Forgetting Beginnings
Kathy A. Fitch
College of DuPage
Kafkaz@kwom.com or FitchK@cdnet.cod.edu
Because of its
potential influence on so many people’s beliefs and perceptions, the future of the
Net is connected to the future of community, democracy, education, science, and
intellectual life--some of the human institutions people hold most dear, whether or not
they know or care about the future of computer technology.
Howard Rheingold The Virtual Community:
Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier
After all, if there
isn't’t significant potential for positive change, why pursue computer assisted
pedagogy in the first place? Yet, as the social and economic push to technologize everyone
and everything reaches a fever pitch, more and more teachers and researchers are wisely
tempering their enthusiasm with incisive critique regarding the prospects of technology
and education.
Todd Taylor "Hyper-Editing" in Teaching
English in the Two-Year College, Special Technology Issue
To meet the goal of
fully educating every student we will need a fundamental change of attitude and
perspective. The current system focuses on how much students learn. The focus
instead ought to be on how much they want to learn. As soon as students want to
learn, most of the problems that plague the present education system evaporate:
students who genuinely want to learn will work hard to overcome any obstacles they find in
their paths.
Douglas S. Robertson, The New
Renaissance: Computers and the Next Level of Civilization
For me, writing this
right now, being a geek means being a willing member of a growing community of social
discontent, an intelligent community of libertarians, artists, dreamers, and
builders. Technology is just the ticket in, the magic is the discontent and
imagination, never being satisfied, and being creative about it. Everyone can use a
computer, not everyone is a geek.
Jesse Dailey in John Katz's Geeks: How Two
Lost Boys Rode the Internet out of Idaho
In retrospect, I'm
embarrassed by how long it took me to decide that it was okay to have fun for a living.
Neil Gershenfeld, When Things Start to Think
Pioneers rarely
sympathize with reluctants or understand their issues. Pioneers have different needs and
far more tolerance for frustration. They rarely understand reluctants or how they learn.
They find it difficult to design professional development for reluctants that works.
Jamie McKenzie, "Reaching the Reluctant Teacher"
I vividly recall a
particular car trip from my childhood because it was when I invented the laptop computer.
I had seen early teletype terminals; on this trip I accidentally opened a book turned on
its side and realized that there was room on the lower page for a small keyboard, and on
the upper page for a small display screen. I didn't have a clue how to make such a thing,
or what I would do with it, but I knew that I had to have one. I had earlier invented a
new technique for untying shoes, by pulling on the ends of the laces; I was puzzled and
suspicious when my parents claimed prior knowledge of my idea.
Neil Gershenfeld, When Things Start to Think
Even though I worry over things like access to technology, the schism between online delivery and online pedagogy, and the growing divide between early and late (or reluctant) adopters of technology, I'm not sure I really believe in "incisive critique" of instructional technology anymore, though I have hard evidence that I used to. That evidence comes in the form of an essay I wrote only four years ago for a class called, as so many things were then, "Transforming Education for the Twenty-First Century." (Occasionally, I think it might be a good thing to chuck all of the old writing cluttering up the memory of this machine on which I write. After all, there's little joy in encountering a fool only to discover that the fool in question not only bears a striking resemblance to oneself, but also had far fewer gray hairs, and much less of a personal quarrel with gravity.) At the very least, I think I used to be much more willing patiently to engage with nay-sayers than I am these days. Guess I could chalk it up to old-age or a general and growing tendency toward crotchetiness, but I think there may be more to it than that. Perhaps, once one has finally decided, like Gershenfeld, that it's "okay to have fun for a living" (186), it becomes increasingly more difficult cheerfully to countenance the prospect of anyone interfering with one's fun--or, by extension, with students' fun, which just might be indistinguishable from what Robertson calls their genuine desire to learn.
I suspect I'm not the only one who feels this way. More than suspect. Even the most cursory glance at various professional email list threads in the weeks following any major conference reveals incipient frustration with presentations that focus on, say, the potential instructional value of bulletin boards or email. How is it, folks understandably wonder, that these presentations are managing to materialize right now, quite as if the last decade or so's worth of exploration and publishing had never taken place? How is it that some teachers are only just now discovering the joys and pangs of email engagement, while others scramble to formulate the rubrics and procedures that will consistently allow teachers to secure professional recognition and tenure based on their extensive online activities, including teaching, research and publication? Folks seem to wonder, too, why so many teachers still wrestle with the question of whether to incorporate technology into education at all. It seems the most absurd of questions to those for whom computer assisted instruction (CAI) , whether in the form of web-enhanced or purely distance delivery (DE) courses, is simply a given. Much the same sort of sentiment arises when teachers hazard nay-saying posts detailing their doubts, their fears, their lack of experience, and their limited resources. A perfect barrage of "get with the program" and "just do it" type posts often results. Having grown weary of coaxing the reluctant from the safety of the trunk, more than a few of the early adopters or "pioneers", it seems, have taken to the virtual equivalent of simply peeling the reluctants' fingers from the bark by force. Even those CAI enthusiasts who would never behave quite so aggressively in physical life might at least allow themselves to indulge in either the fantasy of coercion or it's virtual equivalents, such as a strident post (what Fred Kemp calls an "email bocovir") or a barbaric MOO yawp, from time to time. And who can blame them? Some days, the frustration of being ready to build a better tree house only to find oneself thumping unceremoniously to the ground on account of someone else's gravity is simply too intense to be borne with any equanimity.
Still, guess I must grudgingly allow that the only slightly younger version of me had a point: namely, that all of us must begin somewhere in our interactions with technology. These days, as I spend more and more of my time shuttling back and forth among groups of "incisive critics"; groups of willing but somewhat hesitant followers; and groups of imaginative, discontented geeks, I'm discovering how vital it is deliberately to reacquaint myself with beginnings, however reluctantly I sometimes do so. Forgetting beginnings, I'm learning, is an occupational hazard best, but not easily, avoided. The stories below, then, represent my modest handful of small moments of rediscovering beginnings, sometimes joyfully, but often with a jolt of discomfort.
I should have known better, that's what. After all, I know that students tend to be more aggressive when they're hungry, a bit sluggish after they've eaten, so why didn't I figure, when the Director of our Honors Program invited me to serve on a pre-luncheon conference panel set to discuss "Instructional Technology in the New Millenium" (the best thing about the actual coming of the millenium may turn out be the disappearance of such titles, in all their infinite variations), that the rest of the panel, not to mention the better part of the audience, would end up treating me as the appetizer? My second clue should have been the consistent refusal to let me reserve a lab, maybe line up a demo or two of what some of our teachers and students are doing. But, no. No lab, no demo, no handouts, for cryin' out loud, would be necessary. In fact, I was repeatedly reassured, I shouldn't really even bother preparing any remarks. We'd keep the discussion informal, opening it up to audience participation at the earliest opportunity. Since I already have tenure, I guess I can confess right off that it sure ain't easy being stupid, which means it's often quite the chore being me.
Well. Conference day rolled around. Everyone gathered for coffee and sweets. The college president made a brief appearance to say all the sorts of uplifting things college presidents are forever pressed into saying at such functions. First couple of sessions went swimmingly. Then, the panel. In retrospect, I think there's a kind of a cosmic suitability to my ending up at the far left end of the table, though if pressed about it at the time I think I would have muttered something self-defensively unintelligible about damnable right-wing conspiracies. Anyway, anyone who doesn't believe that it's possible for a person visibly to shrink in a matter of--oh, say, fifteen or twenty minutes--should have been there to witness the wilting first hand. The first panelist's extensive quoting of Birkets and Postman didn't bug me too much. After all, a devil's advocate or two spices up any discussion, and it doesn't do to wish away the influence of either Elegies or Technopoly when discussing CAI. So fine. But, the second panelist launched into a rather strident attack on the very notion that computers might be useful to students at all, much less to their teachers. Can't remember if it was that panelist or the third one who dwelt for quite awhile on cybersex and cyberstalking, all by way of exemplifying how computers magnify what's worst in humanity to begin with, steadily eroding literacy to boot. It was definitely the fourth, though, who began listing all of the reasons why she simply couldn't be expected to employ these tools: no time, they change too quickly, there are too many of them, the payback is doubtful. Somewhere in there I began taking notes. Somewhere in there I wished I'd pressed the coordinator a smidgen harder about the wisdom of convening this session in a lab. Somewhere in there, I really did shrink.
My turn, at last. Wouldn't it be lovely if I could claim to have swayed crowd and fellow panelists alike with a brilliant, impassioned, but delicately modulated oration? Ah, if only. What I did do was begin explaining how my students use computers, how much I'd learned in the last two or three years from the many excellent teachers (but where in the hell were they now when I really needed them, huh?) I'd met online, and how I saw the transformation of my teaching and my students' learning over the ten years or so since I'd stepped into a lab classroom for the first time as an overwhelmingly positive thing. Only, I doubt I was that coherent about it. Maybe I mentioned that my own critical tendencies concern pedagogy--wouldn't want anyone to mistake me for a fan of attempting to stick traditional classroom techniques in an online package and call it a day--but that's probably just my desire to create a tolerable past asserting itself. All I can say for sure is that it seemed to me as though the room was eerily silent--my voice as small as me. At some point, panelist one accused me of being "in love with the machine." He clearly didn't mean it as a compliment. When I pointed out that the books he seemed so desperate to preserve, as if they were on point of disappearing in a puff of acrid smoke, count as technology too, he sneered (well, it's my story, and it felt like a sneer to me) that next I'd be saying that pencils are technological marvels, too. Before I could even squeak out a weak "well, aren't they?" one of our history professors, quietly confident and coolly persuasive in exactly the ways I wasn't managing, stood to explain the history of the book in education.
I don't remember too much after that; not really. There was some discussion of the educational audio/video revolution that never transpired, I think. I'm pretty sure I pointed out that it did, too, transpire ("did so!" of course, is the refuge of the already defeated) and had in fact proven so pervasive as to seem invisible to us now if we weren't paying attention. Then a member of the audience explained that he didn't trust his students to conduct research on the web. Much agreement, there, though I did manage to squeeze in something lame about how he hadn't better allow them into the library, then, either. Perfect reams of junk knocking around in there, as well, you know. I recall, too, being alternately grateful for and frustrated by the colleague who tried to help me out with her extensive, chapter and verse, knowledge of hypertext theory. I did then and always will love every inch of her terminally dissertated soul, but knew that most folks hadn't the foggiest notion of what she was driving at, and didn't care to. This was a crowd in which rhizomes, panopticons, and the inherent hypertextuality of all things simply weren't going to cut it: "Pioneers rarely sympathize with reluctants or understand their issues. Pioneers have different needs and far more tolerance for frustration. They rarely understand reluctants or how they learn. They find it difficult to design professional development for reluctants that works." (Indeed. Plus, the poor things mightn't even realize they're being pioneering until it's too late to do anything about it.) My last crystalline memory of the session is of something that transpired as it ended: panelist one, a handsome white-haired gentleman who looked every inch the Honors Director he was, shook my hand and said, "you think I'm a Luddite, young lady, but I'm not." Too bad the college president, intrepid supporter of all things CAI that is, hadn't hung around a wee bit longer.
Lunch time finally, blessedly came. One of our Art professors brought along a lap top and the interactive CD-ROM one of her students had made as his final project for the course. It was beautiful--the perfect dessert, and precisely the right concoction for ministering to a teacher distressed.
Interlude One--The Lost City of Rapid City, SD: Only a few weeks later, at CW 1999 in Rapid City (my first time at a CW conference), I find myself surrounded by folks for whom technology is a given--endlessly exciting, challenging, and provocative, to be sure, but nonetheless a given. How refreshingly odd to lounge on the grass between (okay, occasionally instead of) sessions, chatting with graduate students, instructors, professors, and entrepreneurs from all around the country--nay, the globe--about their IT dreams and adventures. Some incisive critics here and there, of course, but here Jesse Dailey's magic is palpable at every turn: "the discontent and imagination, never being satisfied, and being creative about it" (188). A glory of geeks. Something to aspire to.
Interlude Two--MOOing is Dead: With all the annoying enthusiasm of a novice, I approach the Liberal Arts division's computer liaison to ask if we might gather the group of English Computer Users together for an introductory session on MOOing. She quickly agrees. (This would be the self-same woman who, twelve years earlier, when I was a member of our part-time faculty, set me on this odd CAI journey. After a seminar she hosted then, I approached her to ask how I might get some time in one of these labs. She said, "by asking." Two weeks later, there I was.) Good turn out for the session. Projecting the MOOs onto the big screen, I begin by showing some of the rudimentary rooms and objects I've created. Eric Crump and the other helpers he's generously gathered to assist us in this endeavor appear, as promised, to teach and to chat. Everyone seems to have a grand time playing around, and all depart laden with books, handouts, and URL's galore, plus the promise of guidance, should they need it, in downloading and installing MOO clients. A week or two later, annoying enthusiasm unabated, I approach the director of our instructional technology division to inquire about installing clients on my lab's computers so students can MOO. "MOOing," she tells me, unemotionally but unequivocally, "is dead." However, I'm free to use WebBoard if I want, and am encouraged to sign up for the IntraKal workshop in the summer. That afternoon, the folks at Super Crown call to inform me that the six copies of High Wired I've ordered are ready for pick up. I drive around with them in my trunk for weeks, feeling somehow moved every time I nestle a gallon of milk next to the stack. One night, on some MOO or another, I inform a colleague that MOOing is dead. She says, "yeah, I know." Oh.
Gosh, it's better than okay. An unfamiliar feeling, still, but definitely right. My favorite computer liaison--one of my favorite people, actually--asks if I can pop into a workshop she's hosting for a neighboring community college's English faculty. They're learning to use Connect.Net, and she could use some helpers. I pop in right after class, and soon find myself happily absorbed in teaching such basics as what a web browser and a search engine are, and such "death grip" loosening activities as how to create a link. Could anything be finer than cutting people loose into this realm for the first time? Watching as things begin to click? Dashing from student to student, from computer to computer? Demonstrating all the cool bells and whistles? Getting to wax unapologetically poetic about how wonderful, magical, and truly useful they are? Therapeutic, I tell ya'. Clearly, I ought to be paying them for the pleasure.
What actually happens, though, is this: after the workshop I'm invited to spend several weeks consulting on the phone with the CC's Writing Program Director, and conferencing with several of her faculty members. Apart but together in front of our distant computers, we negotiate the process of setting up classes, posting assignments, collecting and responding to papers, sending messages, and facilitating group discussions. The group soon decides to set up a mailing list among themselves to share experiences and ideas as they go. Great fun, all around, and it takes my mind temporarily off of being confined to my bed for the duration of a new pregnancy. When, several weeks later, a check shows up in the mail, I'm really dumbstruck. Torn between depositing it and framing it, I let it linger on the top corner of my ancient (rather than antique) roll top desk for a solid month. At first, I wonder if this is somehow like giving a friend a ride home only to be simultaneously insulted and embarrassed when she insists on pressing gas money into my hand, but then I decide it really is okay to get paid for having fun, and generously give myself permission to do it again at the earliest opportunity.
Interlude Three--Flunking KinderWeb: By August, my belly's swelling and my son has begun kindergarten. When I ask his teacher if she's ever considered putting her weekly calendar on a web page as well as distributing it in paper copies, she promptly assigns me to make the web page. (See "it sure ain't easy being stupid" as above. When will I ever learn?. A mom who persists in asking questions like that out loud soon finds herself whipping up three thousand seventy two lemon squares for tomorrow night's PTA meeting) For three months, I do just that, updating the little web weekly, spending hours happily absorbed in searching out interesting links and activities on everything from barn owls and Painted Lady butterflies to elementary geometry and proper dental hygiene. The teacher is happy enough to discover how the web can enrich her teaching, but only about two out of the fifty sets of kindergartners' parents ever access the page. In short, I'm spending a ton of time on something almost nobody's reading or playing with at all, which makes me, as it turns out, not so happy after all. Psychic income might not put milk and books in the trunk or a check on the ancient desk, but it does matter. Not getting paid--somehow, some way--really isn't much fun at all.
By the end of November, I abandon the project. When teacher calls to inform me that my son is in trouble for running where and when he shouldn't have, she also asks if I might consider breathing life back into the page, maybe even consider continuing it next year. I promise to get back to her soon, but I know I won't. Instead, I ruminate. Less than a dozen computers in that whole school. The only parents and students accessing the web or any web are those with, ta dum, access. Perhaps, rather than piddling around with a web site hardly anyone but me can read, I ought to be devoting my time to scrounging up and distributing machines, but how might I even begin? Whole thing makes me feel gloomy enough to wish Timmy were home and I were less ungainly so we could spend the afternoon tearing aimlessly around the yard. School, it seems, doesn't involve nearly enough unstructured tearing around time. On the radio, talk-show callers argue dreamily about how the eventual winner of the apparently rapidly growing Illinois Lottery's pot ought to spend her multi-millions. Drifting into a fantasy about community technology centers--humming high-tech teaching/learning coops with a welcoming air--I shuffle off to the couch for an afternoon nap.
Interlude Four--The MOO is Dead; Long Live the MOO: MOOing may be dead, but I decide to attend TeacherFest: NCTE's First Online Conference anyway. Besides making for great learning and great fun (if that's not too redundant), the MOO sessions provide me with my sole means of conference attendance for the duration of my pregnancy. Some of the denizens of Shanebuck's Online, a tea room and Friday night gathering place for the most devoted, not to mention lovably insane, of the growing group of NCTE MOOers, decide to throw me a virtual baby shower. At first, I figure they really do mean virtual as in
Pats hands Kafkaz a
present tied with a pretty pink bow.
Kafkaz unwraps the present and finds . . .
Pats says "A year's supply of calendars!"
which might be a fair approximation of our typically play-laced exchanges, but that's not what they mean at all. Boxes begin arriving at my door. Rather than open them, I stack them next to the computer. The stack grows and grows. My befuddled husband asks, "you've never actually met these people, right?" Well, yes and no. Right but wrong. By the time the party has come and gone, our unborn baby's closet and dresser fairly burst with bibs, buntings, and baby paraphernalia of every stripe. Some days, I sneak into the room, running a finger along the wee socks and such with a kind of awe. I wish the panelists of my discontent could be here right now. I wish they could understand as deeply as I do that there needn't be anything illusory about virtual community. "Gift economy" takes on new, humbling, meaning.
Organically would appear to be the obvious answer, but when were these things ever logical or, for that matter, natural? Under the auspices of the Center for Independent Learning, College of DuPage's Online College inherits some of least appealing aspects of the structure, procedures, and pedagogy of distance learning projects that have been around for a good long while: common, inflexible syllabi; canned content; minimal interaction with students--all the things that inspire uncharacteristic foot dragging among the half of the English faculty generally eager to go online in any form. Once the Online College unilaterally adopts IntraKal, a companion intracampus discussion list for online teachers is born. Home on maternity leave, I don't strictly qualify for inclusion, but by golly I endured the introductory workshop, so my name is duly added to the subscribers list. Takes me less than a week to cause trouble.
Someone posts a message about the stress of adjusting to teaching online. I reply with a link to an article, "Cyberstress: Asynchronous Anxiety or Worried in Cyberspace--I Wonder if My Teacher Got My Email?" that I think might be helpful. Next day, I get a long, public message from an experienced (nineteen plus years, he informs me--at the not so tender age of thirty-seven, I often wonder exactly when "so there, young lady!" won't apply anymore) DE instructor explaining that, essentially, I have no right at all to contribute to the discussion, and proposing that I've cavalierly hurt the original poster's feelings by presuming to suggest dubiously "expert" solutions when all she was really after was commiseration. After all, what could I know about the long hours, the struggle to learn a new program, the "zero at the bone" when the technology fails, the fear that students might be slipping away?
But . . . but, I sputter to myself, that article is a form of commiseration--more so than usual, as these things go--as well as a collection of perfectly thoughtful suggestions for easing "cyberstress." Hadn't I discovered the piece myself solely because some generous soul posted it on another list? And why, ultimately, had no one on this list bothered to read it? (Or, my more miserly self wonders, did they read it but not much like the plug for some face to face contact, the suggestion that some hybridity might be a good thing? When, some weeks later, an instructor posts a request to keep her previous quarter's courses online so that students with incompletes can submit their required number of postings to the long abandoned discussion area, I'm pretty sure that's it. When someone else mentions that several of his students have completed the course work by the third or fourth week of the thirteen week quarter, I'm fairly certain.) Why assume that any teacher not solely devoted to pure DE couldn't possibly comprehend any of online education's unique challenges? Why this disconnect between DEers and CAIers? What possible long-term stake can any of us have in maintaining such artificial, albeit familiar, boundaries?
Part of the answer might be that much of what I think of as an online college grows invisibly, from the ground up, thriving quietly in the spaces no technology plan or departmental authority reaches, quite oblivious to top-down initiatives or issues of turf. It grows, in short, like a volunteer or a weed: all of its own accord when nobody is looking, taking firm root in even the most seemingly inhospitable of environments. Then, too, online learning and distance education aren't equivalent, despite their many intersections, and the many books and articles that treat the terms practically interchangeably. Still sputtering ineffectually in the sanctity of my own mind, I happen across "University With Long History in Correspondence Ventures Onto Net," which examines, among other things, the sometimes conflicting, sometimes complementary histories and goals of DE and CAI. It begins to occur to me that the best thing might be to find a way to engineer the formation of a hybrid grassroots volunteer movement. So, I swallow the sputter in favor of composing the following reply, reproduced below in all its unretouched glory:
I actually think you
raise a potentially valuable area of discussion here. Both the faculty and students
engaging in various incarnations of online teaching and learning represent a broad range
of interests and experiences that could either gum up the works something fierce as folks
jockey for (largely illusory, to my way of thinking) status and position, or might
actually be turned to our collective advantage as a community of learners and educators.
For me, that range represents a wealth of possibility. The expert colleague or student who
has accumulated experiences far exceeding my own or formulated an approach I'd never
thought of has much to teach me, but so do the colleagues and students still struggling to
figure out how to conduct an online search, how to navigate a web site, how to cope with
seemingly overwhelming amounts of email--even how to use a mouse. If the former remind me
of how much I have to learn--and graciously share it with me, the latter remind me never
to take that learning for granted--and graciously allow me to recapture beginnings with
which I might otherwise lose touch. The teacher who has forgotten more than the students
will ever know, after all, isn't half so valuable as the one who can manage
simultaneously to accumulate experience, retain some memory of what it is like not to
know, and savor the both the struggle and the excitement that learning something new
always generates. In this arena, as in most, there always will be something new worth
learning.
Some of the most intriguing articles and presentations I've seen in the last year have
been by or about folks making early--sometimes even their very first-- forays into CAI,
and for me those have contrasted with the "early adopter" pieces in instructive
ways. For instance, a panel of grad students at CW 1999, describing their first lab
courses, kept remarking on the frustration of attempting to gain "control," to
"get everyone on the same page," and so forth. At twenty something, their
experience certainly couldn't have spanned nineteen years, nor would I have wished it to.
There was, for instance, something refreshingly frank and unjaundiced about one young
woman's comment that of course she was more comfortable in the lecture oriented classroom,
for that is where she had come of age as a successful student. And something refreshingly
self-aware about her determination to teach "webby" classes again so that she
could explore other means of defining what "successful" teaching and learning
might look like. Meanwhile, at other sessions, long time users described their growing
discomfort in traditional classrooms in which "the students face forward in pretty
rows, and keep expecting us to lecture." Somehow, their gradual transformation caught
them by surprise.
To me, that tension of transition--on either end of the spectrum--is the crux of the
matter. Though not a futurist either by trade or by nature, I can't help envisioning a
time when categories like "the online college" will be a thing of the past: the
boundaries between "online" and "traditional" much less clear, far
more permeable. Already, "online" pedagogies are permeating our overall sense of
the possibilities in education. Those "newbie" grad students may never teach DE
courses exclusively, but they'll never again envision a classroom that doesn't incorporate
at least some "webby" aspects. If they manage to hang on to that youthful
self-awareness of theirs, they may even do a pretty good job of remembering the valuable
discomfort of entering a new sphere--of stepping willingly out of their areas of
expertise, just as we ask students to do. Similarly, the DE devotees will never again
enter a traditional classroom without bringing their sense of community-based learning
with them. Perhaps all unaware, they'll be silently transforming what counts as
"traditional," maybe speeding us toward the day when such firm boundaries are
but distant memories.
Of course, by then there will be whole new wrinkles to iron out. That's at least half the
fun. Here's hoping the upstart newbies give me hell when their time comes. What better way
to enjoy the benefits of experience, while avoiding fossildom?
Kathy
No onlist reply to that. I don't suppose the several off-list responses from friends variously taking me to task for being too restrained or complimenting me for being exactly restrained enough really count. In any case, I continue sending links and announcements to the Online College list as the spirit moves me--even send several general invitations to join us online or in Fort Worth for CW2K. No takers. Nary a one. Meanwhile, the preceding year's accumulation of failures and epiphanies begins resolving into a renewed, if still somewhat amorphous, determination to remember beginnings--to begin again and again, maybe quietly in those in between spaces, but nonetheless inexorably, like volunteer or a weed.
Interlude Five--Hybrid Grassroots Volunteers: The interim Associate Dean (my favorite computer liaison in a new guise) calls to ask if I'd like to participate in an attempt at engineering hybrid grassroots volunteers. Would I! Here's the plan. As it stands, the Online College, in an attempt to increase course offerings rapidly, will pay for each course to be developed precisely once. So, for instance, the first person to create on online version of English 101 essentially single-handedly creates the collection of materials and the sequence of assignments that all subsequent students and instructors must follow pretty much to the letter--that's the worst of the DE inheritance asserting itself. (Ever notice how, in academia, precedents harden into granite-faced obstacles with breathtaking rapidity?) Thus, the foot dragging among the English faculty, most of whom, I suspect, have "academic freedom or bust!" tattooed somewhere on their beloved personages. Why not, then, create a class together? In other words, why not create an endlessly growing and mutating pool of ideas, assignments, links, and so on which would count as "the" class, thereby fulfilling the Online College's letter of the law, without tying any of us down unnecessarily? In a sense, what we envision creating is the virtual equivalent of an active course file, but with much more frequent, hopefully continuous, revision, and with supporting documents included. So, if every 102 instructor must include a unit on argumentation, for example, we could collect all of the things that our computer users are already doing to fulfill that requirement, so that any teacher wishing to undertake the fully Online version of the class--or any teacher at all--could copy and paste, combine, adapt, add to, or otherwise make use of our virtual 102 teaching library as she saw fit. Creating the seed of that living library is my project for this summer. Probably, I'll give up weeding the gardens on account of it.
Last Saturday, my husband woke me to the news that our son had written on my car--front passenger side door, thank you very much--with a rock. What a lesson in warring impulses! Part of me figured said husband would never have found the whole scenario so vastly amusing had his car been the slate of choice. Still, the boy is only five, a rock and a nice stretch of red fiberglass glinting in the morning sun irresistably stir up the urge to compose, the letters were indisputably well-formed, and the spelling flawless. Everyone--every writer, every teacher, every student, every reluctant, latent, or pioneering CAI enthusiast--must begin somewhere. Forgetting beginnings simply doesn't pay. To have forgotten them in that moment of surveying my boy's handiwork would have been to bubble over with an anger that would undoubtedly have etched both of us with a regret far deeper than the etching in the finish of the car. Besides, Robertson is right: "students who genuinely want to learn will work hard to overcome any obstacles they find in their paths" (95). The same might be said of little boys with a genuine desire to send a lasting message, for there on my car, which I will likely keep forever, are emblazoned the words "I LOVE MY MOM" all in capital letters. Ah, not only stated, but shouted, underlined, and decorated with a heart.
Probably, then, my introduction here is a lie. I do still believe in incisive criticism, very much so, but now, finally, I'm beginning to appreciate that the instruments, objects, figures, and intentions of every incision matter. If, somewhere, the panelists who sank their incisors into me at that pre-luncheon panel a year ago (who incised me so thoroughly, in fact, that theirs was the sole story to insist on being cast in the past tense) have loosened their death grips from the trunk only long enough to carve a "no" deeply into the bark (or into me!), well, at least the discussion and the movement, however imperceptible, have begun. Indeed, those panelists, along with every character in every story here, deserve the credit for making me want to learn how not to fail at facilitating others' beginnings, or at continuing my own. Just as Gershenfeld "invented" both the laptop computer and the most efficient means of untying shoelaces, and just as my son simultaneously "invented" both cave art and graffiti, so will teachers and students alike continue, for years to come, "inventing" email, bulletin boards, MOOs, online communities, and all of the other tools, applications, and learning environments that so many of us do or may come to, all unawares, take for granted. Celebrating those inventions--those sometimes plodding, reluctant, redundant, backward, all too incisive and generally maddening, but always inherently worthy beginnings--sure isn't always easy. I suspect, though, that most all of the things I "hold most dear" really do depend upon it.
Crouch, Mary Lou and Virginia Montecino. "Cyberstress: Asynchronous Anxiety or Worried in Cyberspace--I Wonder if My Teacher Got My Email?" Presentation for the Teaching in Community Colleges Online Conference, April 1-3, 1997. http://leahi.kcc.hawaii.edu/org/tcc_conf97/pres/crouch.html (3 May 2000).
Day, Michael. "Teachers at the Crossroads: Evaluating Teaching in New Electronic Environments." Presentation to the 2nd Collaboration Online Conference. http://www.sdsmt.edu/online-courses/is/hum375/cybercon2.html (2 May 2000).
Gershenfeld, Neil. When Things Start to Think. New York: Holt, 1999.
Katz, John. Geeks: How Two Lost Boys Rode the Internet Out of Idaho. New York: Villard, 2000.
Kemp, Fred. "Battle Beyond the Millenium: the Internet Versus the Teacher Culture: Are You Ready to Rumble?" Keynote Address, Computers and Writing Conference, Rapid City, South Dakota, School of Mines and Technology. May 30, 1999 http://english.ttu.edu/kemp/personal/works/cw99.keynote.htm (1 May 2000).
McDaniel, Wilma Elizabeth. "Night Treasures." An Ear to the Ground: An Anthology of Contemporary American Poetry. Ed. Marie Harris and Kathleen Aguero. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1989.
McKenzie, Jamie. "Reaching the Reluctant Teacher." 1999. http://fno.org/sum99/reluctant.html (3 May 2000).
Mendels, Pamela. "University With Long History in Correspondence Ventures Onto Net." The New York Times on the Web. October 20, 1999: Education Column. http://www.nytimes.com/library/tech/99/10/cyber/ education/20education.html (3 May 2000).
National Council of Techers of English. "CCCC Promotion and Tenure Guidelines for Work With Technology." Approved: November 1998. http://www.ncte.org/positions/4c-tp-tech.html (3 May 2000).
Rheingold, Howard. The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier. New York: Addison-Wesley, 1993.
Robertson, Douglas S. The New Renaissance: Computers and the Next Level of Civilization. New York: Oxford UP, 1998.
Searchable Online Archive of Recipes, "White Chocolate Macademia Nut Cookies," March 17, 1996. http://soar.berkeley.edu/recipes/baked-goods/desserts/cookies/wc-macadamia-nut1.html (7 May 2000). (Note: doubling or tripling the suggested serving size yields best results.)
Taylor, Todd. "Hyper-Editing." Teaching English in the Two-Year College. Special Issue: Technology. 23.3 (1996): 163-164.
Whitman, Walt. "I Saw in Louisiana a Live-Oak Growing." Leaves of Grass: A Norton Critical Edition. Ed. Sculley Bradley and Harold W. Blodgett. New York: Norton, 1973.
My neighbor frets about his lawn,
and he has reasons--
dandelions, crabgrass, a passing dog.
He scowls up at my maple, rake
clogged and trembling,
as its seeds spin down--
not angels, moths, but paratroopers
carried by the wind,
planting barricades along his eaves.
He's on the ladder now, scaring
the nibbling squirrels,
scattering starlings with his water hose.
Thank God his aim is bad
or he'd have drowned
or B-B gunned the lot. Now he
shakes a fist of seeds at me
where I sit poeming
my dandelions, crabgrass and a passing dog.
I like my neighbor, in his way
he cares for me. Look what
I've given him--something to feel superior to. (Lucien Stryk)
Sleep
keeps me waiting
so I stand at the window
and watch night
turn small green pears
to silver
they hang like rare treasures
I dare not touch
from a tree
I never saw before (Wilma Elizabeth McDaniel)
. . . and though the live-oak glistens there in Louisiana/ solitary in a wide flat space,/ Uttering joyous leaves all its life without a friend or lover near,/ I know very well I could not. (Walt Whitman)
About the Storyteller: Kafkaz insists that, henceforth, substantial refreshments (preferably white-chocolate macadamia nut cookies the size of hub caps) must be served prior to and/or during and throughout her attendance at any pre-luncheon panel, presentation, committee meeting, or spontaneous hallway tete-a-tete in which there is any risk whatsoever of either her relative youth and inexperience or her unabashed technophilia being alluded to in any form or fashion. While she realizes this condition can be no panacea for the myriad perils of professional engagement, she figures it's as good a beginning as any.