AcademiX - The Center Cannot Hold: Living, Learning, and Leading in a Networked World

(March 26 I attended an Apple-sponsored AcademiX seminar at MIT. Or most of it--had to dash back to the office for a meeting in the afternoon and I didn't make it back for the end of the day. What I went to, however, was quite good.

Here are my notes, raw and uncorrected except for formatting, with occasional comments in brackets.)

[This particular presentation was the highlight of the day--very inspiring.]

The Center Cannot Hold: Living, Learning, and Leading in a Networked World
Dr. Paul D. Hammond, Director of Digital Initiatives, Department of English and Dr. Richard E. Miller Chair, Department of English and Executive Director, Plangere Writing Center Rutgers University

Very exciting for English teachers to speak at MIT.

Explanation of title – Yeats, advent of WW2 [I don't know why, but it's weird to see Yeats in Keynote template]

Hammond’s work on American apocalypticism.

Unprecedented economy, environment, government

We need to begin to imagine how to teach differently – not squeeze same old thought into new tube of toothpaste, but fundamentally different.

Miller notes that change is unprecedented because it is global. But wait: crisis or opportunity? That’s what we in education are asking ourselves.

Leopard screenshot: this is the machine of our age. But computers won’t solve our problems. Education experiences with unkept promises of tech. “If we can just get our students to Twitter about WoW in Second Life, we’ll be set.”

Turning off everything doesn’t work any better.

Hammond notes spent 8-12 hrs in lib in graduate school, but hasn’t been back yet…but reads more than ever.

Our info access is unprecedented, as is ability to get work out there. Beginning of a closing of a circle.

Teaching of writing has always been bedeviled by audience being untrue. Teacher says “think of your audience” Student says “I do…it’s you”

Ability to transform passive experience

Printing Press got us out of oral mode, but not into interactivity.

Getting students to engage with problems with our times—problems that don’t have solutions, but ways of being understood.

Enabling ways to drill down deeply beyond superficial aspects. Understanding of not only complexity but depth.

Books are not the main vehicle for people communicating the most important issues at this time. Books great tech for thinking, allowing for extended thought that is clearly endangered by (youtube example). Lends itself of grotesque triviality.

Best news we can get on Comedy Central.

Enabling students to see how things are put together, how do they take access to info and work on it themselves.

Our responsibility as humanists, compositionists is to teach our students to use this stuff. We haven’t done it well.

Designed a controlled experiment. Writers House.

• Access to ubiquitous computing
• Pedagogies that foster creativity and collaboration
• inspiring teachers of new media composition
• spaces that foster collaborative learning

We won’t be teaching keyboarding, MS Word—likely Final Cut, whatever it’s called then.

Delayed reaction to joke about ubiquitous computing in US.

Encourages us to spend time going to local high schools. Stories from comm. college professor abt what our nation has done to public education were shocking.

Education has always been designed first/foremost for convenience of teachers. Student-centered ed isn’t about petting Bobby, but putting him face to face with fundamental experience of learning--frustration, challenge, pushing through that.

How do we transform learning space from 100 years ago to create learning spaces for now?

There’s a diff btw computer labs and experimental labs

Need to teach students to think with tech the way we teach them to think with writing. Vast majority of use for tech right now is for goofing around.

Q: how hard is it to get teachers (on board)?
A: (Hammond) Central stumbling point is acknowledgment that 20 yo mimeographed notes don’t cut it. [Yes. I had some easily 20 year old overhead sheets that had been poorly transferred to PowerPoint in one of my library school classes just over three years ago. Not Cool.]

A: (Miller) When we say center cannot hold, need to move from 1.0 [sage on stage] to 2.0. How many PhD programs have changed in light of all this? Answering questions doesn’t mean we can think. We need to be experts not at content management but at facing the unknown – how do we fix the economy? [possibly I have really mangled this answer]

A: (Hammond) Notes that we don’t know what the implications for this are.

Q: What’s the role of Shakespeare in these kinds of projects?
A: (Miller) New bucket for carrying info to students, have to realize this (Keynote, PPT) is NOT like the slide projector. You don’t get from Ptolemy to Copernicus just by moving a few words around. Does not mean Shakespeare is not relevant. We will never have anything to say if we don’t know something deeply. Universities need to stand for knowing something in depth and complexity.

Q: [missed it]
A: Loss of newspapers, disappearance of snail mail are not modest changes. People say “sure, GM can go out of business…but why is my research budget cut?” These ppl have no center to their world. [extreme paraphrase]

Young people’s facility with technology grossly oversold. We don’t find curiosity, despite having access to everything. Creativity also missing. Collaboration may take place only in WoW.

[how does the library inspire curiosity at HLS?]

They are trying to invent genre of idea-driven visual essay.

We're missing the idea that you can think in these media (but we know you can entertain and sell crap)

Miller admits that they have taught a lot of terrible classes…new pedagogy, creativity needs failure. Hammond: like in science, there’s a lot of screwing up, doing over

Miller: question he asks sometimes: how many of you work in English departments with 5 IT people? (He does, but it took 12 years)