Michael Gorman. One of the things he said fairly recently in an article about the future of libraries was

“If you want to have game rooms and pingpong tables and God knows what — poker parties — fine, do it, but don’t pretend it has anything to do with libraries,” said Michael Gorman, a former president of the American Library Assn. “The argument that all these young people would turn up to play video games and think, ‘Oh by the way, I must borrow that book by Dostoyevsky’ — it seems ludicrous to me.”

He seems to be taking a jab at the recent development in many public libraries to check out video games and host gaming nights and Nicholas over at Information Games, sums up Gorman’s argument as “video games are not books and books are the real business of the library.” (That whole post is brilliant by the way, and is a great counter to Gorman’s reactionary bloviation.) In reading what Gorman said, I also thought about Turkle’s assertion that “Protest against video games carries a message about how people feel about computers in general.”

That got me thinking about some of the other readings for our seminar – Scott McCloud on comics, Bill Viola on video, and Sherry Turkle on video games. Three distinct forms of media. Libraries have eagerly embraced collecting graphic novels – they are, afterall, printed in books which we love and are familiar with – and while film and video had some early hiccups in the conversation about their place in library collections, now are collected eagerly and are some of the highest circulated items. The medium of video games just happens to be at the forefront of the discussion right now in the library world, and therefore it will bring out the “others, primarily book-oriented [that] claim the newer media are uncomfortable to use, expensive in time and money to acquire, difficult to administer, and require too much specialized knowledge and skill to be worth the trouble of learning to produce and use for educational purposes.” (That from an article in 1954 called “The Place of Newer Media in the Undergraduate Program” The Library Quarterly Vol. 24, No. 4 (Oct., 1954), pp. 358-373)

There will always be new forms of media and the library will have to figure out a way to collect, organize and provide access to them. Just because “books on paper” have reigned supreme for the majority of the life of the modern library doesn’t mean that that is what we should be all about. Libraries are about accessing information, wherever that information resides. So now we have to try to figure out how to collect things that we traditionally haven’t collected – video games, e-books, web pages, Tweets, digitized info of all kinds.

I am the new library consultant to the communication studies department, which includes the best kept secret on campus: the film and digital media program. They teach about video games there. They PLAY video games there. Yet our library doesn’t collect video games. I’m formulating a plan to change this, by the way, in part as a result of the readings in this seminar and some other wonderfully thinky library blog posts I’ve read recently… I’m excited about the possibility of pushing our library forward into collecting new forms of media. I also excited to see what other new forms of media might be on the horizon that might throw a wrench into the library world yet again. Nicholas at Information Games says this near the end of his post:

As libraries become less and less about books and more and more about, well, whatever it is we are about, we are going to need innovative problem solvers who can deal with disruptive technologies.

That’s who I want to be.

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Isn’t it peculiar that we are reading an excerpt from this metacomic but not the metahypertext piece by George Landow that our editors refer to in the intro?

Upon finishing McCloud’s brilliant sketch of comics, i found myself reflecting that it was a useful analog to the way we experience computer media—a verbal media enhanced with pictures (and often also sound and motion). It seems that our most successful digesting of digital information happens when there is effective pairing between the verbal and the image so that the affordances of each interact with each other to surface a more profound meaning. (Like the RSA illustration of that lecture on education that Jim linked.)

McCloud’s treatment of  panels was helpful in thinking about the frame in which we experience Web content. If Nelson had his way, instead of  there being  a frame around the Web-page, would the information exist within an ever-expanding panel? The Web today seems to me to do a pretty decent job of keeping those frames pliable through hyperlinks.

OK, so it’s almost 8 a.m. and I’m at home nursing a feverish child, which at least affords me a little free time to work on some final thoughts about the seminar in between bouts of temperature-taking and measuring out Tylenol. Ruta Maya coffee helps. I’m really distracted by this cartoon my son is watching–cartoon rabbits cavorting about with a rendition of “A Night in Tunisia” for a soundtrack (Hey Jazz and Word, which is your favorite version? I’m partial to Dizzy’s myself).

As our seminar draws to a conclusion, I’d first like to say it’s been a pleasure getting to know everyone and reading their work. A special thanks to Gardner for spearheading this experiment (and kudos to Sandy for requiring me to take the seminar in the first place. Also, thanks for the loaner text book). Wonderful conversation and vicious blogging by all have given me fodder and inspiration for my own writing, which has been a real pleasure to do. Paige is forcing me to continue this post-seminar: I’ll do my best! Makes me realize all that I loved about my days of English-majoring and writing for newspapers. Finally, all of this has given me an opportunity to do something I should have been doing all along: blogging. This has been really fun.

What have I learned? Honestly, at the beginning of the seminar, I didn’t know what to expect–I think I made that clear in my very awkward introduction to everyone. But man, what a learning experience this turned out to be, and a very inspiring experience at that!

OK, so here’s a few things I think I learned over the past semester:

1. Collaboration = Augmentation. The assigned readings are much less inspiring and cogent without the full participation of the class in the blogosphere (no worries there). Some of my more significant learning experiences came after reading other blog posts–and, likewise, hearing you all reflect out loud in class. Many of those observations, written and otherwise, helped me hash out the real significance of the readings or ponder things I hadn’t thought of. It just goes to show that we’re much smarter together than apart. This is a hackneyed observation, perhaps, in the Web 2.0 world, but I think it’s really true. And NOT to say there isn’t a place for one’s own learning space … Which is what our own blogs are anyway.
2. The importance of paying attention to the sensual experience of media. McLuhan was the most important author for me in this class. Seemed his ideas just kept cropping up all over the place, including in McLoud’s essay. Ashley’s post “McLuhan said this” is an important reminder about how we shouldn’t take certain academic pronouncements too seriously, but something in his message keeps resonating with me. In terms of education, I think the idea of “The Medium is the Message” is an invitation to explore how various use of technology in education either reinforces or inhibits the learning experience based on the senses with which we engage it.
3. Mastery of technology is less about a prerequisite “competence” than about a sense of playfullness and wonder. After reading the essays on gaming–and in conversations where the subject seemed to always come back to children–I’ve come to the conclusion that, at least on some level, there’s an important lesson to be learned from how children engage technology (and more broadly, the world). I think the same is required of us to learn new things, especially technology. At the beginning of every technological adventure, we must care less about mastery than about forging ahead Crusoe-style and being OK with being a stranger in a stranger cyberland. I’m not advocating irresponsibility, either; just saying that we should always remember to engage technology with a sense of play (not fear) and experimentation before we attempt to master and control it, if that’s even possible. We adults spend a lot of time pointing out how our youth are so adept at technology, but who’s more concerned about being the “experts,” us or them?
4. Our stories, and our need to tell them, matter more than technology… which is why we keep inventing new ways of telling them. Strange, isn’t it? After this seminar, my take is that modern developments in computing (and our reaction to those developments) are only really important in terms of what they say about us as humans, and how they augment human nature, not what they represent in themselves. Ashley was ahead of the game in this observation when she wrote about Social Media as an Issue of Trust.
5. Living and learning is an artistic endeavor, and technology–when used effectively–can help us more fully express that. I’m at a loss, so I’ll just stop there .

Now for the cheesy part! I leave this seminar being really excited about the future–what it holds for us as educators and parents, the possibilities for our children to live richer lives as a result of New Media (again, thank you everyone, especially Gardner, for such a wonderful experience). As I think about all this, my minds goes back to Louis Armstrong’s “What a Wonderful World,” the part that says,

I hear babies crying, I watch them grow
They’ll learn much more than I’ll never know
And I think to myself what a wonderful world
Yes I think to myself what a wonderful world.

And then I think about my own children, and realize that this is what the New Media will make possible. Now, time for another dose of that Tylenol …

This week’s reading was the perfect conclusion to this seminar.  I remember (vaguely) reading McCloud’s whole book, Understanding Comics, in Library School for the week we talked about graphic novels, though I might not have made it all the way through (it being assigned at the end of the semester when things tend to slip…).  I really wish I had read it, but somehow, I don’t think I would have appreciated it the same way that I do now.

This reading kind of reminded me about Turkle’s discussion of constructed worlds.  Comics books are a world unto themselves and I love how McCloud is breaking down the rules for us. There were lots of “ah…so that’s why they do that…” moments while I was reading this, and I loved every minute of it.  Delving into the way things work, the nuts and bolts of another world like McCloud has done is brilliant and simply fascinating to me.

I also found myself thinking, however, “what does this have to do with what we’ve been talking about this semester?” But, when I got to the last page of our reading, it suddenly clicked.  McCloud is doing what we, to some extent, have been doing since September – taking a medium that well-established and accepted without much thought, and analyzing all its components in an attempt to develop a better understanding of it.  He looks at why things are the way they are, goes back into the history of comics, what others have done, why that worked or didn’t work and what lasting impressions it has on the comics of today, and draws his own conclusions.

My favorite part of the whole chapter were the last 6 panels.  McCloud concludes by saying:

I’ve been trying to figure out what makes comics “tick” for years and I’m still amazed at the strangeness of it all.

I seems to me that he’s got it pretty well figured out, yet he still seems to be in awe of the unknown.  He goes on to say that

…no matter how bizarre the workings of time in comics is — the face it presents to the reader — is one of simple normality.  Or the illusion of it, anyway.

All depends on your frame of mind.

In concluding this journey through the history of a new medium, I feel that this is a stellar mindset to come away with.  While we do understand a great deal about technology, its uses and the reasons for them, a lot of the workings are still pretty bizarre.  No matter how bizarre they are, though, we don’t necessarily HAVE to understand everything because of the brilliant men and women who have gone before us and worked hard to help technology work for us, presenting the illusion of simple normality.  Don’t get me wrong, I’m not advocating for the priesthood of technology and blind acceptance of this medium, but I definitely respect McCloud’s awe and appreciation for the slightly unknown, while making the known work to his advantage.

With this in mind, I LOVED the little gremlin that was lurking in the clock…reminds me of the technology gremlins that I hang out with every day!

Where does it start?  As one colleague observed, we start the process even before kids are in school.  As another colleague pointed, we even move our families so kids can go to a specific school based on their rating which is based on test scores.

Illich says that this innovative kind of schooling is for a society that doesn’t now exist and I believe him.  We encourage creative thinking, innovation, and initiative at work, but in school, we take that away because we’re teaching to the test and students have to perform otherwise people will move their families to another school district.

School is supposed to be preparation for the workforce, we’re to be equipping students for their future careers.  Today, we’re looking at using technology to be able to work from home, to be innovative, creative thinking is prized – who knows what we’ll be doing tomorrow. But, as was pointed out, we’re educating students for the workforce of the past – the structure, the factory.  We’re perpetuating this cycle of restrictive, curriculum-centered, test-centered education.

Where does it stop?

It seems we’re all in agreement that the 7th grader with a PLE is amazing.  But we seem to say, “That’s nice, but it’ll never happen.”  Why not?

Because administrators need to have high test scores to keep their jobs, to get their school’s ratings up, to get more people to move to their district.  Because teachers are afraid to let go of the control.  Because teachers are afraid that students won’t learn, even though where there is interest, there is learning.

Do we just write off this generation – get rid of the old way of thinking – and wait to start fresh?  It worked for God and the Israelites on their way to the Promised Land – wait forty years until we clear out the old generation of linear, test-taking learners.

At the same time, I feel like there still needs to be some direction.  Even in the desert, the Isrealites had Moses to guide them.  I like Illich’s idea of the educational initiator.  As many members of our group have pointed out, there are opportunities you might miss unless someone pushes you outside your comfort zone.  But how do you become a life-long learner in a schooled society? Can we de-school without deschooling?

Abolish school? Replace classrooms with references services, skill exchanges, peer matching, and occasional encounters with professional educators? What is Ivan Illich thinking? I enjoyed school! I was smart, didn’t question the rules, preferred structure and specificity, and could memorize easily. Also, I was reasonably personable and assertive, so I got the help I needed from my teachers. Plus, I went to good schools and my parents were supportive (i.e., insistent) of my efforts to perform well. And the results haven’t been all that bad.

So, why “deschool” society? Because education should not be a contest of survival in which only those with certain personality types and social demographics are rewarded by the establishment. It took me quite a few years to realize that my peers who dropped out of school either mentally or physically were not dumb or lazy. One enlightening episode was when, as a graduate assistant, I did a literature review on entrepreneurs for a professor who was developing a high school drop-out prevention program. I discovered that the profile of successful entrepreneurs is almost exactly the same as that of school dropouts! They do not like structures, rules, or routine. They are motivated to learn by having real life problems to solve or challenges to overcome. They like being physically active and working independently. Such folks are literally “misfits” within the typical educational environment. I think they would thrive in a deschooled society.

But is a deschooled society the route to engaged learning for all? I consider Illich’s proposed system useful for stimulating thinking about reform. However, I think his open systems approach to learning, like the school-based system it is intended to replace, heavily favors people with certain personality characteristics such as inquisitiveness, flexibility, persistence, and extroversion. And vouchers to pay for some services is no substitute for the competent, active support of parents or guardians. I applaud Illich for doing more than complaining about current arrangements, but replacing schools won’t necessarily improve learning for all.