Hebrew Bible and Christian Scriptures

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 …

My high school football coach, a real salty old fellow, was a wellspring of quirky aphorisms. Of all the things he ever said, there was one phrase which still rings in my head to this day. Like most of his other pithy colloquialisms, you’d likely hear this one just before the team took the field for a game: He’d gather the team in a huddle, his eyes fixed in a steely gaze, and declare with a raspy twang, “Mens [sic], you know what you know.”

You know what you know.

Had the year been 2010 and not 1991, me and my fellow teammates might have wondered silently “wtf?” in our heads after hearing this strange, awkward phrase. Mens, you know what you know. Part of the amusement of it was hearing coach re-pluralize “men” into “mens,” as he often did, but the rest of it just left you wondering: “You know what you know?” Incidentally, it’s somewhat strange to be told you do, in fact, “know what you know,” which we did (and we knew it). And so that quirky saying became a kind of a team mantra, a reminder that we could take the field with confidence remembering all we had done during the previous week of practice, and simply let our bodies and minds react on the field reflexively like musicians playing music without thinking of the mechanics of their instruments.

You know what you know.

You probably see where I’m headed with this … So as I’m pondering Illich’s “Learning Webs,” I hear it again: You know what you know. Taken in another context, this could be a very bold statement about learning, the self-directed kind (and bear with me as I attempt to make a leap from my old football coach to Plato). I think what my coach said in five words was perhaps more eloquently summarized (or not?) by the dialogue that took place between Socrates and Glaucon in Plato’s Allegory of the Cave:

[Socrates] But then, if I am right, certain professors of education must be wrong when they say that they can put a knowledge into the soul which was not there before, like sight into blind eyes.
[Glaucon] They undoubtedly say this, he replied.
[Socrates] Whereas, our argument shows that the power and capacity of learning exists in the soul already; and that just as the eye was unable to turn from darkness to light without the whole body, so too the instrument of knowledge can only by the movement of the whole soul be turned from the world of becoming into that of being, and learn by degrees to endure the sight of being, and of the brightest and best of being, or in other words, of the good.
[Glaucon] Very true.

… the power and capacity of learning exists in the soul already … You know what you know. Or, put another way, as John Lee Hooker (one of my favorite bluesmen) did in “Boogie Chillen“:

One night I was layin’ down
and I heard mama and papa talkin’
I heard papa tell mama,
“Let that boy boogie woogie,
It’s in him, and it got to come out.”
And I felt so good,
Went on boogien’ just the same.

It’s in him, and it got to come out … You know what you know … the power and capacity of learning exists in the soul already. Finishing up “Learning Webs,” I began to realize that Illich is not telling us something we don’t already know about our educational system (Gisele El Khoury’s post provides a good summary of Illich’s most salient points); and while I’m tempted to fixate on his condemnation of education and how we’ve gotten it wrong, I’m more distracted–and inspired–by the very optimistic assumptions that undergird that condemnation: That all of us have the potential to find our own way. We know what we know. It’s in us, and it got to come out. How meaningful and exciting self-directed learning can be.

If, like Plato, we accept that the power and capacity of learning exists in the soul already, then the job of the educator becomes strangely simple (and liberated, in my view): One moves from being a teacher, the “expert,” to facilitator. Educators can let go of that expectation to be sages on stages and simply turn “student’s minds toward what is real and important and allowing them to apprehend it for themselves.” As Illich writes, this is the only way for educators to maintain credibility anyway:

As masters of their art abandon the claim to be superior informants or skill models, their claim to superior wisdom will begin to ring true.

It’s hard not to agree with Illich’s concept of deschooling, but I will say that it misses a large point. Maybe I’m reading him wrong, but it seems the concept of deschooling assumes that the best learning should (or does) occur in schools to begin with. For the Christian, personal epiphanies are less likely to take place on Sunday morning than they are in, say, the produce section of H-E-B; likewise, our best learning epiphanies, those “a-ha” moments, are as likely to occur outside of school than inside, but maybe that’s precisely what Illich is getting at.

(Note: Just for the record, I never had a writing assignment in school that instructed me to find similarities between a football coach, Plato, John Lee Hooker, and Ivan Illich. That just happened on its own.)

This semester I continue to reflect on my paper on the Death of the Introduction to The Hebrew Bible/Old Testament. This semester it seems clearer to me that a profoundly new, that is new media approach is required for the pedagogy of the introduction. The project of writing a new type of introduction to Hebrew Bible/ Old Testament that embraces the move from Gutenberg’s print to a interactive e-book will requires a new media literacy.

This seminar has also been an introduction to an interesting network of scholars. Sherry Turkle is an academic profiled by the N.Y. Times in a Home & Garden piece “Really Thing About Things.” She has been teaching at MIT since 1976. She is the founder and director of the MIT Initiative on Technology and Self. Sherry Turkle provides an apt follow up to the rubrics created by Brenda Laurel. Rob reminds us in his post Lost in Space the shift from philosophical reflection to a more narrative reflection that there are differences in the tone and texture of the readings.   When Turkle observes “the games as a window onto the culture of computation” she makes a new contribution to the previous readings. What Turkle does so effectively is attend to the way that the culture of computation acts as an environment with its own sort of gravity.

The now defunct television network TechTV created a documentary (in three segments eight, six and eight minute long  segments on Sherry Turkle in their series Big Thinkers.” It is now available through YouTube.com. The first video she discusses  objects and the self. Big Thinkers – Sherry Turkle part 1 The second segment has her describe the computer as a  “mind machine”and virtual reality.  Big Thinkers – Sherry Turkle part 2. The concluding segment  one of the interesting ideas she explores here is the way that nurutring prompts intimacy, even with objects such as a doll Big Thinkers – Sherry Turkle part 3

Sherry Turkle and the post Teach His/Her Own reminds us that video games or running are all expressions of identity and the formation of our selves. So some of what is in play in our various posts is the questions of how our identity choices are shaped in a new media world. James Kendrick in What We Talk About When We Talk explores with Turkle how the discussion of video games in some ways a meta-conversation on other topics. He challenges us that it may be a fear of a technological shift that marks the level of anxiety. He implies that the technological shift intimates a political that is power shift. The resistance may have more to do with the political/power status quo more than the technology itself. He and Turkle point to the possible advantages this technology may hold for intellectual development.

When Engelbart and Nelson talk about books embedded in the Memex or Dynabook they do not seem to understand the profound change that the computational culture will make on the very nature of this new type of book. The book is an object. Sherry Turkle has spent a caeer examining our relationships with objects and the formation of the self.  Her work challenges writers to build in a network context an object that forms a self. What if this new appliance/book would work like a video game. “The emotional power of video games draws heavily on the computer power within that supports a simulated world and a meditative environment, the David called a place of for “recentering.”” (NMR 511)

A major limitation of the print introduction is the fact that it ends like the pinball game that Turkle describes. The reader comes to the end of the page and must wait until the next edition. The new introduction functions in a new digital world. “As a computational object, the video game holds out two promises. The first is a touch of infinity—the promise of a game that never stops. … The games hold out a related promise, also tied to the computer’s presence within them. This is the promise of perfection.” (NMR 511) The challenge for the writer of the digital author is to provide an experience that can be relived and deepened with recurring traffic. This may not be the perfection that Turkle holds out but it is the incremental improvement and the move to excellence for the learner.

It would be interesting to return to Turkle after a session of Second Life or playing Halo.

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CKamp introduced us to Xtranormal last week with her screening of the viral masterpiece “I want to be a college professor,” whereupon I became utterly giddy about the possibilities of creating my own video (the result was a brief sketch in which I cast Ted Nelson as the tech guy). Turns out Blaine was equally inspired to create a couple of vids, too. If you need advice on how to How to Lose Investors and Alienate Bond-holders, then his are required viewing.

While my interest in Xtranormal started out as something of a lark, I’m now trying to think about it more academically: Could this tool be useful in the classroom? Where might something like this fit into our discussion of New Media? One key to understanding the irresistible allure of Xtranormal, I think, is to realize that it affords us a way to do something we’ve already been doing for 30,000 years: Puppetry. In this case, though, digital puppetry. A Google search for “puppetry history” served up a link to a site that looked like it had been attacked by the Geocities-izer, but there was in fact a very telling observation on that site that brings me back to this week’s reading by Sherry Turkle:

It seems to me, man has always been interested in creating and controlling other worlds, as well as in trying to define his own. Puppetry, to me, is an extension of one’s self. It may be motivated by the need to explain, explore, embrace or critique the human condition. It is still, one of the safest ways to act out, act up, entertain, educate, commiserate, wonder out loud, unburden yourself or release your feelings. I have used it, along with my story telling to fulfill my need to see the good guys win and justice done. It has always been both a sword and a shield to me. It is my armor in a world of frustrations and disappointments, when indeed, the bad hats seem to be ahead in this game, we call Life. In short, I have found Puppet Theater to be a wonderful place to find peace of mind and spirit.

As I read this, I immediately called to mind the video game enthusiasts Turkle writes about in Video Games and Computer Holding Power (post forthcoming on that) and how they sought escape in video games in the same manner–and for the same reasons–as our anonymous puppeteer quoted above. Interesting.

Back to Xtranormal… Here’s a brainstorm of some possible scenarios where this service might be handy:

• Demonstrating effective interviewing techniques for job applicants or journalists
• Role play for would-be counselors and therapists (similar to above, what and what not to say)
• A story boarding tool, where dialogue for an original movie scene may be quickly roughed out

Granted, the potential for any video created in Xtranormal to be more humorous and distracting than educational may be a barrier to its adoption in the classroom, but still–it’s yet another resource in the digital storytelling toolbox.

Before I can go on to comment on Viola or Laurel I need to think through something about McLuhan. Several weeks ago as the New Media Faculty Seminar at Baylor met to discuss Marshall McLuhan’s articles in The New Media Reader Gardner Campbell told us about a class session that helped students understand McLuhan’s contention that medium is the message. He told the class what happens in out typical language game when I say “pick up a hammer”? Go ahead now think of a hammer in your hand. Now that you have visualized this now describe for me what you have. The student said immediately you have a hammer being grasped by a person. You have a hammer in your hand. Gardner said an emphatic no to this. “What you really have is a hammerhand! The tools becomes an extension of the person in this case the hand!” My words cannot capture Gardner’s verve and enthusiasm.

The appliance as the extension of the person a la Doug Engelbart and McLuhan’s the medium is the massage/message brings us back to a new appreciation of the “appliance.” Sherry notes the dangers of anthropomorphism of our devices. These devices were also mentioned in The 2010 Horizon Report from New Media Consortium and the Educause learning Initiative. The key trends include 1) the proliferation of resources and relationship due to the internet. 2) The idea of on demand has hit the television and bleeds into other aspects of life including technology. 3) End users seem to be warming up to the cloud services such as Google Docs and the around the corner Windows Live. 4) Students treat their education as increasingly a collaborative fashion contrary to the earlier era.

The Horizon Report list includes critical challenges 1) the changing role of the academy including 2) new and emerging scholarly forms of authoring, publishing, and research lags behind the technology. 3) Digital media literacy continues to find new importance in every field. Finally 4) a contracting economy has given rise to more focus on key goals often absent advancing new media research.

The Horizon 2010 reports the technologies to watch. The report names two near term technologies, that is to say, within the next twelve months, mobile computing and open content. Baylor has worked to position itself well in terms of mobile computing. Baylor is a Microsoft campus. Therefore open source software cannot get a substantial hold here. There is an open standards conference here every year.

The second adoption horizon, that is to say two to three years out that the Horizon Reports mentions are electronic books and simple augmented reality. I want to use Brenda Laurel to explore the electronic book. The Baylor library has started a collection of electronic books. However there has been no substantial rethinking of the concept of the e-books. What if we take Laurel’s reading of Aristotle (Poetics).

When so many of the writers we have read this semester have imagined the books would reside in the Memex machine and the Dynabook but they did not speculate on how that shift of books from artifacts of the Guttenberg era to an entity out of the movie Tron. The introductions to Old Testament/Hebrew Bible and as a course and as a books continue to be written with a Guttenberg model. However, Brenda Laurel in her article “Six Elements and Causal Relations Among Them.” Brenda Laurel brings and interesting reading of Aristotle’s Poetics to a new media aesthetics.  These six elements can provide a helpful dashboard or rubric to assess what a new and fundamentally different introduction to the Old Testament/Hebrew Bible.

The next blog post will review in more detail Brenda Laurel’s treatment Six Elements.

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A few things I really like about Laurel’s essays (apart from their liberal use of the word “bastard”): For one, reading Star Raiders transports me back to 1982, when the Atari 2600 gaming system was in its heyday.

How many hours I spent playing the arcade knock-off versions of Frogger, Pac-Man, and Joust, I’ll never know; furthermore, it’s a wonder I didn’t develop repetitive stress injuries in my hands for all the times I tried defeat the bomb-dropping burglar in Kaboom! (anybody remember that one?).

Like so many of the other writings we’ve read, it’s hard to grasp the full significance of the essay on the first read, and so my understanding of The Six Elements is very awkward at this point; but I can at least glean the thumbnail sketch: The application of the Aristotelian model of drama, and our understanding of what makes it work, as it’s applied to our relationship with computers. Interestingly, in our seminar there’s this recurring concept of “agency” that is once again articulated by Laurel.

To my thinking, the agency Laurel’s talking about as it relates specifically to character and thought gets to the heart of our expectations about “the ways in which things should work or exactly how they have gone awry” in computer design (I’m thinking less about computer games than native functionality, though). By the way, Sherry brilliantly explains how we build these expectations into our gadgets, even beyond the point of practical use to fulfill our understanding–or need–for what Laurel might call the full “spectacle” or “performance” of the machine:

It seems that our tendencies towards presupposed existence of spaces which exist in their entirety extend to the outer representations of our machines, not just the inner workings of them.

This phrase alone makes Laurel’s essay come alive for me! Aptly titled “Anthropomorphism,” Sherry’s post once again moves us closer to considering the fine line between humans and computers and our desire to make them into our own image.

Speaking of, another thing in Laurel’s essay that really jumps out at me is the idea of consistency in character, and how–just as in stories–inconsistencies in the user experience violate something akin to dramatic order. Laurel’s example of the spell-check-gone-bad illustrates how even well-intended features in computing can, without our prior knowledge of them, upset this innate sense of order if “this behavior is not represented to you in some way … ” (Where this is concerned, Microsoft is king IMHO. Animated paper clips emerging unexpectedly to *help* you?! But to be fair, Apple’s auto-correct feature on the iPhone is just as disruptive). Laurel’s point is well taken: When agency, thought, and character all conspire against the viewer-user, the result is either a really bad B movie or a horribly designed computer application.

Finally, Laurel points out something that really resonates with me, and it reminds me why I’m the kind of person who never, ever starts watching a movie in the middle (and, I think, why I’m also not much of a gamer since I generally don’t have the time to understand the complexities of modern video and alternate reality games). I think what Laurel is saying is that, whether you’re watching Dr. Zhivago or playing World of Warcraft, full enjoyment of the interactive experience depends on one’s expectations of what that experience should be–via the Aristotlean model, if you like–and then how well the experience conforms to those expectations. To illustrate this concept as it applies to computing, Laurel uses her Macintosh as an example:

My favorite Macintosh example is an error message that I sometimes encounter while running Multifinder: “Excel (or some other application) has unexpectedly quit.” “Well,” I usually reply, “the capricious little bastard!” Providing graceful beginnings and ending for human-computer activities is most often a nontrivial problem …

Nontrivial, indeed.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/d/dc/Atari2600a.JPG/300px-Atari2600a.JPG

Anybody who read Gardner’s latest post and listened to his E-Learn 2010 podcast (you can play it inline at the end of selfsame post, and I encourage you to do so) knows that I’m having some fun here. The above image is the insignia of The Borg, a race of tyrannical cyborgs that terrorizes all the good guys on Star Trek: The Next Generation. If you don’t know them by their insignia–OK, maybe you’re NOT an ubernerd–then surely you’ve seen a Borg or two on the Internet somewhere:

In his podcast, Gardner discusses the ongoing “Internet Backlash” and some of the folks associated with it, one of whom is Jaron Lanier, author of “You Are Not a Gadget.” At issue in the podcast is, among other things, whether Lanier’s critique of Wikipedia as an expression of the hive mind holds any water. For the record, Lanier is not some garden-variety luddite or even a technophobe. He is, in fact, a computer scientist and a very good writer, to boot. To learn more about his thoughts on the “foolish collectivism” of Wikipedia, have a look at Digital Moaism: The Hazards of the New Online Collectivism. (Between this and Gardner’s podcast, you’ve got an excellent point-counterpoint debate about the concept of the read/write web.)

The spirit of Lanier’s own backlash against Wikipedia is fairly well captured by the very last passage in the essay, which contains the following warning:

The illusion that what we already have is close to good enough, or that it is alive and will fix itself, is the most dangerous illusion of all. By avoiding that nonsense, it ought to be possible to find a humanistic and practical way to maximize value of the collective on the Web without turning ourselves into idiots. The best guiding principle is to always cherish individuals first.

The last sentence there is the key to understanding where Lanier is coming from:

The best guiding principle is to always cherish individuals first.

The tension and often competing interests of the individual versus the collective: That I get. But where I think Gardner gets it right is in pointing out that Lanier’s take on things represents a certain myopia, a “failure of imagination,” as he says, or the inability to see the big picture. Take the concept of “The Collective.” What is “The Collective” anyway? Is it as Lanier would have it (the hive mind) or as Gardner would have it (the artisans of Paris)? The truth is that’s it’s probably both–depending on the context.

That’s just it: Context.  In my view, context counts for much more in this disagreement, perhaps, because never before in history has the idea of “The Collective” existed in such a unique context: The context of many individuals, each at her or his own computer terminal, who just happen to be participating in something collective. In other words, there’s surely more than one flavor of “collectivism,” and the kind we’re talking about here–millions of people editing a shared web space, usually anonymously, and in private–is something very new. As such, I don’t think the same rules apply when Lanier writes:

… the larger pattern of the appeal of a new online collectivism that is nothing less than a resurgence of the idea that the collective is all-wise, that it is desirable to have influence concentrated in a bottleneck that can channel the collective with the most verity and force. This is different from representative democracy, or meritocracy. This idea has had dreadful consequences when thrust upon us from the extreme Right or the extreme Left in various historical periods. The fact that it’s now being re-introduced today by prominent technologists and futurists, people who in many cases I know and like, doesn’t make it any less dangerous.

History is rife with examples of foolish collectivism gone bad, to be sure; and to be fair, it’s worth mentioning that Lanier cites several examples of ways in which collectivism succeeds in making us smarter. But I think we’re at apples and oranges at this point, so I return to Star Trek for an analogy…

For argument’s sake, let’s assume that The Borgs are subject to the usual personality dynamics that usually manifest themselves when humans (and humanoids) gather in concert to decide something important. The committee: That paragon of the dumb-down where nothing of import really happens. So, let’s say The Borgs are deciding on their next attack strategy in a committee meeting. What happens? The shyest and most quiet Borgs, whose opinions matter presumably not less than the more boisterous Borgs, hold back in usual fashion; and the more bellicose Borgs–some of whom are not particularly trenchant in the ways of attack strategies, let’s say–dominate the conversation, keeping the shy Borgs from having Borg-ese words edgewise. Arguably, this is a recipe for the Borgs getting their butts handed to them by Jean-Luc Picard (and I think Lanier would agree with me here).

While this scenario is a stereotype of the same kind of collectivism that Lanier is imposing on the digital world where, inevitably, the dumbest opinions hold sway, it does illustrate how context is important. In certain contexts–and I speak from my own experience–some people are empowered to be more insightful, more thoughtful, and in general, more interesting and creative when they don’t feel threatened by outside influence or conventional social dynamics. For example, when they’re at their own desks at home or in the office by themselves and have time to think and aren’t worried about folks looking askance at them for voicing strange opinions. This is what digital collectivism affords us: some might call it simply “anonymity,” but if thought of more imaginitively–as Gardner is encouraging us to do–we might also see it as a kind of unfettering of the collective influence. Dare I say, it allows us to have the courage to become more individual?

As for me, I’m a shy Borg and prefer to be left to my own devices behind the protective shield of a keyboard. You might find my writing interesting; but truthfully, if you asked me to speak up in a crowd about something I’m even knowledgeable about, the results will probably be dreadful, but not because what I have to say is less valid than someone who’s more eloquent. Thank goodness for a medium where even the most reticent of us can get our 2-cents in (comfortably). It begs questions: Can this digital collectivism be a bad thing for democracy and the advancement of knowledge? Is it harmful or beneficial to education?

At the same time that Lanier simplifies the notion of what “collectivism” is, so too does he over-simplify the meaning of Wikipedia. No thoughtful and responsible individual, even among futurists and techno-utopians, is going to proclaim Wikipedia as the de facto one-stop shop for knowledge. If thought of more imaginitively, though, one could view Wikipedia as a glorified card catalog or index where one just happens to end up first along the road to higher knowledge. Personally speaking, I use it as a map: Sure, it’s usually the first result on the SERP for any given topic you search for in Google, but so what? That means I have to believe that it’s an authoritative source? Of course not. But it’s not a bad place to start for further reading.

And at the end of the day, even when I take issue with something I read on Wikipedia, I have the freedom to change it. Somehow, that freedom seems more appealing to the individual in me than the Borg.

My favorite part of The Last Lecture, which to me is also the most moving part, is the twist ending: Randy Pausch head-faking all of us into believing that his 76-minute aphoristic speech was intended primarily for the general audience.

Oddly, after yesterday’s seminar–to date, the most poignant for me–I began to feel this same sense of being pleasantly (and movingly) hoodwinked. Something about Bill Viola’s essay and the wonderful commentary provided by my colleagues and presenters Jim Kendrick and Rob Rogers crystallized something in my brain. To their credit, I don’t think I could have teased out as much meaning from Viola without their presentation. Another read of “Will There Be Condominiums in Data Space?” is surely in order. To Gardner’s credit, sequencing the Viola essay after McLuhan was a stroke of genius.

In doing the required readings for NMFS and blogging haphazardly, and in listening to presentations and ideas being brought forth about the many topics we’ve investigated, my assumption has been that the proper focus of this class is the New Media itself. Like the typical student, I’ve progressed through readings and discussions with a lingering refrain in my head that goes, “Ok, so that’s interesting. But what’s the most important thing about this? What do I take away from all this?”

After yesterday’s seminar, something clicked. I had a mind splinter all evening and into this morning. Call it a moment of clarity, if you like, but I think I’m at the precipice of real understanding here. The most startling realization for me is that we have, in fact, been head-faked: This class is NOT about New Media at all. It’s about Us (with a capital ‘u’). It’s about our need for finding meaning in everything that we do and see and hear, and it’s about HOW we go about constructing that meaning for ourselves, cognitively speaking. It’s about the human brain–although, “mind” sounds better to me–and how it devours everything in the pursuit of truth and beauty “steadily and without any resistance.” It’s about how memory and the act of remembering IS like art: Every waking hour, we’re constantly editing, rearranging, and combining our memories all for the sake of telling stories and teasing out meaning from life. And it’s about how we instinctively and incessantly project those cognitive tendencies into the material world in the form of media, all again for the sake of making sense of it all.

But this is a class about New Media, after all. So what’s the point? The point is this: For the first time in human history, we have the most complete and elegant mechanism for extending our minds–THE most important part of ourselves–into the material world. Beholding the Internet with all of its attendant weirdness and beauty is like standing back from your own brain as you would admire it in some glass case in a museum: There we are, perfectly externalized in technological form, warts and all! (Only, you’re not looking at just your brain, but a billion others, too).

Marshall McLuhan writes that “We become what we behold,” but I’d wager the opposite is just as true: That what we behold becomes us. As Viola demonstrates with his water wall technology via video in “Ocean Without A Shore,” the better technology becomes, the more it enables us to convey ideas like the thin wall separating life and death, for example, exactly as that idea might have occured in a dream. That’s to say nothing of the fact that, not only can we now map our minds into our own data spaces; we can also connect to shared data spaces and take advantage of collective intelligence and creativity that exists there.

Again, my mind goes back to McLuhan. I can finally understand why modern computing as a medium (although, to be correct, it should be “media” because computers allow us to call on all media at once) is conceptually more important than all the bits and bytes that make it possible–or more important than all the individual tools and services that we as educators and technologists feel compelled to incorporate into the classroom. As for the message:

” … the ‘message’ of any medium or technology is the change
of scale or pace or pattern that it introduces into human affairs.”

The standard response of the technophobe is that computers are making us all into robots. But if like McLuhan we accept the notion that any medium’s message alters the scale of our sense ratios to the extent individual senses are emphasized over others, then the greatest promise of our digital age is that the Internet may in fact help to make us more fully human since it represents our collective brains “externalized in technological form.” It means that learning and creating with New Media means we are doing something more fundamentally innate and human than if we were locked away in our own rooms reading the printed page. And I think this is what everyone from Bush, Engelbart, Nelson, and Kay were getting at in their individual essays when they pointed to the power of computing and its ability to more fully replicate our thought patterns and the promise that it could make us smarter by allowing us to collaborate more richly.

Finally, I came away with another notion yesterday that’s harder to verbalize or pin down in a single blog post, but it has something to do with how life is really a lot like art. Every breath represents another opportunity to create, to remember, edit, and rearrange our own stories and ideas in our own data spaces to find meaning. What’s even better is that I can now share my data space with you, just as you can share yours with me.

Bill Viola’s “Condominiums in Dataspace” is very McLuhanesque, and that makes this week’s reading a good transition from our discussion of medium as message. Viola’s description of traditional media as “additive” and linear (sound familiar?) shows his awareness of their effects on our cognition. Several passages in this essay invoke the McLuhan notions that 1). we’re incapable of fully appreciating the media milieu we’re swimming in, and 2). that we often misuse new media for the sake of recreating the old. But rather than “doing today’s jobs with yesterday’s tools,” as McLuhan would have it, Viola’s assertion works in reverse: He argues that we’re doing yesterday’s jobs with the tools of today. In our ignorance of their true meaning and power, Viola says, we fall prey to using new media for old purposes using “the same old linear logic system in a new bottle.”

Viola also channels Ted Nelson in his warnings to those “boring and incompetent teachers” not to bypass “the primary medium, not only of their own fields, but of the entire culture as well.” Again, all this reinforcing this idea of media literacy and awareness a la McLuhan.

Like all the other authors we’ve read for this class, Viola is ahead of the game in recognizing the computer’s potential to express and represent human cognition. Like our minds, “Data space is fluid and temporal,” he writes, and as we move into the digital world, we are actually “moving into idea space here, into the world of thoughts and images as they exist in the brain … .” The upshot is that “With the integration of images and video into the domain of computer logic, we are beginning the task of mapping the conceptual structures of our brain onto the technology.” Wait: A part of ourselves being externalized in technological form? Where have I heard that before?

Like Bush, Englebart, and Nelson, Viola seems to embrace the notion that a hypertextual environment is a perfect companion to learning, where the learner is free to start at any point–even free to work from the end back to the beginning to achieve understanding. Or, at least that’s what I thought of when I read this passage: “Our cultural concept of education and knowledge is based upon the idea of building something up from a ground, from zero … It is additive. If we approach this process from the other direction, considering it to be backwards, or subtractive, all sorts of things start to happen.” How that actually looks in practice is another matter, but I’m reminded of the Memex and the Xanadu Project, among other things as I read this.

After Gardner requested that we (re)visit the NMFS discussion forums, I went out this morning to visit the site and saw his thread, “Sharing a concern, and asking for constructive feedback.” Hmmm. Clicked on that and saw a link to Brian Young’s Sept. 30 post questioning the direction, leadership, and purpose of the networked seminar. I pretty much had to tear my own hand away from the keyboard to keep myself from firing off my own rejoinder, but then I saw Brian’s apology to Gardner. OK, fair enough. In Brian’s latest post written yesterday, however, I don’t get the sense that there’s been any real consideration of civility after all, considering this phrase:

This seminar is a mess. The leaders haven’t given the thing much thought, and if they have, they need to think harder. This is not a negative comment …

Com’on guys. Not a ‘negative comment’? If I understand correctly, Brian is frustrated because one of his colleagues decided to quit the seminar because he didn’t like the readings:

Pat is out … He said he’s had enough of the readings. He doesn’t want to waste any more time trying to figure out why what we are reading matters. He did it so eloquently in this comment, I won’t explain it anymore.

Pat’s reason for quitting:

… This stuff is way too heady for someone like me who is a multimedia developer by choice. The readings are about as stimulating as watching grass grow.

Two things: First, my initial instinct is to defend Gardner’s (and Alan’s) leadership and vision and their commitment to doing something innovative and risky–I think I can safely speak for all of my colleagues here at Baylor when I say, “Thank you.” After all, the very idea of this seminar is inherently fraught with all kinds of danger: Getting academics, educators, and technologists in one room to discuss the new media and its role in higher education? Having them blog about their experiences and thoughts, all for the world to see? Putting yourself on the line as a facilitator when so much of the value of this experiment depends on what we, the “faciliated,” put into it? To be sure, we’ve had to wade through some occasionally difficult and dry reading, and I do have to give Brian and his colleagues credit for their honesty. But ultimately, I share Gardner’s thoughts about how we should avoid personal attacks and try to be constructive as we express ourselves online.

This reminds me of a few other things. First, the necessity of teaching our students (and ourselves) how to conduct ourselves online as we establish our digital identities. The “anonymous” nature of the web–or maybe “impersonal” is a better description–can often lead us to write things about others we later regret, so maybe a good rule of thumb is: Never say or write anything online you wouldn’t feel comfortable owning up to publicly, particularly in presence of the person you’re writing about.

Also, to Brian’s point:

What I find most interesting is that many in our group barely go through the readings. The discussions are still great. What do we need them for, other than to sell a few more copies of the New Media Reader? Is this a “typical” seminar? Is this how students feel about seminars?

“Is this how students feel about seminars?” Yeah, sometimes. Students tune out because they don’t want to do the readings, they want things to come easily, and we often hear them say things like, “I for one don’t get it and probably never will” or “What do we need [the readings] for?” or “This stuff is way to heady for someone like me … ” As educators, what are we conditioned to say to that? “Ok, sure. See ya later.” Absolutely not! Our role in higher education is to encourage our students to extend their minds and imaginations, often by requiring them to engage difficult concepts and readings they may not personally like or enjoy. As a result, you’d think we’d have the same expectation of ourselves.

So, I’d like to give credit where credit is due and once again express my appreciation to Gardner and Alan for what has been a wonderful experience in NMFS ’10. It’s a shame not everyone is getting the same enjoyment.