 Good afternoon folks. I'm pleased to introduce Gardner Campbell to you. That would be me I'm the last thing between you and supper somewhere in the exciting Capital of Baltimore, Maryland So I want to go ahead and get started I've got a few things to share with you and then I hope a little time for some conversation So my talk is titled networks in the paradox of the active learner It could also be described as an exercise in frustration that almost got to the terminal stage But not quite for some reason hope still occurs in some of the work I'm doing and this is one particular framework that has been fairly hopeful for me I think some of the outcomes have been striking and I want to share with you some of the thoughts I have regarding what it is. I'm doing and invite some of your comments. So here's the frustrating part This is jaren Lanier from an article that was in the New York Times just a couple of years ago Does the digital classroom and feeble the mind and jaren? writes roughly speaking there are two ways to use computers in the classroom You can have them measure and represent the students and the teachers or you can have the class build a virtual spaceship Right now the first way is ubiquitous But the virtual spaceships are being built only by tenacious oddballs in unusual circumstances more spaceships Please as a faculty member who's been working in teaching and learning technologies for over two decades now I've seen my share and unfortunately built my share of these structures that measure and represent the students and the teachers But I've always been aware that virtual spaceships could happen that that was the goal And I'm not entirely sure how that intuition came across to me, but long ago. I knew that this was not a virtual spaceship This is sometimes called a smart classroom It looks more like a zombie room to me with two large glowing eyes up at the front with all of the desks carefully in their former Configuration looking just straight at the front of the room where all this learning is supposed to take place I also know that a more recent version is also Not a virtual spaceship This is from another article in the New York Times about learning on the web And you'll see that learning on the web in this instance consists of the student staying in a residence hall Copying down what the teacher is writing on the blackboard in the lecture hall If you look very very closely, you'll see that the angle of his pen and the angle of her chalk actually match And while that's lovely and aesthetics It is not what I would call a virtual spaceship. It does not answer our Historical moment it does not answer what George Dyson writes in Turing's Cathedral the origins of the digital universe the stored program computer as Conceived by Alan Turing and delivered by John von Neumann broke the distinction between numbers that mean things and Numbers that do things our universe would never be the same Unfortunately in most teaching and learning arenas our universe is more of the same But with computers there as super typewriters super overhead projectors Super document cameras super well, I don't know whatever you want to make them into super They're just not changing the world or the universe The implications of this go very very deep for me One of the things that I've been very interested in seeing is Udacity this online university that has a very compact seven-week syllabus in which you can learn how to program in Python I'm not a programmer never have done very much in that area at all But I thought what the heck it's free why not try and early in unit one I was very much struck by a video that David Adams who's on leave from the University of Virginia as he is Participating in Sebastian Thrun startup I was very intrigued by this video that David had put together and I wanted to share it with you because Lots of times I hear colleagues say as soon as computers in education are as easy to work as toasters I'll use them and this particular video is a poignant reminder of why we should be very glad that computers are not like toasters So let's get started with programming and programming is really the core of computer science Most machines are designed to do just one thing. This is supposed to be a toaster It's more of a representational drawing than an accurate one and a toaster Well, we can do more than one thing with the toaster. Maybe we can put different things in it We can toast bread we can toast muffins Maybe it has some things we can use to change its behavior a little bit We can turn a setting to make it toast for longer or shorter But it's pretty limited what it can do everything it can do is a Variation on this basic functionality that was designed for this basic process of putting toast in heating it up and getting the toast to pop out If we want to change its behavior due to something really different, we'd have to physically alter the machine We could maybe take the parts out put them together in a new way if we're really creative We could make a bicycle from the toaster that would be a pretty big project though So without a program a computer is even less useful than a toaster can't do anything without a program The program is what tells the computer what to do and the power of a computer is that unlike a toaster Which is really designed to only do a few things a computer can do anything a computer is a universal machine We can program it to do essentially any computation So anything that we can imagine anything that we can figure out how to write a program for we can make the computer do And what the program needs to be is a very precise sequence of steps the computer by itself doesn't know how to do anything It has a few simple instructions that it can execute and to make a program do something useful We need to put those instructions together in a way that does what we want So we can turn the computer into a web browser into a server into a game-playing machine into a toaster Without anywhere to put the bread but into anything that we can imagine at least any computation We want to do and the power of the computer is that it can execute those steps super super fast So we can execute billions of instructions in one second The program gives us a way to tell the computer what steps to take So this takes the idea of ease of use off the table a bit It takes the idea of a generational change off the table a bit It points to something much deeper than that which is to say when someone puts together a video saying that a computer Can do anything? It can do anything you imagine. It's a universal machine This is a basic conceptual framework that once grasped might actually prepare the learner or the faculty member Often the same thing into a deeper understanding of why this is not a super typewriter Why this is not a super letter carrier or document delivery system? It might actually propel all the folks who are taking part in higher education and believe me the students get distracted as well Into the universe that this man imagined this is Douglas Engelbart Who's often thought of as the inventor of the mouse which is a bit like? Leonardo doing some doodles in a notebook. It's true as far as it goes. It just doesn't go quite far enough Doug Engelbart, I think arguably is the father of interactive networked computing and had a vision for what he called the Augmentation of human intellect and it ran along the lines of this idea of numbers that do as well as mean changing the universe and he wrote in these words some really interesting and Still unrealized dreams. He talks about an integrated domain And he writes we do not speak of isolated clever tricks that help in particular situations We refer to a way of life in an integrated domain where hunches cut and try Intangibles and the human feel for a situation Usefully co-exist with powerful concepts streamlined terminology and notation sophisticated methods and high powered electronic aids That can be done within the computational environment that is A universal machine is a machine with which you can do anything Unfortunately, most of my colleagues still seem to search for isolated clever tricks that help in particular situations That doesn't change the particular situation. It doesn't get to an integrated domain It doesn't lead to what I would call faculty development or what we need to do if we're to realize the potential of computers in Education at all especially in higher education So I was foaming at the mouth about this one day in a class I'm teaching right now on cognition learning and the internet and have a graduate student It's a mixed undergrad and grad class I have a grad student in there who is a computer scientist and is working in the area of human computer interfaces And he nodded very sagely at one point. He said, oh, yes, dr. C You're talking about the paradox of the active user and I said am I what is that he said? Oh, it's a very famous essay in HCI and I said well because we don't do interdisciplinarity by enlarge and higher ed I have no idea what that is. I'm just a lowly Miltonist and he said well, you should take a look at it I think you'd find it very interesting. So I did this is an essay written by John Carroll and I'm gonna forget her name John Carroll and Mary Beth Rosson in 1987 and in this I found a kind of a Rosetta stone for some of the interpretive confusion. I was feeling So here we see in this chapter. We discussed two empirical phenomena of computer use people have considerable trouble learning to use computers and their skills tend to asymptote at relative Mediocrity and if you take out people and you put in faculty or even students, it seems to me that condition still obtains Carol and Rosson go on to write these phenomena could be viewed as being due merely to bad design in current systems We argue that they're in part more fundamental than this Deriving from conflicting motivational and cognitive strategies. So even in the brave new world of touch interfaces gestural computing and Apple taking care of us from cradle to grave that Basic problem of what is a computer and why should we care is not really being touched So they go on to say accordingly one and two are best viewed not as design Problems to be solved, but it's true paradoxes that necessitate programmatic trade-off for solutions so in thinking about this I Mapped it on to what I've been doing with a particular set of seminars I've been working through and this is what I want to turn to now to show you how I hope I'm engaging with these two Paradoxes in a way that's going to get us a little bit beyond isolated clever tricks that help in particular situations So what are these paradoxes that Carolyn Ross and are writing about? They call them paradoxes of the active user, but it really is about learning, but this essay is almost entirely Learning and so the user becomes the learner and the first one is the production paradox And they write that learners at every level of learning try to avoid reading This is ironic of course because that's what we're kind of trained to do in higher education and do a lot of it But the point in 1987 was that people wouldn't read the friendly manual They wouldn't actually try to go through that carefully annotated design criteria to get the most use out of the Computers they were looking at and this holds true today because of the same paradox that Carolyn Ross and identified People want to get things done Because they want to get things done They're not likely to go into a very deep exploration of a conceptual framework or design criteria behind Whatever it is they're trying to use Probably we don't sit down and go through the entire owner's manual before we take the car for a test drive the problem at that Carolyn Ross and Analyze here the paradox is if you don't look carefully at what it is that's new in your environment If you don't engage in exploratory behavior You're not likely ever to find out that it is a new thing and you'll never explore the depths that are there So because as these new machines come in and we use them to automate a lot of the tasks We have before to help us get things done. There's been a natural reluctance I think to go very far beyond that and to go very far beyond isolated clever tricks that help in particular situations So not only will learners not read the friendly manual Faculty won't actually try to engage with computing at a deep conceptual framework Typically then there's the assimilation paradox which draws directly from learning theory They sum it up by saying a little knowledge can be a dangerous thing Particularly in a situation that invites the inference that it is relevant when it is not This gets at some of the same issues in a slightly different way That is to say as we learn a new thing we search for analogies to what we already know What's happened in higher education is that by searching for analogies and computing to what we already know? We miss what is new About these machines and we tend to graft the machines onto every bit of our practice that we were already engaged in Before the computers entered into our work. So between the production paradox and the assimilation paradox Carolyn Ross and ask the very good question is effective learning possible at this point the massive frustration Sets in and they do give us some hope a paradox in this sense is a problem utterly refractory to a simple comprehensive Logical treatment to which I would add simple comprehensive logical workshops are not going to do it in my experience Simple comprehensive logical analytics won't do it in my experience even a system of rewards and recognition that are simple comprehensive and logical won't quite do it because we're engaging with something that's deeply paradoxical They go on to write we do not believe that there is a sorry that there won't have one now or ever But if the problem is complex it is surely not hopeless We have raised a number of suggestions to how the paradoxes of learning can be addressed And it's a very rich article for that. I urge you to take a look at it However, as we have pointed out along the way these solutions themselves have problems a Premise of our discussion has been that the paradoxes of learning must be taken seriously Not as defects or errors, but as fundamental patterns of learning So as I say I came to this only this spring this particular essay when a student of mine said have you read this and My world shifted a bit as soon as I did but as soon as I read it I realized that it had some applicability for the sorts of things I've been trying to do in the new media faculty staff Development seminar that I've been running for the last three years at various schools and across a network And I'm going to explain to you now what it is that I've been doing and try to talk about it in ways that Perhaps will engage with some of the paradoxes that Carol and Rosson have identified This is the website where the new media faculty staff development seminar had its local aggregation point at Baylor University Back in the fall of 2010 I put this up here to keep my own spirits up and give you the promise of some fireworks to come It's very nice after a faculty development experience to have one of your colleagues blog a spectacular seminar This does not always happen However, when it does happen it tends to have the quality of a feeling of a breakthrough as if something has happened that hadn't happened before and in this particular instance there was a great lessening of fear and Say a corresponding elevation of a desire to explore To be able to engage with false analogies and the need to get something done and put those to the side for just a minute So that some of this richer understanding of the computational environment could come in This is what I call a mother blog it aggregates Content that the faculty and staff in the seminar are generating while the seminar is going on in the middle I have republished the blog posts that are on the individual Faculty members and staff members blogs on the left there You'll see there's some social bookmarking as I've urged people to as they're browsing the web click on a little Button that says share to delicious. I feed that in via RSS. I've got the contributors over on the right There's a search function and so forth. You can't really see it here But the header is from a Bill Viola video and I tended to change the header during the semester to fit Whatever it was that we were reading at that time. The idea here is that we simply bring the faculty together There's a very bare bones kind of syllabus and you'll note here. This is another part of the infrastructure There are matched seminars most of the time That's because I started this as a seminar for undergrads and then kept raising the bar to the point I thought well I wonder if faculty and staff would be able to engage with this as well And there have been a couple times when the two populations have met together, but they're very much along the same lines This is the front page of the syllabus for this semester's Faculty staff development seminar and you'll notice that it is networked and I'm going to get to that in a moment There are multiple schools participating at any one time and the syllabus is largely drawn from the new media Readers collection. That's an anthology that came out in 2003 from MIT Press and some of it's quite Chronological and then some of it is more topical. We begin with Vannevar Bush's as we may think which I look to as a Source of the of the mighty Nile and then we start going Roughly chronologically from Norbert Wiener and J. C. R. Licklider up through Doug Engelbart Ted Nelson Alan Kay and Adele Goldberg by which time we've gotten to Roughly in 1977 and we've got most of the conceptual framework in place for the later developments in hardware Software right up to mobile computing Then I take a sharp break and we go to Marshall McLuhan who by this time should be a little more Comprehensible given the sorts of things we've been reading up to this time and it doesn't hurt that Ted Nelson actually name checks him in his computer lib dream machines Then we go to Bill Viola and an analysis of video art in terms of what he calls data space an early essay on holistic ways of viewing the data universe It's got some interesting ties to this integrated domain idea Then Brenda Laurel and her mapping of Aristotle's poetics on the human computer interface Which people usually enjoy because this is why we get so angry with our computers. We give them agency We believe there are a little people in there trying to thwart our will Then to Sherry Turkle an early essay on video games a little bit of radical Deschooling notions from Ivan Illich who in the early 70s was talking about learning webs and using computers In ways that sound a lot like massively open online courses So some pretty startling prescience there and I say radical too because he speaks the things that dare not be spoken and faculty usually get either a little giddy or a little nervous about this time because this is our bread and butter of course and Illich's Vision is that all of these institutions not only will crumble they must and then we end with Scott McLeod's Timeframes with a little bit of dessert from Tim Berners-Lee if there's time That's really what this is. We meet once a week. We're in a room together for an hour and a half We use an old-fashioned analog book after a while I stopped facilitating the discussion the participants themselves begin to come in on a particular day We just had Bill Viola day with a couple of folks working together one staff member one faculty member They had some videos to show us they had some ideas some ways to present What had been most interesting to them in the reading and then the idea is that they will blog about what it is They have read and noted in the seminar This is the mother blog for this semester seminar spaced out by Bill Viola was written by one of the fellows in Learning technologies a colleague of mine named Bill Saunders He was the presenter that day the header is Screenshot from a second-life Seminar group as I'll talk about in a minute. We actually had one of our network seminars last fall Hold its meetings in second life So it was international and very interesting for that reason all these things that get syndicated in Represent individuals blogs which can look very very different The idea is that people will craft their own information spaces and those then get republished Into the seminar's mother blog but you can see where this is going Many of the things I'm trying to stress about truly participatory culture truly computational thinking should be reinforced If only implicitly by the activity people are engaged in as they're part of this seminar I have to say that for faculty keeping a blog is often the single hardest thing that they've done since they've written their Dissertation and they will tell me this they will sometimes be very aggressive Sometimes they will be sheepish Usually though they're they're quite reluctant I've had everything from I take great pride in my writing as if all of us who blog don't To people saying well, where do you find the time which is a legitimate answer? And yet finding the time as part of what we're supposed to do in the seminar and so forth I think it has to do with by and large of a kind of the faculty Disinclination to engage in participatory culture a way in which that's seen as either not worth very much or it's frightening Because your ideas are out there or because you feel it be judged There's a lot of imposter syndrome going along or maybe I'm just projecting. I don't know But in this case, this is an intrepid graduate student who is just all in and she's a great contributor to the seminar So to recap we have a simple seminar read an essay come in 90 minutes We talk about it if you're presenting on the essay that day Bring in some web stuff some cool things that you've found to help illustrate what it is We're talking about and by the way even for IT staff Most of these essays are completely unknown one of the most poignant moments in my professional life was sitting with a group of CIOs and CIOs to be at a restaurant talking to them about Doug Engelbart And they said who's Doug Engelbart and I thought wow So the faculty don't know the IT people don't know these things are not generally known these essays are quite engaging and As one faculty member said to me I had no idea that the early writers about computing were so insurrectionist and I said no that's right You can absolutely let your freak flag fly. This is a great set of writings to get you all riled up but not widely known and a lot of fun to talk about when we get together at The same time that we get together physically. We also blog the blogs are aggregated up locally They're also aggregated up into a network. Now. Here's the network grandmother blog let's say from last fall Last fall we had Virginia Tech the group in second life a group at the University of Queensland in Australia Group at Houston Community College where the stuff has gone viral Tom Hames is the liaison down there They now have three seminars going concurrently including one for administrators only so I don't know what kind of Kool-aid Tom is serving But I'll have what he's having You Cal Berkeley but a dictine University and Baylor This semester we've got a few of these folks back also Whitman College is in this time two Lane is starting up again Two Lane after they did their first seminar the faculty said we want to keep going so they've added a 201 and a 301 and They seem to enjoy the just like getting together again same principle Aggregating blogs up but now from across the network All I do is take all the URLs from the various mother blogs and keep putting them into the syndication plug-in and they come right in This is a slightly different wordpress theme from the others. You've seen Aggregating tweets on one side aggregating the social bookmarking on the other side As I say, we've had a number of different participants in today. This is a list of all I can remember Rice St. Lawrence University University of Queensland two Lane Baylor Tech Whitman College Houston Community College University of South Carolina upstate Benedictine University the group in second life you Cal Berkeley and Penn State Which did not go well for reasons that I would be happy to talk to you about if we have some time So the question for me is why does this work when it does I? Think I can design a pretty good course But I was very startled to find that faculty would tell me that they felt their own Anxiety about tech churn going down that they felt this was a really interesting opportunity To meet together and do something that they very rarely do and it's very rare to have it in a mixed group as well with faculty and staff and Graduate students and what was it that was so compelling about this? I Don't know here are some thoughts It really does engage them in both participatory culture and computational thinking. I don't ask them just to tweet I asked them to think hard about what it was about this machine that's changed our world I don't say oh everybody's going to blog and that's that I do try to engage them as well with some very interesting essays about what it means to be a universal machine and by coming at both of these in this way the Hope I have is that faculty and staff and grad students will begin to have certain ideas of their own That will be able to make these two things go together in a kind of a synthesis Not just to get distracted by the latest social network But not to dismiss it either because it's coming out of something that's truly revolutionary in the history of Human communication and expression To put this another way, there's an experiential layer and an infrastructure layer What I'm doing here is quoting from an essay on Lucasfilm's habitat by Morningstar and Farmer It's one that we read in the undergrad class. I don't have time for it in the Faculty staff seminar, although I keep playing with a syllabus, but they talk about a virtual space as having both An experiential layer and an infrastructure layer the experiential layers where you walk around obeying the rules that you simply find there in front of you The infrastructure layer is the layer you begin to explore when you want to change the rules When you want to take advantage of a glitch or reprogram the computer to put it another way and using Alan K's words if you're playing By speculating with currency then that's experiential But if you begin to play with the currency itself and invent different kinds of currency now, you're in an infrastructure layer and My goal is to have faculty begin to innovate at the infrastructure layer by and that's a metaphor by that I mean don't just think about isolated clever tricks that help in particular situations Start to think about things in a much more integrative way And that may actually change what you think of as a course of study. It may change what you think of as pedagogy itself It's an extremely low threshold experience. There are zero Deliverables, that's not a typo Zero deliverables. I'm not looking for a revised syllabus partly because faculty kind of know how to do that now and It becomes just more background noise. That's not necessarily a bad thing I hope their syllabi do reflect some of what's going on in the experience, but I want this to be as much as possible a pure intellectual social Experience in which we get together we talk about ideas and we contribute something to a discourse that can be aggregated across the entire network Understandably faculty and staff are skeptical about this. No deliverables. What does that mean? Well, okay, there is one deliverable I actually do ask them to blog each week and I ask them to attend as faithfully as possible But I don't want to get into the usual Business with the sorts of things that often we look for sometimes quite rightly as a result of faculty development This tends to ease their minds. It lowers the anxiety and we can get to some of the really interesting stuff I think that the syllabus is structured pretty well There's a way in which Laying the groundwork and then starting to explore the really wiggie stuff seems to work And it sponsors a certain playfulness within the group which which I guess probably the most playful that Any of the seminars ever were with me was when our astrophysicist came in to talk about comics And had gone out onto the internet downloaded the frames of one of his favorite fantastic for comics blown them up into one frame per sheet of paper Drained all the dialogue out of it all the color out of it cut it up And then gave it to us to reassemble into narratives of our own no one knew that this guy had it in him No one had ever seen him Go into something that was quite that creative I don't think it would have happened if we'd started the seminar with that I don't think it would have had any resonance if we hadn't gone through through some of the conceptual stuff before we got there And then I really do believe in seminars Very old school old old school That is to say a small group of people getting together talking about something that's on their minds It's a seminar in the sense that seminar means a place where seeds are planted and this again gets to the idea of no deliverables and it's across a network, so they're scaling that can occur It's what I would call a massively open online seminar, which is not a mook, but a moose It's a kind of small group community organizing Pat Alphada gave me that metaphor when I described this to her It at its best gives us the experience of an intimate local intense Seminar that begins to ripple outward into a set of shared experiences Not only across the world, but also across many different kinds of learning environments And I've been fortunate for many of these to be able to Skype in for at least one session or in The session in second life. I actually went in world for that and it's been very striking to me to see how Many common questions come out but strategies for addressing the things the essays bring up will change Depending on the local context since the participants can see this blogging happening across the network They begin to get an understanding of how things emerge and how they're addressed in different contexts as well So the big big big big big goal here is for faculty and staff development to be truly transformative I Don't want them to come together and just learn another part of the adobe creative suite as good as that can be as a learning experience I don't want them to come together and do some kind of massive course redesign as welcome as that might be I want something that's very simple and powerful Something that will help them engage with the fact that our universe will never be the same because of these inventions called computers There's a book that was published in 1962 Conference proceedings from a conference that was held at MIT in 1961 The book is called computers and the world of the future I couldn't resist picking that up when I found it in the stacks a few months back and in there JCR lick lighter. It was of course the person who really got Arpanet going the one who by hook and by crook helped to give us the infrastructure that we would later call the internet He has a response to an essay called computers in the university when I read it I was very moved and thought that yes, this is something. I'm trying to get at this is what he said No one knows what it would do to a creative brain to think creatively continuously Perhaps the brain like the heart must devote most of its time to rest between beats But I doubt that this is true I hope it is not because interactive computers can give us our first look at unfettered thought Now for better or for worse, I stand before you today as someone who believes that that is true and from everything that I am reading and hearing Including the keynote just a few hours before The need to think creatively on a more and more continuous basis is what we might say the 21st century Demands of us. It's what the 21st century is made of and it's no accident. We have done this we ingenious human beings and This glimpse of unfettered thought this machine that has changed the universe is Intensively interesting it can go awry in so many ways But the hope that is there is also I think very strong if we can rise to this and as I say sounds awfully grandiose and I apologize for this But that really is the goal of this faculty staff development experience By the end we should be able to get to a profound understanding of what Alan Kay meant When he said in my favorite quotation about computers that a computer is an instrument whose music is ideas If there's a way this experience can get faculty staff grad students a little bit closer to that I simply believe that good innovations will come that people will be able to think way way Outside the box and then perhaps begin to understand what's in the box or the smartphone or the implant or whatever It's going to be over the next ten years. They'll begin to approach that as well So I'll end with a pitch and then we'll have some time maybe for some Q&A the pitch is It's really really hard to be part of this network All you have to do is tell me that you're doing it We have a common syllabus we space the meetings out across about 12 weeks as long as we're roughly in sync It doesn't matter when you meet at your local schools Just week-to-week. We need to stay pretty much in sync. So the blogs will make sense to each other across the network I would very very much like to talk to anyone who would like to be part of this. We'll be having another experiment in faculty staff development starting up in the fall of 2012 at Virginia Tech With that which is not quite an altar call, but very close I will stop and I'd be happy to entertain any questions you might have. Thank you