Nicht Diese Töne

Stop SOPA and PIPA

2012-01-17T22:05:00.000-08:00

In support of the ongoing blackouts and various web-based protests to ongoing legislation in the US House and Senate, I encourage my readers to go to contact their representatives. This site will tell you who to call. Thank you.

College Education, College Sports

2012-01-11T14:50:00.000-08:00

The United States is the only country in the world that weds higher education and amateur athletics inextricably together. The University of Michigan, to most of us, is not just an elite post-secondary research institution, but a football team, the home of Denard Robinson, famous rival of Ohio State. If I type "michi" into Google, auto-complete suggests "Michigan Football," "Michigan State Football," and "Michigan Football Schedule." Somehow, this doesn't strike us as odd.

A narrow view of the phenomenon suggests that football is primarily a marketing mechanism. Schools like Michigan attract both perspective applicants and alumni donors by virtue of having a competitive and successful football program. Defeating rivals, landing in major bowls, and fielding exciting players are all a boon to the University as a whole because, like any good marketing, successful football leads to more visibility and more positive emotional associations with the school on the part of donors and prospectives. All of which is true. Football, in particular, is a wonderful way for American colleges and universities to promote their brand.

Branding alone, however, does not account for the phenomenon as a whole. Any given university may want a great football program - or a great athletics program broadly - for branding and marketing reasons, but does the system on the whole really benefit higher education all that much? While the University of Michigan may be better off with a great football team than with a bad one, is the entire state university system better off by virtue of their football programs? I don't have an answer for that question, but it's worth posing.

Now, it's well-nigh impossible to imagine American higher education without competitive athletics. College football won't be going away, even if we could somehow prove that college football is bad for universities and colleges. That said, a better understanding of where sports fits into the ecology of higher education in the United States might help us think about hot-button issues in college athletics, including the debate over whether or not athletes should be paid.

The argument over paying college athletes - and especially big-time football and basketball players - has been hashed and rehashed in popular media. In short, the argument for paying players is, essentially, that they are making tons of money for their schools (and for media companies) with almost no compensation. The argument, at its heart, is capitalistic: college athletes do not get to participate in the free market for their services and skills, and that is unfair because there is a substantial market that others are participating in (coaches, ADs, ESPN, etc) built upon those very skills. The argument against paying college athletes is, broadly, that college sports are supposed to be an amateur endeavor, and that colleges and universities are primarily geared towards educational missions. Enrolling in a university - even on a football scholarship - means that you are a student first and foremost. Paying athletes for playing college sports, then, would further degrade the educational mission of the university. At its heart, what this argument really says is, "colleges and universities are not a capitalistic free market; they're a socialized public service."

Now, I'm not going to weigh in on either of those arguments, because the debate seems to me to be taking place in the wrong arena. There's no question that college athletes ought - in a capitalist system - to be compensated at market value for the benefits they bring to their institutions. There's also no question that colleges and universities do not by-and-large operate in anything resembling a true capitalist system. The reality is, both sides are right because neither is willing to admit the systematic and philosophical assumptions of the other.

The debate, however, is academic, because the route we're traveling down is unequivocally the capitalistic one. So what is that likely to look like?

In a purely capitalistic, free market higher education system institutions would have to pay their own players according to their market value. Instead of offering a scholarship to a desired recruit, a football program would have to offer a scholarship plus a salary or contract. In essence, college athletics would become professional, and colleges and universities would create professional athletics teams that operate alongside the University. Realistically, a great many of the current D1 college athletics programs would not be able to afford the competition this would create, and so we'd be left with a small number of elite athletics programs at wealthy schools that can afford to fund not only athletic scholarships, but also player salaries. As a result, the little money that travels from athletic departments to other parts of the university - in the form of both media contracts and donations - would almost certainly disappear (hence athletics would truly be "alongside" and not really "part" of the university).

From the athlete's perspective, there's nothing particularly wrong with this. He is likely to be better off in this system than in the current one. Unless, of course, he is a she. Or plays a sport other than basketball and football. Or isn't quite good enough to warrant anything beyond a scholarship. In our current system, very few athletic departments are profitable, thanks in large part to the many sports that college athletes play but no one watches. In a system with increased payouts to athletes in high-profile sports, it seems unlikely that those unprofitable sports programs would continue. And in a free market, that's as it should be. If women's volleyball can't turn a profit - or at least break even - it shouldn't exist.

Now, all of my analysis here is built upon the assumption that colleges, and not media outlets or other companies, will be paying student-athlete salaries. I think that's a safe assumption, but someone might argue that an elimination of the amateur status of college athletes would have little effect on institutions themselves, as very very few college athletes would warrant exorbitant salaries that schools could not afford. Rather, they might say, companies like ESPN or Nike or whoever would be the real payees in the form of sponsorships and commercial spots and so on. That's a fair assumption, but free agency in other American - and international - sports leagues suggests to me that institutions overpaying for marginal players is a more likely outcome.

As for the educational missions of institutions of higher learning in the truly free market system, it seems to me that they will be little changed. The biggest change is happening already anyway: less and less public money would go towards colleges and universities, which in turn would search for new revenue streams, including, most importantly, increased tuition and decreased financial aid. Professionalization of college athletics might infuse new revenues into the higher education system, but those revenues would almost certainly be dedicated primarily (or exclusively) towards funding the professional athletics programs. More and more universities would have to adopt the D3 sports model, where every player is a walk-on and no athletic scholarships are awarded because of how expensive it would be to field a competitive (and therefore economically viable) athletics program.

There is a good argument for this kind of system: it would allow the great majority of institutions the chance to essentially do away with one of their biggest expenses (both in terms of money and human capital). In a free market, if the University of Hawaii cannot really afford a D1 football program (let alone D1 basketball, baseball, volleyball, etc), it simply won't have one. In the end, that might actually be better for the university.

It's not hard to see, of course, that this is the direction we're going. The super-conference phenomenon is a consolidation of the most economically robust football programs into a bloq that effectively excludes the University of Hawaiis of the world from the most meaningful and, therefore, lucrative events like big-time bowl games and high-profile rivalries. It is probably only a matter of time before athlete compensation becomes a reality, and college sports is professionalized, as the institutions that can afford to pay their football players will already have divided themselves from those that cannot. The end of the whole process is, ultimately, that college sports will be an extremely visible part of higher education, with very little actual bearing on the educational missions of those schools.

While the professionalization of college athletics may not have too direct a bearing on the educational missions of colleges and universities, the underlying trend towards increased capitalization will. That's it's own post, but some of the results are already apparent: increased tuition, more and more course content moving online (though frequently with only dubious credentials, if any at all, available to graduates), an increasingly large access divide among socio-economic classes (that is, rich white kids who can afford tuition go to elite states schools or liberal arts colleges, while poor minority students go to vocational schools or online for-profits), and an ever-growing student debt bubble. Which all raises a significant question that the sports debate largely ignores, but shouldn't: what is the purpose of college education, both for the student and for society at large?

Remember?

2011-12-06T11:52:00.000-08:00

A short poem inspired by accidental poetry overheard in a hall.

Remember When I Crocheted the Virus?

Remember when I crocheted the virus?
It was soft and deadly plush
Like afternoon rain growing into a thunderstorm,
Setting off a wildfire.
What I'm saying is, I authored that destruction,
But I made it with care, out of love.

Response to "Toc"

2011-11-28T22:00:00.000-08:00

From my "Future of English Studies" course. Toc is a new-media literature project. Here's the website. Despite my critique below, it is worth taking a look at.

As a piece of writing, Toc has its virtues. As a piece of electronic media, it's a disaster.

Disclaimer: I'm a gamer. I have been since I was young. I grew up on Civilization II, Front Page Sports Baseball, and Doom. As important to me in college as the "Great Books" and the discussions that went with them was the purchase of my first real computer, and the weekend (and wee-morning) hours I poured into Knights of the Old Republic, Neverwinter Nights (1 and 2), and countless other strategy and RPG titles. It is true that video games often do not contain great - or even good - writing, and that their stories, when they have any, are largely derivative. What they do well, however, is interface.

Toc suffers because it is "interactive" without the interaction actually amounting to anything. Sure, there's a certain randomness (and, the authors would likely argue, timelessness) to the order in which you encounter the various fragments of the story, based upon what you click when, but the fragments are sufficiently free standing that the order hardly matters. Instead, the interaction implies the game world - you have to click precisely on the little blue, green, and red lines to get the appropriate media to operate - without embracing it. The experience of the reader remains mostly passive.

A passive reader experience is fine, of course, but in this case it's the "mostly" that's the problem. The experience isn't passive, but what interaction there is either is too limiting, too frustrating, or both. The lack of controls on the videos (mostly they cannot be paused or rewinded) is a UI disaster. Clicking on the little lines is finicky. The "lens" through which the textual parts of the story is read looks bland, at best. The mix of beautiful hand-drawn images and cool 3D effects in the videos with poor and outdated CGI is jarring.

In all, the authors of Toc, it seems to me, couldn't decide whether they were making this story for readers or for users. They embraced technology as a medium without embracing the design principles that go with it. Sure, the video game industry has its faults, but design is not one of them. Sure, UI people don't have all the answers as to how we can best interact with computers, but they have some good ideas. Sure, modern digital distribution of software of all kinds raises copyright questions, but the archaic "insert CD to install" - without even an autorun function! - places Toc several years behind the times (as does its lack of a patch for the few but noticeable bugs).

Worst of all, Toc is doomed by its lack of flexibility. Though ostensibly friendly with both major operating systems, it requires Apple's Quicktime, which has a tenuous and unhappy relationship with Windows. Toc does not run in Linux (I tried), and I suspect it will struggle once the current generation of its dependent technologies has passed (that is, once we're on to OS 11, Windows 8, and Quicktime Whatever). Even if it can run, it will certainly feel outdated (as it already does). This is true for most digital media, of course, but it is particularly ironic here. For a work so sensitive to time and its illusions, Toc is perhaps more vulnerable to time's passage than most works of art and literature.

Questions for the Liberal Arts Major

2011-11-21T13:57:00.000-08:00

The title is a bit misleading here. Basically, I'm working on drafting a dialogue (of all things) about the future of liberal arts education for my "Future of English Studies" course. The goal is, in short, to reimagine the St. John's College Great Books program - or something like it - with an eye towards important modern concepts like multiculturalism and technology. The fundamental question is, how much do you lose from the radical dialogic pedagogy of the college in modernizing it (or post-modernizing* it, I guess).

* Post-modernism still makes me viscerally uncomfortable, even as I recognize that almost everyone - including myself - with any semblance of education in the modern world believes in it implicitly. Truth is relative? Of course. Context matters? Duh. Moral sensibilities have more to do with culture than with eternal, Platonic forms? Yeah, I guess so. That doesn't change, though, that I also dislike post-modernism. I think this is in part due to its horrible name. Someone should have foreseen a problem with future naming of philosophical movements when they called their own time "modern." Someone else should have realized that calling the next movement "post-modernism" was also silly. What comes next? Post-post-modernism?

The goal in this post is not to write my draft, but to pose questions. That is, I don't even plan on trying to answer or discuss those questions here: that's what the dialogue will do. I just want to pose questions. So without further ado, here are, in no particular order, questions for the liberal arts major:

- Is it desirable for every student in a college to share a reading list with every other student?
- Is it possible to share a reading list in a multicultural curriculum?
- What makes for a good classroom discussion, and how important is a shared reading list - or even a shared reading - to that project?
- How could a St. John's-like program teach writing effectively without abandoning its pedagogical roots?
- What is more important to St. John's pedagogy: the illusion of equality in the classroom, the apparent absence of grades, the commitment to the shared reading (and no outside sources), or the participation of a sufficient percentage of the students in the class?
- How many students and tutors is ideal?
- What is the purpose of a liberal arts education? How can we justify it in the modern world?
- Could St. John's work as a multicultural institution? That is, is it merely the reading list, or is it the entire structure that is racist and sexist? (Can the subaltern speak?)
- Indeed, is higher education in general (not just St. John's) not culturally hegemonic?
- What subjects should make up "tutorials?" At St. John's we do Math, Laboratory, Music, and Language. Are these the best options? What is the goal of the tutorial?
- If Husserl's "Crisis of the European Sciences" organizes the traditional St. John's, what text or texts would best organize a modern St. John's?
- How should a student be assessed in a dialogic classroom?
- Is it possible to just update the reading list and keep everything else about St. John's the same?
- If we did update the reading list, what would be thrown out or condensed, and what would be added? Isn't it too ironic to have a multicultural, post-modern canon?
- What about increasingly prominent non-textual works of art and philosophy, like movies, documentaries, albums, and born-digital documents like blogs or video games? What would it mean to study these, and would it be possible to do so in a dialogic classroom?
- Can elements of the St. John's program be recreated online?
- What would a fully digital St. John's seminar look like; what would it gain over the traditional model, and what would it lose?
- How important is the credential to a liberal arts education? Practically and theoretically.
- How should questions like these even be decided? That is, how should a modern liberal arts program be run politically and socially?

I'm sure I could pose more questions, but this seems to me a good start. Of course, if you have any thoughts, I'm happy to hear them.

Reading Asterios Polyp's Chart

2011-11-07T14:05:00.000-08:00

In my "Future of English Studies" course this week we read David Mazzucchelli's Asterios Polyp. It's a wonderful graphic novel that you should go read. Then you can come back and read this post. I'll do my best, as always, to explain my astrological analysis in non-astrological terms.

Doing a natal chart for a fictional character is always tricky business, but in the case of Asterios Polyp I feel justified. The book itself draws attention to Asterios's birthday and sign, as one of his key companions in the story is a self-proclaimed "Goddess" who studies astrology and, hilariously, lets Asterios know not to worry "if you fall in love with me, everyone does." She's a Pisces, we're told, but she must be an Aquarius cusp or a Leo rising the way she comes across in the book. She's, uh, forward. And one of only two other characters as opinionated as Asterios.

While Asterios, as a rational thinker, dismisses astrology and its nebulous determinations and interpretations, I thought it might be interesting to see whether his chart tells us anything more about him than "he's a Cancer-Gemini cusp." Now, the book tells us a few things - birth date, and a number of significant life events - but it gives no time or place, so we have to do a little rectification. Guessing at place is easy enough. Asterios lives and works in New York, and his parents are immigrants from Eastern Europe (hence the "Polyp," a shortening of a longer, presumably Greek, name). Assuming that Asterios was born in New York City seems safe enough.

Time is a little trickier. I ended up deciding on 5AM, for a number of reasons. First off, we learn that Asterios is born a twin - his brother dies - after a 30+ hour labor. For whatever reason, I imagine the doctor's decision to perform a c-section as happening at the end of a second long night of labor. As for astrological reasons, the first argument for this birth time is that it puts most of Asterios's planets on the Eastern side of his chart. Asterios is a fairly self-absorbed character who, moreover, is an architect used to shaping his own world. That jives better with Eastern hemisphere of self-determination than Western. Moreover, we learn that Asterios has not yet designed something that was actually built, so he's more of a theoretical architect. That his Northern hemisphere is stronger than his Southern with a 5AM birth time supports this facet of his personality: despite his vociferousness and manifest brilliance, much of his work (Saturn) remains below the horizon (in the fourth house).

The other virtues of a 5AM birth time include a Piscean midheaven, supported by the positive and, I think, transformative relationship he has with our aforementioned Goddess and her family. Also, Sagittarius - the sign of philosophy and higher education - fills most of the 6th house of work, another sensible configuration given that Asterios works in Academia. Finally, and most importantly, this birth time puts his Sun in Cancer in the first house, but keeps his ascendant as Gemini. The book as a whole is largely concerned with how Asterios deals with duality, and so a Gemini ascendant makes sense, as does a first house Sun, as Asterios is extremely self-absorbed for much of the book (it is worth noting that he is a progressed Leo, too, making him something of a showman).

Ultimately, we can't rely too heavily on the houses here, despite how sensible the rectified chart looks. Nevertheless, they can serve as guideposts for interpreting the signs and planets.

Without further ado, here's the chart.

Asterios Polyp Rectified Chart - Generated by OpenAstro

I won't go into too much detail here. There's a lot here and, to even my surprise, it fits Asterios extremely well. Indeed, the chart's correlation to what we know about Asterios as a character is strong enough that I wonder whether Mazzucchelli consulted an astrologer while he was writing. Anyway, let's look at the highlights. What really jumps out here?

Short (technical) answer: T-Squares. Big, messy t-squares. Mercury in Gemini squares a Saturn-Moon Conjunction, Squares Chairon. Indeed, throw in Jupiter and you're on the verge of a Grand Cross.

Non-technical answer: Asterios has serious conflict and difficult in his chart. His workmanlike attitude belies the difficulty he has in translating his work into reality. Nevertheless, he's so deeply invested in what he does that he makes it a part of his home. He has a strong aesthetic that he must see realized in his home, and even slight deviation from his expected and desired order of things is profoundly upsetting to him.

This quality he has a hard time expressing and understanding, tending to overwhelm his interlocutors precisely because he's not as self-assured as he seems. He struggles to communicate how deeply he is what he does and says. That is, ideas are not merely ideas to Asterios, but are rather a core part of his personality. This multi-faceted sense of self is so upsetting to Asterios that he subsumes it in his subconscious, refusing to realize that the way he lives is peculiar and personal, instead externalizing it as a philosophical position.

Because of this internal conflict, duality takes the place of complexity in Asterios's thought. In a beautiful piece of astrological serendipity, Chairon sets off both the internal and external senses of self with a deep, personal wound. For Asterios, this wound is his dead brother. Indeed, his splitting the world into dualities is his attempt to heal the loss of his twin. Not only that, in healing himself - so he thinks - he finds a means by which he might heal others. That is, he can bring them a simplifying dualism.

That Asterios does not understand that dualism is, of course, the irony at the heart of his character, and the quality that sets the plot in motion. The story is very much an effort by Asterios to better connect with complexity. Fittingly, this is represented by the place to which his t-cross opens up: Pisces in the 10th house. Asterios has Jupiter - a planet of growth - in Pisces, and it is no surprise that his growth throughout the book is both Piscean - in the sense of embracing emotional complexity - and social, as signified by the 10th house.

There are other interesting aspects in Asterios's chart, but this t-cross (which is nearly a grand cross) is really the heart of the thing. How well it fits perhaps raises a question: how much am I mapping the book onto the chart, and how much am I mapping the chart onto the book? That is, which is prior?

The answer, of course, is neither. Yes, my familiarity with Asterios as a character colors my reading of his chart, but should I know nothing about him, I would come to similar, if more abstract, conclusions. The forces at work here - the important planets, signs, and houses - have very broad meanings that, nevertheless, are narrow enough to allow only particular interpretations. That the events of Asterios Polyp fit so well with that interpretive baseline, yielding a rich, specific chart seems to me no accident.

Now, the question is, does this tell us anything about Asterios we didn't already know? Perhaps not. But it does give me a different language through which I might explain the things I sensed in reading. Just like writing a reflection on a text, doing a chart might open up linguistic and artistic interpretive pathways that would otherwise stay closed.

To the skeptic, then, that opening up of new pathways is the value of astrology. It is not about fate. It is about understanding.

Backwards Design and Higher Education

2011-10-23T17:02:00.000-07:00

A note about the title: it's actually a joke. There really isn't any meaningful backwards design in higher education. But I'm not here to complain. No, there's actually very little backwards design at every level of education, and for the most part I've managed to enjoy being a student throughout my life. Even without backwards design, schools are wonderful places to establish networks, to have conversations, to try out ideas, and, if you put yourself in the right mental space, to learn by failing.*

* That could be its own post, but we'll save it for now.

Before I can say anything about higher education, I need to talk about backwards design, briefly. Back in 1998, Grant Wiggins - who happened to go to a very good Great Books college - and Jay McTighe wrote a book called "Understanding by Design." It's essentially a handbook for curriculum writers, advocating an approach that starts at the end and works its way backwards. This idea was hardly new to educational theory by 1998 - indeed, in one of my courses this week we've been reading a piece from 1949 that advocates the same idea - but for whatever reason the formulation by Wiggins and McTighe grabbed ahold of the world of educational practice.

The essence of the concept is this. First, you figure out what core idea or ability you want students to finish a class with, then you figure out how you're going to know whether they have it. And voila, you're curriculum is done!

That's not entirely true, but it's pretty close. Sure, you can import a handful of secondary and tertiary ideas or abilities with which students should gain familiarity, if not mastery. And sure, there's still the work of actually writing the curriculum after that. But figuring out the end goal and the assessment really is more than half the battle. I would say that, in writing my creative writing curriculum this summer, for example, I spent a good two or three weeks decided on an end goal and an assessment, and maybe a day or two on writing the actual curriculum from there. That is, once you know what you're trying to do, it's not so hard to figure out whether any particular activity or lesson plan fits into that bigger frame.

The funny thing is, in higher education this doesn't seem to happen at all. I could speak to my current classes - though a couple are better than others on this front - but rather I want to point out a deeper and less personal issue. It should seem obvious to anyone who has been to college or graduate school that the vast majority of Professors do not use anything resembling backwards design in their curricula (heck, most of them just stand up and lecture every week, and then have their TAs administer and grade a content-knowledge test at the end). The question is, why?

At the heart of the problem, it seems to me, is a dichotomous conflict between research and pedagogy. The difference between a Professor and a researcher at a think tank or consulting firm is, primarily, this: the Professor, in addition to doing research, teaches. Perhaps it is easier to find Professor jobs than pure research jobs, or perhaps Professors like the idea of and prestige associated with University positions. Regardless, once in the Academy, Professors do not, actually, get to choose one or the other. Or, rather, they are not assessed, themselves, on both fronts.

For the most part, academic survival depends upon research and publishing. While a great many people will defend the "publish or perish" mentality of the academic market as a necessary part of a meritocracy, it has an unintended side effect. Professors, because they are evaluated almost entirely on research, do not spend time or energy designing or executing their pedagogical functions. They are, in short, bad teachers. And they are not necessarily bad teacher by choice, but rather by necessity. A Lecturer (not a full Professor) at Stanford I spoke with this week related a story of a colleague whose Dean told him not to spend so much time teaching. "If you ever want to get tenure," he (more or less) said, "You have to cut back on your teaching and get to work doing research and publishing."

It's important to note that "cut back on your teaching" does not mean teach fewer courses. No, the admonition is to take your teaching less seriously, to spend less time and effort on designing a good curriculum, on employing effective pedagogy, on evaluating whether your students are understanding the material. The result, for students, is long, boring lectures and even longer, even more boring reading assignments that float aimlessly in an ethereal mist, never to be connected to their studies except in their own minds. In short, none of the habits of mind - design, making informed connections, creative generation of questions, and so on - that make for good research are modeled for students in the classroom.

So what does that have to do with backwards design? While Wiggins and McTighe talk mostly about courses, I think there's an argument to be made that educational structures as a whole can be subjected to a similar analysis. In the case of higher education - and especially graduate studies - the analysis leads to disturbing revelations.

- At the level of the individual course, there is no clear sense of what a student ought to be getting out of the course, nor how anyone (except maybe the student) will know whether the course succeeded.

- Institutionally, there is little coherence to the student experience except what the student is capable of bringing to it herself.

- It is not clear that the assessment procedures we have in place - that is, the dissertation - are effective measures of whether students are adequately prepared to do meaningful research.

I've hit on the first of these above, but the second two deserve quick explication.

Institutional incoherence is a big problem in the humanities in particular, where students routinely take ten years or more before they finish their studies. While there are many factors that cause this problem, one of the most important is the lack of clear objective for graduate students at an institutional level. That is, Universities do a very poor job of saying "what we want out of our PhDs in English is _____." Of course, they do generally have something to fill in that blank with, but it's rarely something that makes sense, or that would be agreeable across the department (let alone amongst students). Now, that may not be a problem, per se, except it leads to our other issue.

How do you assess outcomes (or processes, even) when you do not know what outcomes (or processes) you desire? In the case of the University, the dissertation has long been the be-all-end-all. Why? Because of tradition. Oh, sure, there's more to it than that, but not much more.

In the modern world, I think it's fair to ask whether the dissertation is an adequate reflection of whatever kind of learning students are meant to do. That is, the dissertation exists, primarily, as a kind of pre-monograph, a preface to a first book. But is our goal to turn all PhD students into writers of books, anymore? How many graduate school programs define their success based on whether or not graduates go on to publish books? While that may have been the model in the past, that publishing itself is undergoing rapid transformation in the modern age demonstrates that its probably not the best model for the future.

What's more, the dissertation is written, published, and defended individually. It is, perhaps, in some ancillary sense a collaborative experience, but it is still held up as an indication of individual achievement. The problem is, Professorial research is decreasingly individual. Collaboration has taken hold in much of the academy, and, indeed, part of the goal of graduate studies probably ought to be habituating students - many of whom have been stuck in highly uncollaborative environments through the whole of their academic lives - to working in teams. And yet, our final assessment is monolithic, and, what's more, it's almost unimaginable that it be anything but the work of a single person.

All of which shows not only a disconnect between purpose and assessment in higher education,* but a total lack of consideration of that disconnect. What is the purpose of a graduate education? How do we know that we've achieved that purpose?

* We haven't even touched undergraduate, which is its own messy can of worms.

A great many institutions obviously do a fine job creating future scholars, and so the system is working fine on a certain level. The question is not, however, if it has worked or if it is working, but rather how does it work and will it continue to work? Despite missing the kind of clear curricular structure I've mentioned above, the Academy has always has a resilience, thanks largely to its clever, self-motivated members. It is not clear, however, that survival alone means that the system actually works.

Watching Myself Read

2011-10-18T11:53:00.000-07:00

For my "Future of English" course this week we were asked to watch ourselves read and to reflect on the process. This is my result.

In trying to watch myself read, I was surprised to find that I already do watch myself read. That is, I sat down to read and said "ok, now to watch myself read" and found that, as I started to read, I was reading exactly the way I always do. So, really, that wasn't what surprised me, actually. What surprised me was that I didn't realize that I always watch myself read. You could say I haven't watched myself watching myself read.

This continuously self-aware division into reader and watching-reader leads to interesting contradictions. I am an extremely critical reader, on the one hand. I am an extremely agreeable reader, on the other. I naturally filter what I read through the lens of other familiar texts, but I am often hard-pressed to say just exactly which text I am filtering my understanding through, or even if I actually am filtering at all. I have a sophisticated and refined interpretive ideology, and yet strive to adopt the ideology of the text I am reading.

In short, I know my reading extremely well on a surface, procedural, level, but understand it almost not at all at a deeper, existential level. That is, I know how I read, but I don't know exactly who the I is that is doing the reading. It's not the I that eats dinner with my wife, that's for certain. Indeed, that dinner-eating I often spends much of those dinners trying to understand what the reader I has just experienced, appropriating the readerly experience and reinterpreting it for my real life, synthesizing and analyzing, arguing and explaining.

As an almost schizophrenic reader, it is not uncommon for me to generate a lot of ideas as I read, and especially shortly after or whenever I pause to take a (mental) breath, often by glancing at the clock or leafing through the upcoming pages or checking my Twitter feed. In these times of pause, the more familiar, more argumentative, more discursive I interposes on the receptive, reader I. This is the I that has always watched the reader I. This is the I that is critical. This is the I that searches for connections. This is the I that is consciously ideological. This is the I that is always the same.

The reader I, on the other hand, is much more mysterious, despite how conscious my bifurcation is. I find myself reading texts back-to-back that contradict each other, and, at the reader level, agreeing with both. My reader-self will follow even the most dubious argument to its conclusion, nodding in assent the whole way. Nevertheless, the reader-I is not wholly passive. It is the reader part, not the interpretive part, that shifts voices as an author does, that can tell whether Eagleton is speaking his own opinion or is rehashing the views of someone else.

In observing my reader I this week, an interesting phrase occurred to me. It is this: "the audience of your reading." My reader reads, while the interpretive I asks questions like "who is the audience of your reading?" I might as well say, while I am reading, a part of me is always writing - or preparing to write - also. Whether that writing ends up actually written is immaterial, I engage in mental preparation for it either way.

I would not go so far as to say that, for me, reading is writing. Rather, that they are different is exactly why my reading process is so bifurcated. Then again, the reader I and the writer I almost always coexist. They are not, perhaps, so schizophrenic after all. Rather they are like Aristophanes's lovers (from Plato's Symposium), amorphous blobs meant to be together. Indeed, they are not only meant to be together, but incapable of surviving without each other.

Perhaps the true challenge of this assignment, however, is not in recognizing this dichotomy. Rather, it has been in getting the reader I to read itself. The writer I is used to interpreting the transmissions of the reader, and the writer I is used to looking at and analyzing itself. The reader, however, never really gets a chance to turn that equation in the other direction*. Because this reader I is so impossibly anti-ideological and anti-interpretive, its voice in the process is non-existent. It is, after all, the writer within me that writes this very reflection. Even when I read my own writing, the reader I adopts its traditional role, treating the text as if it is not my own, letting the interpretive I do the interpretive work.

* Except, perhaps, when I'm doing astrology, but that involves the procedural trick of placing myself outside myself in a system of formal codes.

Reflection is a telling word, in fact. When I look in the mirror, what I see is not myself, but a reflection of myself. In trying to turn the interpretive mirror on myself, what I discover, above all, is that the same interpreter that interprets my reading also interprets myself. This could be maddening, but in fact it bothers me not at all. The system, it seems to me, works. I see no occasion for dramatized crisis. Nevertheless, it is interesting to observe and articulate this strange division-cum-non-division, and it is surprising to me that I had never noticed something so fundamental to my own reading before.

An Alternative Pedagogy for the PhD Core

2011-10-12T13:43:00.000-07:00

Introduction

Because my last post was a little bit negative, and perhaps somewhat dramatic,* I want to offer a constructive follow-up. Let me make explicit, first, the criticism that is really at the heart of yesterday's post. Then, I'll offer an alternative.

* I never, ever write overly-dramatic posts, do I?

The problem with my two required courses is that they are not, at least so far, good courses. One is a Doctoral Proseminar that every first year PhD student has to take. Its stated objectives are, in part, taking a broad look at the field of education research and, in part, getting to know the rest of the cohort. The other required course - the spark for yesterday's existential angst - is the first leg of a three course series of introductory research methods courses required within the first two years by all Education PhD students.

The How

How are these courses bad? Well, they are both co-taught, but there is not even a semblance of collaboration between the Professors co-teaching the courses. In both sections, one Professor gets up and lectures while the other sits around looking bored, only occasionally interjecting. At some point the Professors might switch places when the topic changes, but that's really it. There's no dynamic interaction, there's no prior planning, there's no engagement.

The lack of interaction is perhaps not damning, but the lack of student participation is. Now, a student in one of these courses might very well object that, yes, we do participate some. This is true. The lecture style in both classes is not pure, incessant blather. There is some opportunity for back-and-forth. But there is no room for dialogue, even so. The path of the "conversation" is, if not predetermined by the Professor, managed in its entirety by him.* Students don't have the opportunity to speak to each other without Professorial interpolation. That's not dialogue, that's Q&A.

* I say 'him' because three of the four Professors in question are male, and the three men are the chief pontificates.

A word on the classroom that both of these courses take place in. It's not exactly conducive to dialogue. It's basically a small-to-medium sized meeting hall, perfect for a breakfast get-together. There are a number of round tables that fit four people each, with a longer desk at the front of the room, in front of a SmartBoard (that, incidentally, none of the Professors knows how to use). At the back of the room is a blackboard. Notably, one wall contains creative artifacts made by STEP (Stanford Teacher Education Program) students, who use this same room more dynamically.

For a typical class, students will read a few articles and do a kind of preparation activity. In the Proseminar these are basically note-taking activities designed to reinforce good reading skills. In the methods course, these are writing activities, some of which have proven interesting and valuable, and others, well, yeah. My last post addresses that. Regardless, with the rare exception of some small-group work at the tables, whether a student has done the reading or not has no particular bearing on the course because the Professor simply stands around expounding about said reading for far too long, asking theoretically probing questions that the same five students answer.

In short, it's a typical University class. But what is striking is how different it is from my experience at this very University as a Master's student. It is said that the difference between the Master's level and the PhD level is that the latter is more focused on research. It seems that, in addition, because research is the important thing, pedagogy goes totally out the window as well.

A final note on the how and why of the problems with these required courses. In addition to troubling pedagogical practices, the curricula of both courses are far from compelling. There is no clear "this is what you're getting out of this class." That means that, while the assessments are fairly good, there's not a strong sense of how said assessments measure whatever it is that we as students are supposed to be learning. For example, the book review required in Proseminar may develop good habits of mind, but it does not connect in any meaningful way with the readings or the lectures, at least so far. In the methods course, we're supposed to design a study around our research interests and questions, but in the first three weeks (30% of the quarter), we've not even spoken about research questions, research design, or what makes for a good study, let alone actually done anything.*

* It's becoming a source of personal amusement that, in a certain sense, my tennis course is pedagogically superior to my other courses. Each session we show up, we warm up by working on whatever part of our skill set we want to, then the instructor shows us a new skill or a wrinkle on an old one and we go practice it for a half-hour as he wanders around giving pointers. And you know what? My ability to play tennis is improving much faster than my ability to research. I know it's not a totally fair analogy, but that doesn't mean it's not worth thinking about.

The Why

Why are these courses the way they are? Perhaps the Professors teaching these courses are doing it because they're trying to curry favor with the administration, and thus they don't want to invest in designing a strong curriculum or practicing good pedagogy. Perhaps the course curriculum, because it is designed by committee and not by the teacher, is innately unfocused. Perhaps no one has recognized the problems with the room the courses are housed in, and therefore hasn't tried to come up with a more engaging way of using the space.

Whatever the reason, at its heart is this: Stanford University, like most institutions of higher education, is primarily interested in research.* While many Professors like to teach, they frequently have little to no actual teaching training, and their jobs are in no way dependent on the quality of their teaching. Students, similarly, are generally less invested in classes** because they're wrapped up in research agendas and assistantships and meeting other requirements and trying to survive in the Bay Area on the roughly $20,000 a year they make as PhD students.

* Well, research and football, anyway.

** A quotation from a Doctoral student well-along on her path: "Your classes don't matter." In that case, I wonder, why do we have them at all?

In summary, Professors are not accountable to their employers for their teaching. They are accountable to their students, but their students don't particularly care whether they teach well or not. As a result, there's no particular motivation to improve a course, no particular need to assess whether it is "working" or not,* and no particular place for a student who does care about the quality of his courses (and the pedagogy therein) to voice concerns. It's a self-perpetuating, broken system. Except it's not broken at all: it's exactly what almost everyone involved wants it to be, which indicates that maybe the real problem is much, much deeper. But we'll have to leave that for another time.

* At Stanford in particular such an assessment would be confounded by the fact that most students here are extremely good at doing well in and taking as much as they can from poorly taught classes. Otherwise they wouldn't have made it to Stanford in the first place.

An Alternative Pedagogy

Vogon Guard: "Alright, so what's the alternative?"
Ford Prefect: "Well, stop doing it, of course! Tell them you're not going to do it anymore. Stand up to them!"
Vogon Guard: "Doesn't sound that great to me."
- Douglas Adams, Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

The alternative to lecturing is, simply enough, not lecturing. The alternative to none - or few - students participating is getting them all to participate. Perhaps this is my St. John's education speaking, but I still think there's a lot to be gained from students talking to each other, and there's no reason that can't happen in these required courses.

How does that work? First of all, no more powerpoint slides. No more prepared lectures or conversational agendas. No more "this is what this article means" declarations. Questions - even pointed ones - to shape a conservation are fine, but presupposed answers are death to inquiry. If the goal is for new doctoral students to learn to interpret research, to discuss or analyze a text, and to be able to construct and argument as to what that text means, then it's imperative that they get practice at actually doing it. That does not mean "write a summary," that means dialogue, conversation, and argumentation.

So instead of two Professors trading off droning - with occasional interruption - at 30 students, let's put all of the manpower and brainpower in the classroom to work. Split the class into two groups of fifteen,* and send one Professor off with each group.** Sit in one great big circle, let the Professor ask a question about the text, and let the students work together to try to answer that question. Have, in other words, a dialogue.

* And rotate the groups around each week, so there's always a different mix in each group.

** Alternatively, split into even smaller groups - say five groups of six - and let the Professors float around, or put them into different groups each session.

Does that sound like St. John's? Of course it does. And why do I suggest it? Because it works. Stanford PhD students are smart people. If you put fifteen of them in a room with a text and ask them to figure out what it means and why it's important, odds are they're going to succeed. So why not give it a chance? They'll be developing interpretive skills, learning to talk to each other about research (which, vitally, may not even be in their area), and getting to know each other much better than they can when they're sitting four-to-a-table and being lectured at for two hours.

It is true that Professors are generally experts in these fields while students are not, but their wealth of experience does not mean that they are innately better readers than their students, or that they can say something more insightful about a text. What's more, even if they are better at those things, students will not learn simply by watching them talk. I cannot learn tennis without swinging for myself (and sometimes hitting it into the net), so how can I be expected to learn to speak to my future colleagues about research without being given a chance to do so, even if sometimes our interpretations are wrong, or we cut each other off, or we oversimplify? By doing will we learn, not by watching.

The Professor's role in this picture is to be the net. When I hit a tennis ball too short, I can tell. When I say something stupid, the Professor can chime in. But here's the really cool part: even that can be given over to students. If you let us talk to each other, we'll learn how to point out each other's mistakes, as much as highlight each other's strengths. In short, we'll form and learn to be a part of an intellectual community much like the one we're supposedly entering as future PhD-holding scholars.

Perhaps the objection could be raised that dialogue doesn't happen among Professors, either, and that therefore such a pedagogical system would not prepare students for the Academy. If that's so, then this alternative to lecturing becomes doubly important: we need academics who do more than merely pontificate, but who can actually communicate. The only way we'll get them is by training them to do so from the beginning. And anyway, it's a lot easier to transfer the ability to dialogue into giving a good lecture than the other way around.

A St. John's-ian dialogue, of course, is not the only valid alternative to a lecture class. Not all good classes are discussion classes. I do, however, pose it as a radical opposite pole. Somewhere in between is an equally good place where co-teachers actually work together, where the affordances of the room are taken into consideration when shaping the curriculum, and where the students are allowed to practice and be engaged with the material (and each other) for the whole two to three hours. Such pedagogical strategies exist. I wish that some enterprising Professor teaching a required, core course would use them.

When Doing Poorly on an Assignment is a Crisis

2011-10-11T12:10:00.007-07:00

I knew, when I decided to come to Stanford, that there would be days I would wish I had gone to UCSD instead (just as the reverse would have been true). I did not expect that one of those days would come so early.

Those that know me know that I care little for grades. I am perfectly capable of assessing my own learning. What I desire, instead, is feedback, constructive criticism, helpful advice. Harsh doesn't hurt. On the contrary, the more direct the feedback, the more specific the criticism, the better. I want to be a better writer, a better thinker, a more skilled lover of wisdom.

In one (or two) of my courses this quarter, however, I'm feeling something of a crisis of purpose. The course is a core requirement for all Stanford PhD students, a course that, in principle anyway, is at the heart of what we're doing and learning as future researchers. The course is a methods course, an introduction to research methodology and thinking.

It is in this course that we recently read a piece by Jerome Kagan. The piece was the first chapter of his "The Three Cultures," and, frankly, it's one of the worst pieces of writing I've read in a long time. Its point - that different research methodologies* have different cultures - was blindingly obvious, but its construction was totally inane, ranging from disorganized to grossly oversimplified to needlessly complex. Phrases like "the critical point is" appeared over and over, often referring to disparate ideas, while the phrase "to put it simply" appeared in front of one of the most complex formulations in the text. A single paragraph mentioned algae, bees, and ferrets in an effort to make a point about language, but the point got lost in the bestiary.

* That is, the hard sciences, the social sciences, and the humanities.

All of this was prefaced by two inexcusable writing decisions. The first was a table that shouldn't have been a table. The table charted "dimensions of research cultures" against those cultures, with the horrifying result that some cells contained whole sentences formatted like bad poems. Note to self: anytime you put a 20 word sentence in a table, try to make the cells wide enough so that you do not to have one word per line.

The other decision - perhaps graver - was an invocation of Ludwig Wittgenstein near the opening of the text. Wittgenstein, if you don't know, is famous for destabilizing theories of language and meaning with his not-always-clear, fragmentary texts. He challenged the assumption that words meant the same thing all the time, and ultimately convinced everyone from philosophers to linguists to social scientists that context is really important - perhaps the only thing that is important - to meaning.

Kagan uses Wittgenstein, then, to begin his treatise on the three cultures. His citation of the philosopher is made to preface his own observation that, within different research paradigms, different words have different meanings. Fear, for example, means a different thing to an English professor than to a Behavioral Psychologist.

Which is all well and good, of course, if blindingly obvious. No, the offense here was pointing to Wittgenstein as the divider of the disciplines. It perhaps did not strike Kagan as supremely ironic that Wittgenstein himself probably would not have been all that excited by the theoretical division of the "three cultures" of modern academic research, that Wittgenstein's ways of thinking were in equal part scientific, social, and humanistic, that his methodology was not easy to categorize by the very system that Kagan found Wittgenstein to be the father of.

Behind my disgust at reading page after page (after page) of the drivel in "The Three Cultures"* was a lurking fear. You see, this was not something I was reading on my own. No, this was one of the first pieces that I was meant to read as a PhD student at Stanford University. In some sense, this was canonical, brilliant, an important work for me to contemplate and consider.

* I prefer to be a generous reader, but in this case I cannot think of a single redeeming quality of the piece.

With even greater horror I turned to my assignment: I must summarize this monster and, what's more, apply its reasoning to my own potential research interests. The written summary is, I think, a poor piece of pedagogy and assessment as is, but it's doubly hard when the work in question is of such poor quality.

Being the contrarian that I am (nicht diese tone, after all), I decided to write a poem. I suspected this might get me in trouble, to a degree, but I have always tested academic limits (often to my benefit) throughout my time as a student. This was not, for example, the first poem I've turned in on a non-poetry assignment, and historically my assessors have appreciated the change of pace, as well as the effort at creative insight. Some have leveled a warranted "don't do that again" at me, as well, but at least there was respect for the process.

In this case, I borrowed some of Kagan's language, inserted a one-sentence statement of the simple fact - that different research cultures are different, basically - and ended with the observation that "somebody misappropriated the Wittgenstein." It was, in my opinion, a funny but not inaccurate piece of analytical and synthetic work considering the quite dull material with which I was presented. It was not a good poem, but it was not meant to be. Good poems (and perhaps good writing of any kind) need subject matter worth writing about. Of course I could have, in less time and probably with better results - at least from the Professorial point of view - done a traditional summary, but if I'm going to spend hours reading a piece of drivel, I intend not to bore myself by writing the same kind of drivel in response.*

* It is worth noting that the Kagan piece was poor writing by academic standards as well. It was flowery and full of needless metaphors. It was organized so that multiple and unclear ideas populated each sentence. It was a mess.

In response to my poem (and, for the other reading, an interpolation of the reading into Plato's Meno; another, I thought, interesting and synthetic attempt to summarize the work without driving myself totally mad at the grade-school-book-reportiness of it all), I received a "check-minus" with a note that I did not summarize Kagan, and that I should look at my classmate's example passages for help.

Hence my crisis. I know how to summarize a piece of writing. I can write a clear and concise sentence when it is worth writing. But I am not here to learn how to regurgitate simple information poorly presented. And yet, increasingly, that is how I feel my classes are designed. Classes taught ostensibly by critical pedagogues - who believe in student-run classrooms and dialogue and activity - are two-hour lectures.* Courses in research methodology involve no training in research or methodology, but rather middle-school level assignments that ask primarily that I demonstrate not that I understand the ideas of a text or am striving to make them my own, but rather that I have done the reading, and am able to copy and paste important ideas into equally vapid academic jargon.**

* A fact that would amuse me were it not so sad. It is a shocking revelation that the people who teach teachers to teach (and teach education researchers to assess good teaching) - that is, School of Education Professors - are such poor teachers.

** Perhaps that is "methodology" to the modern researcher? If so, academia is in worse trouble than I thought.

Perhaps I was mistaken in thinking that Education research was open to people who value ideas as much as research, people who value creativity, process, and inspiration as much as method and practice. It is not that I discount research, method, or practice, it is rather that I see so little of the other stuff that I'm beginning to wonder, well, whether wonder is a part of the equation at all.

Again, I don't really care about grades. I could get a check-double-minus or a D or whatever and that wouldn't bother me. No, what bothers me is that the feedback I received misses the point entirely. It bothers me that the conversation is one way. That the pedagogy is so deeply flawed. That the underlying philosophy is so undemocratic. That the value system is so blindly accepted that it cannot see that, maybe, a whimsical, irreverent, and sarcastic spark might have merit beyond "not being a summary." Of course it wasn't a summary; it was a condemnation.

If a summary had been worth writing, I would have written one. Give me an assignment worth doing, an article worth reading, a conversation to have (instead of a lecture to attend to), and I will produce high quality work.* Give me a class worth taking - do not waste my time for three hours at a time with your pontificating and your holier-than-thou elitism (tenure alone does not make you interesting). I, too, am an intellectual. I, too, love ideas, perhaps more than you would believe. I, too, can speak and listen. I, in my own way, am well-read. I have stood in front of students and shut myself up so that they might speak, and it was wondrous. Yet, if no such thing can happen even here, at Stanford University, in a PhD program, in Education, can we hope for it to happen anywhere else?

* I might as well say the same for any and every student, and yet this lesson learned so well in research has not been learned in practice even by the very researchers who teach it.

It is not my assignment that makes me wonder about all of this. That is but a small and ultimately meaningless symptom of a much deeper problem. Nevertheless, it is an indicative example of the bigger picture: a case in which, it now seems obvious to me, the result was destined both because of how I was inevitably to respond to the assignment, and how the assignment, so to speak, was going to respond back to me. And so the deeper culture becomes the question, and leaves me with an exhortation.

Instead of demanding that I fit into your narrow boxes, academia, you would do well to invite and celebrate your radicals, your creative thinkers, your irreverent teachers, your trouble-makers. I know that UCSD does, and yet I chose Stanford, in part, because I believed that it did as well. Now I'm not so sure.

Four Random Thoughts on Reading Gerald Graff's Professing Literature (and Sundry Other Works)

2011-10-03T16:36:00.003-07:00

Ok, so this is a response to my reading for my "Future of English" class this week, but I believe it is actually broad enough that it should more or less make sense to people who aren't in the class.

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When I taught creative writing last summer, we spent a day with Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities. It's an enigmatic book, a difficult one, but intensely perceptive. Getting high schoolers to appreciate – nay, to comprehend – the project of the work I feared would be impossible. As we read sections together, my fears were realized: they had no idea what was going on.

So instead of forcing a conversation, I jumped into the later part of the activity sooner. I sent them out of the classroom (this was a private school, so I was allowed to do this) to find a place on campus that they found interesting, and then to compose something in the style of Calvino (or at least his translator). An example:

A City In Perpetual Motion

The city in perpetual motion is constantly rising upwards as its inhabitants' visions grip the stars with the dreams swirling in their minds. The city is made of glass allowing a communal flow of energy to circulate through its streets. Glass wall upon glass wall are lined and stacked to form endless buildings, those too, upon glass. The glossy skyscrapers are filled with rarities and talents and treasures, seemingly weightless and untainted. The glassy floor is covered in flourishing plots of herb and flower, each of their seeds pulled from the farthest edges of the universe. As the city in perpetual motion rises upward, it expands, its inhabitants determined to take their place above the stars.

Perhaps not as skillful as Calvino – certainly not as impressive as the vast, interwoven collection he produces, complete with self-reference and surprising invisible threads and the strange Marco Polo / Kublai Kahn back story – but good enough to give rise to a question. Did the students actually fail to understand Invisible Cities? What was I looking for? What ought I have done?

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It strikes me that the history Graff describes is a history of Hegelian dialectic aborted. Time after time, apparent theoretical, pedagogical, and interpretive opposites have circled each other in the English Department, seeking synthesis, but unable to find it thanks to an unwillingness or inability for the the institution to engage the conflict.

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I wonder what a similar history of the School of Education would look like? What conflicts have been subsumed into the now-incoherent structure of the institution? Certainly the tripartite division between the researchers who identify themselves with 1) the humanities, 2) the social sciences, 3) the hard sciences comes from some historical disagreement that Schools of Ed participated in, but continue to shield their students from (instead requiring methods courses in each of these research techniques separately, without asking them to consider the fundamental question: what is research?)

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What does the ideal University look like, or is there such a thing? Perhaps a better question is: if one had the power to build not just a University or a College, but indeed the Educational system or, deeper still, the entire society itself from scratch, what would it look like? I suspect one would need to go to social values to make any meaningful, fundamental change. Why?

Is it maybe the case that, given our social values the system we have is the ideal, or at least a very good representation of those values?

Two Research Ideas

2011-09-26T16:26:00.000-07:00

One of my first assignments here at Stanford was to draft a possible research question and propose a methodology to use in answering that question. Because I have multiple interests, I wrote two.

The Dialogic Pedagogy of St. John's College

Questions

What is a dialogue? Obviously there is plenty of research about how to support dialogue in the classroom, and the role of discussions in learning. From my own limited experience, however, as a graduate student and as a teacher, there is a tremendous difference between dialogue as it is conceived in such research and dialogue as it occurs in, particularly, the classrooms of St. John's College.

As a graduate of St. John's, I have first hand experience in those classrooms. Far from providing answers, my experience only raises more questions. What is it about the culture, the pedagogy, and the organization of learning at St. John's that makes their classrooms unique? How is it that students in the St. John's seminar are able to speak so directly to each other about such complicated texts with minimal Professorial intervention? Or are they actually able to do so, after all? What is the relationship between the dialogic pedagogy of the college and its Great Books curriculum? Do they support each other, are they separable, or do they detract from each other? Perhaps most importantly: what, if anything, does the pedagogy – as distinct from the curriculum – have to teach educational systems at large?

All of these questions interest me, and they serve as a backdrop for a possible research agenda. In the short term, however, I want to focus particularly on undergraduate programs and dialogue. That is, I want to address this question: What constitutes a dialogue at St. John's, and how is it distinct from dialogues in other undergraduate academic environments?

Method

In order to begin to answer that questions, an initial qualitative, ethnographic foray into the college would be invaluable. A visit to the Santa Fe campus would allow me to conduct interviews with current students and faculty, as well as observe seminars in action with a researcher's – rather than a student's – eye. Video analysis of seminars could also be helpful, though that would require both the necessary equipment and approval from the school (recording of seminars is traditionally forbidden). While direct observation and interviews would only be possible when present, with permission and help I might be able to record video of a seminar or seminars throughout a semester or more.

In addition to doing qualitative data collection at St. John's, I would want to follow a similar interview and observation (and/or video analysis) protocol at another or other institutions. Perhaps the most feasible option would be to look at undergraduate courses at Stanford, as well as another local college or university (such as San Jose State). I would strive to find courses which describe themselves as “seminars” and which intend to use discussion-based pedagogies. I would strive, at this stage, to match specific content across the colleges in question.

Having collected my data, I would code and analyze in the qualitative tradition, with an eye towards answering my initial question, but also with the hope of discovering the appropriate path towards addressing the deeper questions that inspire my research.

Design in Game Development and Curriculum Construction

Questions

J.P. Gee, among others, has noticed that game developers do an excellent job of scaffolding learning into their products. That is, gamers learn how to play the game from simply playing it, whether because there is a built-in tutorial, or because the mechanics of the game are somehow made obvious by experimentation, or because the game is similar enough to other games in the genre that new players can be expected to transfer skills and strategies. Regardless, learning to play a game is a significant portion of what makes games fun.

School environments and activities, on the other hand, are frequently designed with a much more acute eye for learning, but too often without the same success. What, then, is it about the game design process that makes games so effective? How does that process differ from the curriculum and educational design process? Is the difference cultural, mechanical, or philosophical?

I'm particularly interested in an analysis of the design process game and curriculum development, as it pertains to learning in those respective environments. The question is not, then, whether students learn better from games, or what games do so effectively. It is how games are designed and how that process differs in education.

Method

I believe this question lends itself to an ethnographic approach. On the one hand, ethnography of a game development studio – or, indeed, a multitude of studios, as different studios likely have different design processes – and on the other, a similar ethnography of a school or other academic institution engaged in curriculum and activity design. Many public schools, of course, have little say in the details of their curricula, so perhaps a textbook company or other curriculum developer (Foss, for example) would serve as an interesting foil instead.

Spending time observing and interviewing participants in the design processes in these two environments, I would hope to discover what, if any, vocabulary is shared, and what is different. I would also hope to see to what degree learning is an explicit or implicit part of the design process. I expect a variety of other notable differences might arise as well, in terms of relationship to prototyping, the degree to which the process itself arises organically during development, and the passion and engagement of the people working on the design, among other things.

Purpose

Ultimately, my hope is that the game design process might hold some keys as to how educators might help to unlock the powerful learning potential of games in education, without forcing us to conclude that boring “educational games,” irrelevant commercial games, or tacky gamification are the only options. That is, perhaps traditional learning might be benefit at the level of design from contact with the game design world. And, in reverse, perhaps the game design world can benefit from contact with the education design process.

The Future of the Blog

2011-09-15T16:25:00.000-07:00

As I am about to begin working on my PhD in Education at Stanford University, I have been reflecting on this blog and the role it will play in my studies. While I was an MA student I wrote here frequently, and I expect I'll continue to write frequently as a PhD student. I feel, however, that I put an undue amount of pressure on myself to produce content for this blog at a fairly regular rate. Undue because, ultimately, I have a very small readership (though I very much appreciate those of you who do read the blog regularly), and thus mostly am writing for myself.

The upshot of all of this reflection is that, while I'm not planning on discontinuing the blog by any stretch, I'm planning on scaling it back significantly. Instead of my target of two posts a week, I'm hoping to get to a post every now and again... Maybe one every couple of weeks. I'm still going to work on my Beethoven project, of course, as time and willpower permit, and likewise with my still nascent novel (which has been more difficult than I anticipated), and I fully anticipate occasional game ravings, political rants, and educational reflections to make their way to this space. But the pace at which I've tried to write here over the past couple of years will be lessened because, well, there's just too much else to do.

In particular, there's too much else to read. Not only will I be taking on a heavy PhD reading load, but I've found that the Internet is bustling with great writing, and the decision to be an active producer of writing sometimes gets in the way of my desire to read more. With that in mind, I want to encourage my readers to take a look at Dirk Hayhurst, at Eric Nusbaum, at Joe Posnanski. These are writers who I follow (or have recently begun to follow) and who are teaching me - whether they intend to or not - to write better.

Perhaps what I'm trying to say is this. As an undergraduate I read a lot and wrote a little. Since then, I've written a lot and read not as much. Now I think it's time for the pendulum to swing back in the other direction, and a few years from now I'll pick up the pen (or the keyboard) and become a writer again. Of course, that's not really a dichotomy - one may write and read a lot at the same time - but I nevertheless feel that one's focus naturally tends towards one or the other at any given time. For now, it's back to being a reader and a student.

Ferrero, Sequoia, and Finding a Home

2011-09-06T11:45:00.000-07:00

Juan Carlos Ferrero used to be the best tennis player in the world. Back in 2003, in the middle of that five-year vacuum between Sampras and Federer, Ferrero joined Andy Roddick, Lleyton Hewitt, and even, briefly, Andre Agassi in taking his turn at the top of the tennis-ranking mountain. Now Ferrero is 31, still young by the standards of society, but positively ancient in the world of tennis.

Ferrero fell short of the quarterfinals at this years U.S. Open after losing to the colorfully named Janko Tipsarevic. And had he managed to win that match, an almost certain defeat at the hands of current world number one Novak Djokovic waited at the other end. Regardless, the Tipsarevic match I have little to say about, except that it was a hard-fought four setter. The match before it was the interesting one.

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On our way to San Diego, my wife and I suddenly found ourselves in bumper-to-bumper traffic. Now that's no surprise in Southern California, but in this case the traffic was particularly bad. The highway, it turns out, was on fire. Or, rather, a fire raged on both sides of I-15 in Victorville, just north of the northern reaches of the Los Angeles metropolitan area. After two and a half hours of trying to find a way around the flames, we turned North instead, setting out on an unexpected path.

We ended up in Lake Isabella, on the doorstep of Sequoia National Forest. Big trees, we thought. We want to see big trees. We rolled into a shabby old motel near the lake at almost 10:00 PM, after starting our day in Flagstaff, Arizona, and called it a minor, if unexpected, victory.

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Gael Monfils might be the most entertaining player on the ATP World Tour. He dives to make his shots, he lopes around the court, he pouts, he yells, he engages in a subtle rope-a-dope that announcers - and, in theory, his opponents - mistake for nonchalance. Above all, he plays with joy and the curse of grace, and so the crowd loves him and is yet frustrated by his failure to be better.

The "curse of grace" is a term Joe Posnanski uses to describe Carlos Beltran. Some athletes are so gifted, so refined, so graceful at what they do that they appear not to be trying. If only, we think, he would try a little harder, he'd be truly great. Gael Mofils tries hard. You don't become as good a tennis player as he is (#7 in the World entering the U.S. Open) without practicing hours and hours and hours a day, without pushing yourself, without learning how to give more than you think you have. And yet he looks like he's not trying, because he's just that graceful, and because - despite the criticism it brings - he wants you to think that he's not trying.

Juan Carlos Ferrero, whose own grace is largely a memory by now, beat Gael Monfils in five sets last week.

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After a long drive through the Kern River valley, up into the mountains, we finally arrived at the big trees. The first one lurked behind a turn on the road, eliciting cries of surprise and awe as we passed. Even if you've watched Planet Earth, even if you've seen one of the countless pictures of the Giant Sequoias, nothing can prepare you for actually seeing one.

We happily paid to park next to the somewhat touristy Trail of 100 Giants trailhead. Rarely - though moreso in National Parks than anywhere else - the touristy vibe of a place is irrelevant to its own internal grace. The Giant Sequoias along the trail we walked were in no way lessened by the paved path that weaved between them, nor by the screaming of children unaccustomed to a screen-less walk through a natural monument.

One child in particular screamed and screamed and screamed. He didn't want to go towards the leaning tree, or away from something he liked, or along a path near so many bees. The exact nature of his protest was hard to make out, but it was, I'm certain, directional. It seemed to me, above all, that he didn't want to confront the Sequoias. No child is able to comprehend those trees. Indeed, probably no adult can really understand what it means for a tree to be 1,500 years old. Constantine is ancient history; the birth of a Sequoia, even more so.

Infinity is not nearly as overwhelming a concept as finite but large. The Sequoias are giants - too big to see the top of, over a dozen feet in diameter at the base, sometimes scarred with burn marks as large as an entire cedar tree - but it is their relationship to time, more than space, that truly impresses. What can a child do but cry when confronted with a 75-year-old baby of a Sequoia that's older than Granpa, and yet at only the beginning of its young life?

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Monfils played as Monfils plays. Ferrero played as he is forced to at his age. After a gritty first set tiebreaker, Monfils power and agility won out in tight second and third sets. He looked to be in command of the match, but he plays an expensive brand of tennis. Every dive, every collapse, the effort of chasing down so many of Ferrero's well-placed shots caught up with Monfils. He still held serve in most every game down the stretch of the final two sets, but a break here and a break there, and Ferrero closed out the match 6-4, 6-4 in the final two sets.

Tennis - especially at a Major Tournament like the Open - is a grueling sport. As important as power, speed, and agility are, stamina and the ability to pace oneself are just as important. Ferrero rarely overexerted himself in his match with Monfils, playing just hard enough to push the Frenchman, just pesky enough to stay in the first three sets and steal one of them. Then, by the time the fourth set rolled around the match was already well over three hours old, and Monfils's grace and nonchalance turned into fatigue, and Ferrero showed the instinct that allows you to be the best in the world, if only for a short time.

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The tree we spent the most time with was dead. It had fallen well over 100 years ago, and yet it had barely decayed. For the Sequoias even death moves in slow motion. Lying on the ground, it's easier to appreciate the sheer size of one of these Giants. Walking from base to tip is roughly equivalent to traversing three tennis courts. Climbing onto the curved peak affords one a view of a dangerous fall. Bringing the virtually imperceptible giants to human scale only further reinforces how unfathomably huge they are standing up.

On the exposed faces of the fallen Sequoia people had scrawled initials, expressions of undying love, crude jokes, and brief political rants. It's tempting to be upset about the human need to spoil natural beauty, but in this case anger is as perfectly irrelevant as the illegible carvings. These trees do not exist on any human scale, and our petty efforts to make them ours - by writing on them, or by protecting them from writing - misses their point. Indeed, they do not have, in any human sense, a point. They are merely trees. What power we exert over or in service of them says more about us than it does about them.

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I wonder about players like Juan Carlos Ferrero. What motivates him to keep playing when he knows that he stands little chance against the Roger Federers and Rafael Nadals and Novak Djokovics of the modern game? As time passes the gap between himself and the top players grows, and as new top players find their way to the peak of their own games, Ferrero will continue to be the same Ferrero who reached his peak in 2003, and has been fighting to maintain a semblance of that greatness ever since. Sure, another big paycheck, another endorsement deal or two can't hurt, but defeat does hurt for a champion.

"The love of the game" is a hackneyed and inadequate response to the question. Of course Ferrero loves the game, and of course he believes in himself. Somewhere, though, in the back of his mind, he has to know that the victories left to him are the ones that are not won during prime time, with the lights shining on him and the TV cameras rolling. He might beat Gael Monfils, who is number seven in the world, but that is still a minor, unexpected victory. Maybe, though, even for a former world champion, that's all that matters sometimes.

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Now we're searching for a home in the South Bay. The trees are behind us. Their monolithic presence has given way to human concerns: a place to sleep, food to eat, a toilet to shit in. As we search we've been forced to reconnect with commerce, with the artificial rules and regulations of the social contract, with the cultural codes that run even deeper than that, with the games that you have to play. The U.S. Open is still on TV.

And what is a home, really? It's a place to stay, but - as the saying goes - you can carry it on your back. It's a transitory phenomenon, a place defined by its residents, a moment. And yet the question "Where do you live" usually elicits a one word response: Honolulu, Denver, San Francisco. These capital-letter stand-ins for the particular moments we spend in our homes speak to eternity, a time that spans our own lives. In the end, a home is both the moment and the eternity, the place and the Place. Perhaps we don't always look for these things, but we find them anyway. Or, anyway, they find us.

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What does Juan Carlos Ferrero have to do with the Sequoias? Nothing, really. Ferrero operates on a human scale, searching for a victory this week, and another one next week. His career as a tennis player will be over soon, even though it only just started, even by the standards of a normal human "career." The Sequoias, on the other hand, lie mostly outside of human perception. Comprehending what it means for anything to exist for 1,500 years is essentially impossible for a creature that lives less than 100 years. Eternity is not the precise word, but it might as well be.

As I search for a home, I'm really searching for a place where I can filter my perceptions, understand my interactions, and ground my existence. Wrapped up in a home is an understanding of home in its moments and in its eternities. Ferrero and the Sequoias are experiences I filter through myself, and as I look for a home, I look for a way of understanding not the meaning of tennis or really big trees, but rather something about myself. I know where I am going, what I am going to do, and perhaps even a little bit about who I am. Still, there's something else that a home represents in time, in space, and in understanding.

That something is wrapped up in eternity and in moments, in trees and tennis courts, and, above all, in the way we move through it all.

Win Probability and Tennis

2011-08-31T20:16:00.001-07:00

As a huge baseball statistics nerd, I love Fangraphs.com. Well, I don't really read many of their articles, nor do I engage in their often contentious comment threads. Rather, I love the thing that made it famous: win probability graphs. If you haven't seen one, they look like this.

Hey look, the Royals lost a game they should have won!

The premise is simple. Given any game situation, you can calculate - based on the number of expected runs scored for both the remainder of the inning and the remainder of the game - how likely each team is to win. Certain events, like home runs, tend to increase your odds significantly, while others, like strikeouts with the bases loaded and two outs, tend to hurt them. Of course, context becomes extremely important, and the graph will fluctuate more in closer games like the Royals versus Tigers game above.

Now the cool part is not even the graph itself, but the "Leverage Index" beneath it. Basically, the amount of change that is possible/likely in any given situation is mapped beneath the graph. This leads to a clear, quantitative mapping of high and low leverage situations. This in turn, leads to cool calculations of things like "clutch," which fangraphs calculates by comparing a player's performance in low leverage situations to his performance in high leverage ones (instead of the standard, and unsatisfying "close and late").

All of this is old hat to baseball fans, and my point isn't to recap what you already know or could find on fangraphs. Rather, I want to put out a call to coders, web developers, and tennis fans to do this for tennis. I've seen a man named Jeff Sackmann produce a "Tennis Win Expectancy Graph" for a particular match, but as far as I know, there is no widely available tool to let tennis fans calculate win probability on their own, much less a live scoreboard like on fangraphs.

If anything, win probability for tennis should be simpler than for baseball. Rather than having to calculate run expectancies, your set of variables are much, much smaller. If you use the tour wide statistic, as Sackmann does, that the server will win 64% of points, you can, theoretically, easily produce a win probability algorithm. Turning that into a graph is obviously not too difficult, given Sackmann's own work.

So let's make it happen! Tennis needs would benefit from win probability graphs as much as baseball. Questions that win probability (and leverage index) could help answer include:
1) Do great players "raise their level" on key points, or are they just always better?
2) How much of a difference in point-by-point leverage is there between a three and five set match?
3) What is the "most important" point in a given match?
There are countless others, so I won't list them all. But even these should whet the appetite of the statistically-minded tennis fan.

Now you're probably thinking: "great, so do it yourself." If only I could. I have spent most of the day watching the U.S. Open and playing around with Excel. But while the mathematics are not beyond me (though they are harrier than you might think), the coding is. Perhaps someone else wants to take the baton? If so, I'd be a happy contributor, cheerleader, partner in the process, to whatever degree I can.

Hey, fangraphs isn't just graphs, it's also writers. If someone starts "tennisgraphs," I'll be happy to write for it.

The Corporate Death Penalty

2011-08-27T11:26:00.002-07:00

If corporations are people, they should not only have the rights of people, but also the responsibilities. They should be able to suffer the same consequences individual people do for immoral and illegal actions, including, in particularly heinous crimes, the death penalty.

Now what I'm not going to say here is that corporations are not people. It should be obvious that they are not, but the notion that they are has been a legal reality in the United States for over 100 years. So as much as the Democratic Party was ostensibly up-in-arms over Mitt Romney's "Corporations are people" gaffe, they've been on the same bandwagon for over a century (since, in fact, the Democrats were the conservatives and the Republicans the liberals).

No, the point here is that, if corporate personhood is a legal and philosophical reality in the United States already, we ought to extend it to its logical limits. As is, the corporation (capitalized? I think maybe yes)... Ahem, Mr. Corporation is protected by the constitutional rights of individuals. That is, his individual rights are protected under the 1st and 14th amendments, among others.

Obviously, this has created all kinds of problems, not the least of which being the (increasingly less) recent Federal Election Commission vs. Citizen's United Supreme Court ruling that allows corporate entities to give unlimited sums of money to political causes. The result was the meteoric rise in spending in the 2010 midterms, and the even more insane fundraising that has already occurred in the 2012 election cycle (Barack Obama is on pace to shatter George Bush's reelection fundraising totals, and not because of grassroots support). Of course, corporate personhood has been around and caused trouble for a long time before FEC vs. CU, but this particular piece of legal interpretation has dire, self-perpetuating consequences in a way that few previous corporate personhood rulings and legislation have.

How do we get ourselves out of this mess? Well the root of the problem is, in some sense, that we've endowed personhood on entities that have no conscience, no fundamental ethical code, and no accountability to anyone except for shareholders. Because most shareholders are only distantly involved in the companies they are invested in, and because of the cultural maxim that all public companies must maximize profits at all costs,* there is little concern for little stuff like making sure people or the environment aren't harmed by defective (or even effective) products and services. The result is a set of beings with human rights, but without human responsibilities.

* Indeed, they must not only maximize profits, they must actually make more profits than they were expected to make if they are to do well in the market.

Getting rid of corporate personhood is well nigh impossible. There's no political traction for it, no reason that either major party will challenge a nearly two-century old legal statute. What I propose, then, is to force the corporate person to have a conscience by forcing him to be accountable for his actions. There have been a great many well-known cases where corporations knowingly engaged in immoral behavior at the expense of consumers, the environment, or both. While there are repercussions for such actions, they are usually slight and monetary. While there are people held accountable for heinous corporate crimes, their prison sentences are lenient and their fines meaningless (and frequently uncollected).

Rather than approaching corporate responsibility quantitatively, let's approach is qualitatively. When a corporation is convicted of a heinous crime - the intentional killing of a human being (or murder, as we call it in human-speak), for example - it should be subject to the same kinds of penalties an individual is subject to. In particular, I believe we should sometimes put corporations to death.

What does that mean, exactly? It means that the corporation is dissolved, it's assets liquefied and seized, and its board and CEO barred from serving with any other for-profit corporation in the future. Is that too harsh? Ironically, a great many people would say "yes," even though I'm talking about a corporation convicted of murder. "Why," the argument goes, "should the people inside the company (and the shareholders) be legally responsible for the actions of the corporation? The CEO is not the murderer." Too which I respond, yes, but the corporation is being put to death, not the CEO. The CEO and board, however, do share some responsibility for the corporation, and thus should not be allowed to serve with other for-profit corporations in the future.

What about the shareholders? Well, they could conceivably cash out between indictment and conviction. Otherwise, their investment would come to nothing. What about the employees? Well, unfortunately, they'd be out-of-work. Now if that seems harsh and unfair to employees and shareholders (the "little people" in the equation), think about the other side of the equation. If every single employee and every single shareholder of a corporation has that much stake in the corporation not committing heinous crimes, suddenly said company actually does have a conscience. The CEO and board stand to lose plenty under this proposal, but the employees and the shareholders stand to lose even more, which makes them powerful advocates for the moral behavior of the corporation.

While the corporate death penalty - complete with severe professional ramifications for the board, as well as loss of employment for the employees and loss of investment for shareholders - would be a significant step towards ensuring a more ethical moral climate in the corporate world, it's far from a silver bullet. Indeed, the hassle of prosecution, the potential economic ramification of a "too big to fail" company being put to death, and the difficulty of enforcement of the stipulations that would be necessary to stop the most corrupt of CEOs and boards from profiting even from the death of their companies (see Ken Lay at Enron) would prove significant hurdles to implementing such a proposal. Hopefully, however, the very attempt would at least force us to recognize the absurdity of legal corporate personhood to begin with.

The biggest hurdle to the corporate death penalty, however, is that corporations would resist it, just as they resist rescinding corporate personhood in general. Given their political influence, it would be nearly impossible to gain traction on a bill that allowed corporations to be put to death. Given the Supreme Court's political leanings, it is also hard to believe they would uphold such a bill (though, in the process, they might at least be forced to declare the individual death penalty unconstitutional). Nevertheless, I suggest that it might be an easier path to the end of corporate tyranny than any other we have before us.

Returning to Coors Field

2011-08-24T10:25:00.001-07:00

For the first time in over a year, I made it to Coors Field for a Rockies game on Monday. Though I missed the real excitement by one day (yesterday's game had a little bit of everything), the opener of the Astros series had a couple innings worth remembering.

First off, the Rockies - after much mocking by me and my fellow attendees for their abysmal offense - managed to score six runs in the first inning. This offensive explosion proved enough to win the game, though the home team, in another shocker, managed to tack on to the lead in later innings.

All was not peachy in Rockie-ville, however, as J.C. Romero and Josh Roenicke combined to surrender 4 runs and record one out in the ninth inning of what had been a 9-1 game. Rafael Betancourt was summoned to close out the game, which he did promptly by retiring two batters in, roughly, seven and a half hours.

The final out was a strikeout of former Rockie Clint Barmes, who batted with two runners on base and a chance to bring the game to one run. Even as a die-hard Rockies fan, a small part of me secretly wished that Barmes would have hit the ball out. As one expects with Barmes, however, occasional power comes with frequent strikeouts and popups, and so the game was hardly in doubt. Betancourt, especially, is the kind of pitcher that Barmes struggles to hit well, and while he had a battlers at bat, he never seemed likely to square anything up.

The details of the game, of course, were nothing remarkable. Instead, the reason I mention it in this space is because of the chance to return to Coors Field. Recently Rob Neyer sung the only slightly over-exaggerated praises of the park I grew up in. While even I'm hesitant to call it the best of the last 50 years, there's no doubt that it's an amazing stadium. The views of the mountains alone are enough to separate Coors from most any other ballpark.

Unfortunately, we sat away from the mountains, instead finding ourselves behind the left field foul pole. Our slightly-obstructed view of the infield meant that Mark Ellis was hard to see. Which is fine, because he still barely feels like a Rockie to me (though an offseason resigning seems plausible, if unfortunate). On the other hand, we had an unparalleled view of Eric Young Jr., who continues, for some reason, to play out-of-position in left field. Though, as fellow attendee Joe observed, Eric Young Jr. is out of position no matter where he plays, so there is that.

Me and the view from our seats.

As for ballpark banter, my favorite incident was our critique of a nearby fan's unfortunate sign. It read "CarGo's #5 Fan." Clever, at first blush, because Cargo's number is, of course, 5. Not clever because it lacks the usual fanbole (fan hyperbole, per Joe Posnanski) of always using superlatives. Perhaps, we discussed, it could be an ironic sign? But the other side of the same poster-board said that it was the fan's first game at Coors, which suggests, instead, an unintentional faux pas in sign construction.

With Eric Young Jr. continuously in view, we hatched a plan for how to improve the sign. Eric Young Jr. wears the number 1 - because, hey, that's what 5'10''* utility infielders/outfielders/fast-guys-who-don't-play-defense wear. Combined with EY Jr.'s status as the son of Eric Young - of first Colorado home run fame - and you have the much better sign: "EY2's #1 fan." Much, much better.

* Standing next to Dexter Fowler, Eric Young looks like a small child. Dexter is 6'4'', though he only weighs, per baseball reference, 10 pounds more than EY. Also, for some reason Dex can't steal bases.

The original sign showed its weaknesses in particular when Cargo came up with the bases loaded in the 8th inning. As Joe observed, "Cargo's #5 fan must be really excited, right now." "Yes," I responded, "but there are four people more excited."

Perhaps all of this sounds irrelevant. But that's exactly the point. Watching baseball on television (or MLB.tv, anyway) for the past year, I forgot how different it is to watch in person, with friends. There's a vitality to the experience that is lacking even on the most vivacious Purple Row game thread. The game is alive. What you lose in ability to see strikes and balls on television, you gain in the ability to watch the defense. What you lose in announcing (which, frankly, is little with the Rockies broadcast crew) you gain in the quips and jabs of surrounding fans.

To those of you who live near baseball stadiums, this is not news. But living in Hawaii - despite its many virtues - makes you forget the magic of baseball. Even a mediocre, meaningless August game at Coors Field is enough to remind my why I love the sport, and why, even in the leanest and meanest times, I'll always be a Rockies fan. In the end, it's not about the Rockies at all. It's about being there - about feeling and seeing the game around you. And, in my case, it's about Coors Field, because that's where I learned to love and understand the game, and the place that will always define my fandom. Even if I live the rest of my life in the Bay Area, the Rockies will be my team because Coors Field is my baseball home. And it was good to be home again, if only for one game.

Traveling

2011-08-12T10:52:00.000-07:00

Just a quick heads up that the week-long silence here is a result of the move-in-progress. Jericha and I left Hawaii on the 10th, are now in Colorado, and will be visiting New Mexico and San Diego before we make it out to the South Bay. During that time I'll have some Internet access, but can't promise frequent blog posts (especially because this is prime novel-writing time). Expect an occasional check-in, but our regularly scheduled programming probably won't return until mid-September.

Economy, Purpose, and the Fallacy of Infinite Growth

2011-08-06T16:51:00.001-07:00

Introduction: The Language of Economy

Let's put aside labels and their connotations for a minute. Words like "capitalism," "socialism," "communism," and even "economics" have way too much baggage and innuendo attached to be a part of a rational conversation. We've imbued them with Good and with Evil, and so one cannot be proclaimed a socialist or a capitalist without moral judgment following close behind. Once cannot speak of economics without the intensity of fear, anger, outrage, frustration, hope, and expectation.

Putting aside the labels and building from scratch, what ought the fundamental building blocks of a society be? That is, if we suddenly had the need to create a new nation, how should that nation be organized? I don't mean what branches of government it should have, or what kinds of political parties (if any at all). I mean something more fundamental than all of that. What should the motive force for the people of that society be? What should the implicit goal and purpose of individual and collective life be?

Building a Society

Freedom, it should be said, is not an end goal. There perhaps was a time when it made sense as one, as both the French and American revolutions demonstrate. But what does it mean to organize a life around freedom? It means little, because freedom is a way of doing things, and not a reason for doing things. To act for the sake of freedom is, in some measure, to act just because you can. "Because I can," is rarely a good reason for doing things.

Nevertheless, it goes without saying the people ought to be free, need to be free. While we might debate the meaning of "free," we can, I think, agree that any actual purpose in human life is best achieved when people are free. This has been the mistake of communist (and other) governments of the past: they change the end goal while doing nothing to improve the conditions necessary to make that end goal attainable. Without freedom, people cannot employ their creative energy towards their process, which prevents them from reaching a meaningful and successful outcome. Just as you cannot dictate the learning of a child and expect that child to actually learn, you cannot dictate the life of a man and expect that man to actually live.

So what kinds of goals should a society be organized around? Justice, like freedom, is not an end point, but a means. Peace is the same. How about, then, happiness? Indeed, the American Declaration of Independence suggests as much: "Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness" are inalienable rights. Life and liberty are means, the pursuit of happiness is an end. A reasonable and desirable goal for both individual human life and for a society. Of course, we could probably come up with dozens of good goals, and reasons why each of them are flawed. The point, however, is that it makes sense to have a philosophical purpose for a society as an anchor around which laws, governmental systems, and, yes, even economies can be built.

The Constitution, of course, reads "Life, Liberty, and Property." Now, let's resist the urge to use those dirty economic words. Think, instead, about meanings. What, really, does it mean for property to be a right? It does not mean, importantly, that our society need be organized around money. Context does matter, here, however, and so it does mean that our society is not organized around the pursuit of happiness. That was a revolutionary campaign slogan with no power to shape the law.*

* Indeed, it probably sounds absurd to say that the law should be organized around the pursuit of happiness. One might even argue that the right to the pursuit of happiness is built into liberty, in every meaningful legal sense. That very well may be true, but it misses the point. The point is, liberty speaks to process, and pursuit of happiness speaks to outcome. Pursuing happiness is something you do, liberty is something you need in order to do it. In building a society, it does no good to speak solely of the means that people will have without speaking, to some degree, to the goals that will be supported and encouraged. You may argue that supporting and encourage goals is not the work of a government (or a society at large), but of course it is an inevitable outcome of having a society at all. What is a culture if not a set of supported and unsupported (or honored and shunned) actions? Indeed, even the most libertarian states and individuals tend to have a semblance of moral sensibility. If a society says that the pursuit of happiness is both right and a right, I suspect few would object on the grounds that said society is unfairly trying to control people. And if they did object on those grounds, they must be very upset at every other society ever, which have had more obscure and stricter moral goals than happiness.

What, then, is our society built around? There is no constitutional necessity that it be primarily commercial, despite the presence of "property." Increasingly, however, that is our shared end goal. Commerce, money, exchange... Acquisition is the measure of a life in the modern world. Why is this true? Because our culture - with some governmental aid, but let's not shift blame to those who simply enact our cultural will - had decided, globally, that property should be the primary purpose of both individual human life and of our social existence.

Now, I would be surprised if the majority of people would say that money ought to be the end goal of individual human life or society in general. I would also be surprised, however, if a careful examination of any individual life in the modern world would not include some concern for money. You see, regardless of how highly any individual person holds monetary gain, it is a kind of implicit measuring stick in our society, a measuring stick, what's more, that shapes behaviors and determines possible actions based upon a shared cultural understanding that certain amounts of money equate to certain material resources.

Now don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that money is flawed in itself. It's a useful abstraction for many reasons. The problem is not money, but a global (and increasingly globalized) culture in which money is not merely a convenient way of ensuring that people's needs are met, but rather an entire organizing principle and end goal for human social life. Much like grades in school, money is an abstraction of achievement that bears some not inconsequential relationship to actual success, but which also misses the point entirely. If the purpose of going to school is to get good grades, and not to learn, then what good is school? Similarly, if the purpose of life is to acquire property, to hold money, to be rich, then what good is life?*

*Again, I beseech you to stay away from the language of socialism, capitalism, and so on. I am not talking about capitalism, here. I'm talking about the fundamental assumptions of our society and culture, and whether or not they make sense. If those assumptions are capitalist, if I am, therefore, a socialist... Well, then you've missed the point. The point is not to label, but to live.

It would be insanity to create a school where grades supersede learning in importance (and so, of course, in many schools this is the case). Insanity not because it doesn't make sense, but because it fails to go to the root of things. Indeed, it makes a lot of sense for students to pay more attention to grades than their learning, and so most do. What they miss, then, and what their teachers miss, is the opportunity for a more fulfilling, joyful, and meaningful experience.

Now lets take that entire paragraph and do it with society at large.

It would be insanity to create a society where money supersedes happiness in importance (and so, of course, in many societies this is the case). Insanity not because it doesn't make sense, but because it fails to go to the root of things. Indeed, it makes a lot of sense for people to pay more attention to money than to happiness, and so most do. What they miss, then, and their law makers and luminaries miss, is the opportunity for a more fulfilling, joyful, and meaningful experience.

Now you may say that there is no meaning to human existence, so who cares how society is organized? I would argue that that's just the money talking. Because money is so abstract, so inherently meaningless except as a kind of measure of materially full but spiritually empty success, a society built around it tends to produce citizens who find life meaningless. Why? Because they are right. True, they are free to find their own purpose, to organize their own lives around the pursuit of happiness or some other more meaningful goal, but at every turn they will be confronted with commerce, with their own money or lack thereof. It is no accident that many of even the most ardent supporters of a spiritual life live in material comfort (and why shouldn't they?): in a society built around money, it is hard to be seen as spiritually successful if you are not economically successful. We have an innate cultural bias against poverty.*

* Just as the school has an innate cultural bias against students with bad grades. We say those bad grades (that poverty) comes from laziness, from stupidity, from an inability to understand the system. The thing is, we've built the system not only so poverty (so bad grades) are possible, but in fact so that they are necessary. "The poor will be with you always" because, in a system built around money (grades) it is impossible for everyone - or even the majority - to succeed. So whose failure is it?

The Fallacy of Infinite Growth

Little of this, of course, is surprising. A society organized around X will tend to produce citizens who are deeply concerned with X, whether or not they think that X ought to be the purpose or goal of their own life or of society at large. What's more, if X is limited in its availability, it naturally follows that people will try to horde X, even at the expense of other leaving other members of their same society with too little X to survive.

Ah, but there's the problem. Everyone can have enough X. Everyone get an A in this class. Everyone can be rich.

The true, fundamental problem with organizing a society around money is none of what I've written above. Sure, it is troubling and frustrating to watch people (both successful and otherwise) come to believe that their lives are meaningless. Of course it's silly that we've fallen for the argument that money is the best way to assure happiness on a large scale (despite centuries of evidence to the contrary). Yes it's amazingly stupid that we've made even having a conversation about economics well nigh impossible thanks to how loaded the language surrounding it has become, in spite of the actual meaning of the words involved. But in spite of all of those problems, at the real core is this issue, which is tied up in human nature and evolutionary history: the fallacy of infinite growth.

Everyone can be, if not rich, well-off. A rising tide lifts all boats. Everyone can have X.

Except that's not true. There are complex reasons why not everyone can have an A in a class. Similarly, there are complex reasons why not everyone can be "well-off" in society. But there's a simple reason why a money-driven economy makes material comfort for all impossible. Finite resources, and the unsustainable nature of infinite growth.

Human beings evolved in a time and place where the size of the world and the resources in it were effectively infinite relative to the human population. Acquiring material goods made sense for small packs and tribes because, well, there was so much stuff around that was so hard to get that it was crazy not to stockpile, to horde, to protect, to be "rich." We have, built into our evolutionary psyches, a notion that the world will continue to support us no matter how much more of it we use. And for good reason: this has always been true.

The problem is, it's not true. Not at all. The world is manifestly finite in size, and therefore finite in resources. For all of the talk about renewable, sustainable energy and such, the simple fact remains: there is only so much stuff that we have access to. Now think about the assumptions of a society built around money, an economy built around growth... Recall that success and failure of companies in the modern world has less to do with profits, and more to do with growth of profits, with success relative to projections. A growing economy, we believe, is a healthy one. A growing world is a successful one.

Except the world cannot support more people (if it can even support how many we have now), and the economy cannot, fundamentally, grow ad infinitum. Even if there were good philosophical reasons to organize society around commerce (and the first part of this post has argued that there are not), there are practical reasons why it is ludicrous. What happens when we continue growing for the next twenty, fifty, or one hundred years? Where will the people go? Where will the energy come from? What resources will we be able to access?

An assumption of infinite growth may very well be built into human nature, but it's an assumption we need to overcome, nonetheless. Having seen the flaw of that assumption, it's impossible not to see the flaw of modern commerce: it cannot go on forever, because we cannot create ever more goods, ever more energy, ever more stuff when we only have a finite amount of stuff to begin with. It would not only be better to organize our society - our world - around a different principle than money. It will be necessary to do so.

Conclusion: Where Are We Going?

There is little reason to believe that there will be a fundamental change in the political economy of the modern world in the near future, despite the fact that such a chance is ultimately not only desirable, but necessary for the continued success of humanity as a species. The reason such a chance is impossible is cultural and linguistic: we lack the language to have the conversations we need to have in order to restructure our political world. We are stuck in a verbal shouting match, arguing over which deck chair should go where on a sinking ship.

It goes deeper than that, however. Our current political and economic systems are self-perpetuating. They make use of human nature to reinforce their tenets. They make dangerous assumptions that are not only left unexamined, but are in fact are transformed into boons with rhetoric. They serve no one - including the most successful - and yet are defended staunchly by even the least successful. How this is achieved is not totally clear: there's deception, of course, but no vast conspiracy. There's mis-education, but not explicitly. Above all, there's oversimplification and moralizing without any attempt to understand the roots of those processes.

With that in mind, the takeaway here should not be that "Capitalism is Evil." That's exactly not my point. Indeed, the mentality that capitalism, socialism, or any other economic system is innately good or evil is in fact a large part of the problem. True or not, those assessments forget to go to the root. They forget to ask, "How ought a society to be organized, especially in light of the material realities of the modern world (where infinite growth is an illusion that has been dispelled)?" They turn the entire conversation into an ideological shouting match, which, of course, only serves to perpetuate the existing cultural, social, and economic systems as they already are.

So what do I suggest? Well, that's hard to say. I think, above all, we need to engage in a conversation about purpose, about meaning, and about how we can better design a society, a government, and a world. That conversation must challenge assumptions. That conversation must undermine the belief that we should do things a certain way because it's natural to do so, or because we have always done so. As Descartes attempted with philosophy, we need now, in the modern world, to attempt with society: to start with a blank slate. We must ask, how ought we, as human beings, to design a society so that we all might live more fulfilling lives?

Language Has Nothing To Do With Words

2011-08-03T15:39:00.000-07:00

The title is not really accurate. Language obviously has something to do with words. Language, generally speaking, is made of words. But the importance of words to language is, I think, a little overrated. Hmm, that's not really right either. Words are, after all, essential to language. No words, no language. No words, no blog post. Hard to be overrated when you're essential.

So let's try it this way: vocabulary is not the most important part of learning a language. We might add a corollary to the same effect about grammar. And yet, vocabulary and grammar rules make up the core of how we teach and learn language, whether foreign or our own. To me, this is like trying to teach someone to play piano by making them memorize the names of the notes (something many music educators do, of course). It's not useless, it's just not the most important part.

So what's the alternative? Well, I think there's a strong argument to be made for the importance of culture in learning. Can you truly learn to speak a language without an appreciation for how and when and where it is spoken? Perhaps you can, in a mechanical kind of way, but there's a reason why people learn more about how to speak Spanish by living in Spain for a few weeks than by taking years of courses.*

* This was certainly my experience, though you have to exchange Spain for Costa Rica.

Language is a cultural phenomenon. Think about how much of what you say is idiom, context, suggestion, gesture. Even in written text, there are cultural meanings and expectations. We learn to read not just words, but the meanings of words. We learn to listen not just to grammar, but to intonation and inflection.

Of course, none of this is a revelation. The importance of cultural context to language may have been news long ago in anthropological and even educational circles. As early as Wittgenstein, modern philosophy began a deconstruction of our concept of language which has meaning outside of context. No, the point isn't that this is news.

Rather, this is a gentle reminder - to myself, or to any educator - that language has everything to do with culture, and nothing to do with words.

Listening to Beethoven's 3rd Symphony, Part Four: Rebuilding a Melody

2011-07-27T04:12:00.003-07:00

As usual, check out parts one through three by clicking their respective links on ye olde sidebar.

What do you do after a catastrophe?

Last time we looked at the wholly remarkable "train wreck" which punctuates (with several exclamation points) the development of the Third Symphony. It is, in short, a total musical catastrophe. The development section, up to the train wreck, is a seething mass of competing themes already. Indeed, even without our catastrophe and the third theme to follow, this development section would have been unusual in Beethoven's time for its length and intensity. But the train wreck raises the bar. It plunges the piece into a warlike chaos, destabilizing any sense of harmonic, melody, or even rhythmic balance.

So what do you do after a catastrophe? Beethoven, in a sense, had written himself into a corner with the train wreck.* So he responds by doing something completely new and different. He plays us a melody.

* In a hilarious understatement and/or misunderstanding and/or ironic quip the editor of the Liszt piano transcription notes, in the space between the train wreck and the theme to which we are, by degrees, coming: "Here the genius of Beethoven saw the necessity of a change." Um, yeah. Considering the entire piece just fell apart, I don't know that it takes a genius to see that something pretty amazing has to happen. No, the genius is the one who can put it back together.**

** Scratch that, the genius is the one who is so confident in his ability that he knows he can put it back together, and therefore chooses to break it in the first place. The "genius of Beethoven" saw this whole thing coming a mile away. Then again, maybe that's the ironic quip: the necessity of a change is not in this piece, but in composition itself.

Not to say that the previous two themes are not melodies. They are, in a rudimentary, arpeggiated kind of way. But this one actually is a melody. It includes tones that are not the one, three, or five of the tonic chord. Said another way, it moves stepwise instead of by chord tones. Said another way, it's something you can actually sing without sounding totally ridiculous.*

*Seriously, try singing the opening theme with this lyric I was cursed enough to hear: "Oh my word, it's Beethoven's Third, again." It may be a fantastic theme, but I defy you to take it seriously as a melody.

What do we make of this melody? Well, on its own it's quite pleasant. It's not harmonically all that complex (just a series of tonic to dominant and back; about as simple as it gets). It's rhythmically straightforward. It's, well, a song. Which is perhaps nothing special in itself, but remember how we got here.

You see, what strikes us as a simple, pleasant, but largely uncomplicated melody on its own is transformed into a kind of symphonic messiah in context. This third theme literally saves the movement from total chaos, swooping in just after some of the most dissonant, ugly, weird chords that any composer has dared write into a symphony. It's simplicity is chief virtue: we are rebuilding a melody. Indeed, we are rebuilding melody itself.

Following the metaphor from the last post, this theme is an attempt to recreate that beautiful life of the Viennese waltz after bombardment has destroyed the city. It is not melancholy, particularly, even if it has a touch of minor tonality. Rather it is resignedly determined, complete with a simple-minded view that everything can and will be alright, that the city can and will be rebuilt.

But war - and music - is never that simple. For where do we go after this theme but once more unto the proverbial breach.

The third theme - as you may have noticed in the first two snippets - doesn't resolve itself. Instead it launches right back into the opening theme. That opening theme, far from being a return to "normal," becomes a catalyst for rapid and unpredictable harmonic motion. We sway from major to minor and back, we change keys, and we end up back at the third theme, only a half step (!) higher. This time the third theme isn't around for long, either, taking a new melodic turn before leading us into a new statement of the opening theme in which it's not clear where our attention should go. Are we meant to follow the broiling flutes, or the arpeggios in the bass?

This potential second train wreck is stopped by a harmonic, melodic, and rhythmic reset that is not quite as intense as the one that introduced the third theme, but is jarring nonetheless. Instead of chaos, we see a kind of sickeningly quiet order, a plucking of pizzicato strings set against the tension of a sustained dominant chord. And then, of course, the horn comes in (early), and we're back to the opening of the symphony in the form of the recapitulation, where things are very much the way they were when we started. Except, they're completely different. All of which will be the subject of part five.

Anyway, the purpose of all that is to give us context for thinking more about this third theme. As a piece of music, this third theme is hardly amazing. As a piece of narrative, it is brilliant. Standing between total destruction and the remainder of the development section, it speaks to a kind of naive optimism that, once beaten down, cannot help but return again (and once against get sent away). Now, I don't think that Beethoven means to discount this theme, but I also don't think that we can take it at face value.

What would taking it at face value look like? Well, I think it would be easy to look at the third theme and to say it's a nice maneuverer, a clever ploy to allow Beethoven to go boom boom and get away with it. It's easy to say it's pretty, and nice, and beautiful. It's easy to say that it's genius. It's a lot harder to say why it's all of those things, however, and harder still to say that, maybe, we're not supposed to actually like this theme.

That is, we are supposed to like it, but only because it's so much nicer to listen to than the noise that came before it (or, for that matter, the strangeness that comes after it). We like it by contrast. But, as mentioned above, it's not a particularly great piece of music, nor does it really get its chance to play itself out. No, I believe this theme is a stand in, a joke, a classic example of Beethoven thumbing his nose at his listeners (especially the uptight ones that would have really hated the train wreck). It's a statement that, no, everything is not alright anymore. In the face of the kinds of harmonic and melodic atrocities - so-called, anyway - Beethoven commits in the development section, the tradition of music cannot be the same.

While examining the opening theme, I talked about the infamous C#. It raises questions about heroism, about music and narrative, about harmonic and melodic function. This third theme, I think, starts to answer those questions, but in a subtle and subversive way. If music is powerful, I asked, is it also dangerous? The answer, in this development section, is yes. Music is dangerous. Music can change mediocrity into greatness, or vice versa. Music can tell a story about power and conflict, music can persuade, music can frustrate and anger, music can inspire. All of that makes music dangerous.

I don't think, to be clear, that it's the train wreck that is dangerous, for all of the chaos that it embodies. No, it's this third theme that's the dangerous one, precisely because it's so perfect. The chance for easy redemption, the opportunity to pretend that a revolution isn't really a big deal, these things are a danger. And music, too, is a danger, if it chooses not to unfurl itself. Before Beethoven composers rarely, if ever, wrote about themselves, about music, about power. They wrote, largely, to be pleasing, to make money, and to praise God. Beethoven does all of those things, but he also drives deeper, and in so doing unearths the flaw of the music of his predecessors (however great much of it was): it can't stand up to true musical force.

We have further to go in this movement, but I want to leave with a glimpse of the entire development section. In the last two posts I've subdivided the development into two parts: pre-train wreck, and post. It's worth listening to the whole thing as one unit. I won't offer any more commentary, since the last two posts have more than enough. Rather, I'll let the music do the talking. Here's the entire development section of the Third Symphony.

A Brief Thought on Final Exams

2011-07-23T17:53:00.000-07:00

The long-awaited Part Four of the Beethoven series is finally in the works, but in the meantime, I wanted to talk a little about final exams.

In many subjects - particularly science and math - the culminating assessment of student learning is a final exam. Students are meant to demonstrate their understanding of the material by answering a massive collection of multiple choice and free response questions. In principle, this all seems like a good idea: after all, if the subject is really important enough that students should take the class in the first place, we need to make sure students know the material at the end of the course.

The problem is, there's no reason to believe that final exams (or tests in general) really do assess student knowledge in a meaningful way. What do I mean? Well, what is learning? I would argue that, for learning to really have occurred, students should retain the skills and knowledge from that learning well beyond the end of the course. What good is it to memorize the various organelles in a cell if two weeks after the test you won't remember them? Why do we test students on their ability to remember formulas that they will later be able to look up? Why do we force students to test alone when in their real lives they'll almost always be working with others (collaboration is called "cheating" on a final exam)?

My point, however, is not to raise those questions, but this one. How many students from your most recent class in which you had a final would pass that final if they took it again today? Would you pass your high school Chemistry final? Physics? Biology? Could you succeed on an Algebra test? Geometry? US History?

What values do we show when we design assessments that test knowledge that is not actually important or useful? Why do we make students demonstrate their learning by taking tests they will not be able to pass even months - let alone years - later? What good does that do?

Now consider the alternative: project based assessments, collaborative design challenges, even portfolios. I know mathematics and science teachers in particular might find those foreign to their subjects, but they meet a criterion that seems important to me. Students who can succeed at completing a Physics design challenge in high school will likely be able to complete that same challenge with the same level - if not greater - success later on in their lives. Why is that? Because that design challenge is testing the stuff we do care about, like collaboration, the ability to find and filter information, and, yes, physics content knowledge, but in a way that actually matters instead of in abstract and meaningless questions.

As I completed my own creative writing course this summer, I reflected on the wonder of teaching skills-based, instead of content-based courses. Assessment can be about growth, and can be designed in such a way that students could succeed equally well twenty years from now as they did this summer. But the "content-based" excuse for bad assessment is just that, an excuse.

Tag Poems

2011-07-19T02:11:00.001-07:00

A final piece of my own writing from my now-defunct creative writing class. Several members of the class and I wrote a "tag poem" during the final week of the course. Basically, each person had to write a poem using the last line of the previous poem as either a title or a first line. The following were my four contributions. I'm particularly happy with the first and last ones, though I'd like to spend more time with them before I call them finished.

Untitled

Elemental fire cannot rest
On a pedestal.
Some goddesses are not content
To be worshipped.
She would rather consume,
Turn all to ash.
She would rather give birth,
Her maculate labor.
Flowing, hardening, the hair and fingers,
Pele’s very heart turns
To igneous rock.

Happiness, Anyway

Lately I relate to happiness
And anyway, I’d rather smile and laugh
In paradise, it’s mad to want much less
Than sheer perfection, on the world’s behalf.
I wonder, though, what paradise might be?
Is it a sunny day, a sandy beach?
Or is it mauka showers, greener trees,
And eighty warm degrees each day to each?
No, all those things do not make paradise
All by themselves, for they are in the world,
Experience alone cannot entice
Determined misery to come unfurled.
Yes, lately I relate to happiness
And anyway, it’s better to feel blessed.

For the Sound of Her

A spoken word seems like proof,
Conclusive evidence of her presence.
But today even electrons can talk,
And so the mind can hear voices
Long after it has forgotten a face.

For the sound of her, I listen,
Straining to hear more than a voice,
Needing proof, not content with faith.
For the sound of her, I moan,
Needing to possess, or be possessed.

Distance is the progenitor of doubt.
If I cannot imagine four thousand miles
How could I perceive her in that desert?
How could I, surrounded by trade winds
And coconuts, conceive her in red mud?

For the sound of her, I wait,
Or should, but need to own her
As much as she owns herself.
For the sound of her, I waste
Her love, listening all the while.

Water running in the bathroom,
The creaking bedroom door,
The rustling of bedsheets,
A sigh of contentment,
These demonstrate her existence.

Harmonica Heavy Southern Twang and Banjo

Band go twing twang, the harmony can
Drum up a trance dance, a piercing piece
Of musitchy excellence, Notus’s wind
Instruments blow, and bellow
Boom and boon loom soom jazz.

Fuzzy Fundraising Math

2011-07-13T12:35:00.000-07:00

This New York Times article is a wonderful example of the old adage about lies, damn lies, and statistics. Apparently relying upon widespread lack of understanding of mathematics and an inability or unwillingness to think critically about information, Jim Messina - President Obama's campaign manager - presents some shady numbers, and then points to them as evidence of “more grassroots support at this point in the process than any campaign in political history.” He's not lying, just statistic-ing.

The numbers are as follows:
- $86 million raised for the DNC and Obama's reelection campaign in the second quarter.
- 552,462 separate donors.
- Average contribution of $69.
- 98% of contributions under $250.

Well let's break out our calculators, shall we? 552,462 donors times an average donation of $69 equals... $38.1 million. But wait, Obama has raised $86 million! Huh? Where did the other $47.9 million come from?

Reading more closely tells you that the average contribution may be $69, but there's no indication as to how many donors have written multiple smaller checks, instead of one big one. In order for the math to work out, that $86 million required about 1.25 million separate donations, even if there were 552.462 separate donors. The actual average contribution per donor, meanwhile, is over $150.

That's starting to sound a little less "grassroots," no? Don't get me wrong, the sheer number of contributors here is impressive, and a great many of those - maybe as many as 98% - are average Joes and Johns contributing $20. But that's not where the bulk of Obama's funding comes from.

Unfortunately, given the numbers we have to work with here, we can't draw any certain conclusions about the percentage or amount of Obama's current campaign money that comes from corporate sources. For that matter, the Citizen's United vs. FEC ruling makes it nigh impossible to track that corporate money anyway. What we can do, however, is hypothesize. Let's assume that those 98% of donors giving $250 or less per donation are only donating once. After all, we're still over a year from the election, and I'm guessing Mr. Middle Class Obama Supporter isn't cutting multiple $50 checks to reelect the President right now.

If we assume that 98% of donors, then, are contributing an average of $69 overall (instead of per donation), we get the following:

- 98% of 552,462 donors is 541,412. An undeniably impressive number of grassroots donors, but far from the full story.
- Those donors have provided, following this hypothesis, about $37.4 million.
- That means the remaining 11,050 donors have contributed, across multiple donations each, $48.6 million.
- The average, then, amount of money donated by each of those 11,050 donors is roughly $4,400 dollars.

Remember that we're still well over a year away from the election. That's a lot of money from a small number of people for just one fiscal quarter's worth of fundraising. It's not unreasonable to assume that a small subset of those 10,000 donors - whether they be individuals, oil companies, financial firms, or health insurance providers - will be contributing as much as $50,000 each by the end of the election cycle. Perhaps the President should be careful whilst pushing for closing loopholes and levying higher taxes on the wealthiest wage earners, lest they lose the ability to contribute so much to his campaign.

For all of the talk about "grassroots" and "yes we can," it's worth remembering that those grassroots contributions, no matter how you slice it, are not the bulk of Obama's campaign money. And when executive push comes to legislative shove, the golden rule wins out: he who has the gold, makes the rules.

Character Sketch: Samantha Miller

2011-07-11T20:13:00.001-07:00

Samantha Miller was not brilliant, nor was she a beauty. Her job was ordinary, her daily routine unremarkable, her love life a vanilla series of dinner-and-a-movie outings that failed to inspire her or her potential beaus. She was, in short, boring. Except for one thing. She asked questions. A lot of questions.

Despite an intelligence that was far from formidable - it took her three tries to get through algebra, two to pass US History, and, now as an adult, at least a month and a team of helpers to get through her taxes - Samantha possessed remarkable self-awareness. She recognized and accepted her weaknesses young, and chose to turn them into strengths. While the result may have been something uninspiring to the world at large - she was, after all, plain in most every way - she was, in fact, an extremely valuable conversant precisely because she was slow to understand and quick to point out her lack of understanding.

“Wait, what do you mean by that?” Was her favorite phrase. Far from shame at her inability to grasp the subtleties of some interlocutor’s blathering, she was proud of her stubbornness, her determination to undermine the pretensions of others. She wielded, then, her so-called stupidity with what can only be described as genius, knowing exactly how to ask a question, when to interrupt a monologue, and what to do when her question was disregarded or misunderstood (that is, ask it again, and more loudly).

As a result of her inquisitiveness, and despite being slow to learn, Samantha had a formidable knowledge base. Or, at least, she understood extremely well the things that she did understand. Her shamelessness, furthermore, allowed her to interject not just with questions, but with vehement disagreement when the topic of conversation happened upon one of her strong points. Though she would never venture more than a sentence or so at a time, even when on the terra firma of acquired knowledge, her questions and interjections became more pointed, more direct, and even sometimes scathing. It was as if she was saying, “If I can understand this, why can’t you?”

That’s not to say Samantha was arrogant. Far from it. Rather, her self-awareness granted her the confidence that comes naturally and rightfully with knowledge of one’s strengths and weaknesses. That she had turned the latter into the former was a source of pride for Samantha, but also - and not accidentally - a source of humility.

Perhaps, then, Samantha Miller was a tragic figure? Blessed with a gift that she had identified and refined early in her life, she grew up to find a world that found her particular gift far less desirable than physical beauty or pure intellectual strength. Instead she was seen as a nuisance, an idiot, even. That didn’t bother her much, because she was, above all emotionally self-sufficient (and even, as she grew older, distant), but the result was that her extremely useful skill was lost to a society very much in need of it. The tragedy was not hers, but ours.

The Prog and the Pickalees

2011-07-08T11:51:00.000-07:00

More work from my creative writing class. We read Jabberwocky and went out to write our own nonsense poems. Here's mine.

The sun shone brigly all the day
The air was chottled in the quait
Three pickalees with freinted deegs
Came wrasting by the lake.

Suddenly, a prog awoke,
It trumpled and gorded volumly
The pickalees, with shaking deegs
Retranted to the slinty sea.

The prog, with fronden in his eye
Began to sing a clanty tune
Until the pickalees returned
And dronned with it 'til noon.

But then the sun's most brigly rays
Shone on a shloreny sight
The pickalees, with geranee
The prog ate in one bite.

Teaching in Gangsta's Paradise

2011-07-07T16:10:00.001-07:00

Today in my creative writing class, students wrote essays about songs they brought in, discussing both the meaning and the writing of the lyrics. This is my own take on the assignment.

Coolio's Gangsta's Paradise moves me, precisely because I am the person the song is written to. I am that teacher, that intellectual, that political activist, that, well, white person who once thought it was easy to solve the world's problems. Education is the answer, right?

"They say I gotta learn, but nobody's here to teach me / If they can't understand it, how can they reach me?" Coolio's question towards the end of the song is, to me, the crux of his narrative. Having described life in the gang world – the complex mixture of pride, self-loathing, competition, fear, and brotherhood that comes with the kind of upbringing most eventual gangsters find impossible to escape – Coolio responds to my righteous indignation. He needs to get an education, I say. His response: you don't get it. He's right, I don't. And, what's more, I'm far from alone.

It's easy to take the next two lines as resignation: "I guess they can't; I guess they won't / I guess they front; that's why I know my life is outta luck, fool!" I would argue, however, that there's something else going on here. Indeed, this isn't resignation, but rather frustration and anger at the resignation of those few who are willing to try to teach the otherwise disenfranchised, the gangsters, the "dangerous." The problem is, that effort to teach is usually an effort to conquer, to impose, to "reform." "They can't" and "They won't" because they're afraid to try to understand a life that asks "I'm twenty-three now, but will I live to see twenty-four?" without irony or sarcasm.

What would it mean to be a teacher in a Gangsta's Paradise? There are plenty of teachers there, already. There are the ineffectual schoolteachers, who lament their students' stupidity, disobedience, and laziness, and then there are the brothers and fathers and uncles who teach their kids how to survive on the street, who have a more nuanced view of those students' flaws. Regardless, there's not much communication across those boundaries. The innocent outsider, there to solve the problem, is afraid to actually understand and experience the problem he or she wants to solve. The insider has more important things to worry about that than 19^th century European History or Trigonometry.

I don't have solutions, myself. Even as a former teacher of at-risk and high-risk teens in Hawaii, some of whom were well-versed in the gang lifestyle, if only by proxy, there's no magic bullet to becoming a cultural insider. Taking away the expectation that teaching is about distributing knowledge is a start. Eliminating the distinction between teacher and learner is another step. But even the most radical and progressive pedagogy is no guarantee. Because, at the end of the day, you can't "front." You can't bullshit. And that's really hard for teachers to do.

Gangsta's Paradise is a brilliant, well-written song because it's not afraid to address the complexity, to challenge the assumption that access to knowledge and education makes all the difference. Beyond that, though, it's reflective, recognizing that the Paradise of the L.A. (or New York, or Honolulu) gang world has its own responsibility: "Tell my why are we, so blind to see / That the ones we hurt, are you and me." That does not absolve me, or those millions who are afraid to even acknowledge the issue, of responsibility. Rather, it only further illustrates how important it is not to be a conqueror, not to fight gang culture, or to try to "enlighten" the people caught in it. The process is subtler than that, and more risky. I should say, the process is subtler than that on the ground.

Higher up, the problem is starker, and very much analogous to the gang experience: "Power and the money, money and the power / minute after minute, hour after hour / Everybody's runnin, but half of them ain't lookin' / What's going on in the kitchen, but I don't know what's cookin." This could just as easily be about politicians, corporate leaders, banks, insurance companies as about gangsters themselves. What better example of the brilliance of the lyric writing could you find than this? The audience expands; we learn that we're all living in the same Gangsta's Paradise, where the ones we hurt are, far too often, you and me.

Gangsta's Paradise moves me, however, not because I can empathize. The analogy between the gang world and the commercial and corporate world may be apt, but it doesn't mean the experience is the same. No, what is moving is the challenge to my perceptions, the self-awareness and fear of the author, and, in spite of it all, the pride. I don't get it, but I do respect it, and that's a start.

The Blog at Two Hundred

2011-07-06T17:50:00.000-07:00

I hate and love self-referential, reflective, meta-writing. I hate it because it usually has an audience of one (the writer). On the other hand, I'm a fan of metacognition and reflection and all of that good self-awareness and learning stuff.

So with that in mind, I want to try to accomplish two things in this Nicht Diese Tone at 200 posts post. The first is to reflect a little about what the blog is, what it's about, and where it's going. The second is to call forth from the now nearly two years worth of writing I've done here a small set of my very favorite pieces.

What is Nicht Diese Tone?

As I've said before, "Nicht Diese Tone" is the opening to the lyrical section of Beethoven's 9th Symphony, a work of particular importance in my own life as both a scholar and a man. As a scholar, the 9th was the focal point of my undergraduate thesis. As a man, the main melody of the 9th adorns my wife's wedding ring. Now, none of that says why I love the symphony so much, why it is important to me, but rather that it is.

Why is a more complicated question, in which this blog is tied up. Of course, the joyful celebration of mankind that makes up the core of the symphony is important, as is Beethoven's unrelenting optimism in spite of his own isolation and frustration. But beyond that, there's the brilliant construction of the symphony, the self-referential and reflective opening of the final movement, in which each previous movement is considered and rejected in turn. There's the repetition of the initial five minutes of the piece by the vocal part. There's Beethoven's own words before the Schiller he borrowed for the bulk of the lyric: "Oh friends, not these tones. Let us sing yet more joyfully."

This blog, I hope, has lived in that spirit: reflective, creative, joyful. But also critical, inquisitive, and, above all, willing to take a different perspective. As I depart from Honolulu and return to the bay area, I hope it will continue to be all of those things, and, while I will study in the Learning Sciences at Stanford, I hope the blog will continue to be about many things. Perhaps my greatest weakness as a writer, as a blogger, and as a person, is that my interests are so disparate, so numerous. Being an intellectual omnivore means that there's too much to eat, and sometimes you don't necessarily eat well (and sometimes you eat too much). But I choose to see that as a strength, even if it makes myself or my blog harder to pin down.

My Favorite Pieces

I can't actually say that these are my favorite pieces of my own writing from the last two years. It's tough to make that kind of determination, after all. Certainly these aren't my most popular pieces. My blog statistics tell me that distinction lies with my Comparing Discussion to Brainstorming post from October of last year. No, these are a few pieces that I particularly like, that I think are accessible, and that represent the blog. I could pick more, but I'm sticking with these five.

The Peter Quince Sonata - A reading of Wallace Stevens's Peter Quince at the Clavier
Impressions of Walla Walla - A reflection on my visit to Walla Walla, Washington for my brother's graduation.
Winning and Losing with Rafael Nadal - An attempt at actual sportswriting, responding to a Nadal loss.
Sailing to Byzantium - Published on Pitchers and Poets, but one of my favorites. Reading the famous poem through the lens of baseball.
My Heart is in the Slaughterhouse - A half-silly, half-serious poem written after visiting potential PhD programs.

Character Sketch: Elliot Hilliard

2011-07-01T13:17:00.001-07:00

He was every bit as pretentious as his name sounded. Elliot Hilliard. Elliot Wordsworth Hilliard. He spoke with a slight lisp and an affected British accent, even though he was from Boise, Idaho, and had never left the country.

He was a hipster, a “space cowboy,” a plaid-flannel-and-aviator-sunglasses-wearing man of the modern world. He thought himself cosmopolitan because he could name the Presidents of Mexico, Honduras, Costa Rica, Panama, and Nicaragua, as well as the chief opposition to each in their upcoming elections, but did not find it at all ironic that he could not do the same for Canada. He would have explained that his bachelor’s degree in political philosophy culminated in a thesis on modern Central America, as if that specialized knowledge excused his ignorance regarding the rest of the world.

Moreover, Elliot didn’t speak a word of Spanish. That is, he knew the basic vocabulary that any resident of the American Southwest picked up just from channel surfing and going to the grocery store, but he had never put any particular effort into understanding the language (a fact which irked his professors very much). Instead he had taken Latin in high school, and French in college, and while those languages gave him enough working knowledge to translate - badly - the speeches and Mexican news articles that made up his background research for his thesis, they did nothing to teach him the intonation, the conversation, and the music of Spanish ("The Romance languages are called that because of the Romans, not because they are lovely," he would say).

Not that Elliot cared for such things. His interest in language was more... imperialist. He was a conqueror of the word, a wielder of its power, not an admirer of its beauty. He valued persuasion and rhetoric, and his love of poetry had more to do with its effect on other people than its affect on himself. That’s not to say he was emotionless, unmovable, uninspired. No, Elliot was simply thickheaded, a man smart and cunning enough to understand the machinations of the political and social world, but far too practical to see either the spiritual value of human interaction or the satisfaction of self-knowledge.

The result was a man very much in the world, with a great many acquaintances, but few friends or enemies. Most people regarded him as an Italian prince might regard a wealthy merchant carrying a copy of Machiavelli - respectful of his intellect, suspicious of his potential power, and wary of his lack of empathy. That Elliot himself was totally oblivious to the reaction he elicited in others reinforced and perpetuated that reaction: his lack of self-awareness came across as a meticulous, calculated indifference.

Even so, Elliot believed he had a great many friends. As he had never known meaningful friendship or true conversation, he took his superficial interactions for profound ones, his philosophical rambling for a heart-to-heart. Elliot was not, then, unhappy. Quite the opposite. Among those who knew him best, his cheerfulness was one of his most troublesome qualities, betraying a disturbing lack of empathy. No wonder so many of his acquaintances - and even his own family - continuously urged him to go into politics. No wonder, either, that Elliot would say that he didn’t have the heartlessness and cynicism for it, that he was too much the “common man,” with simple needs and simple desires.

Little Big Planet in the Classroom

2011-06-28T20:22:00.002-07:00

Today we played Little Big Planet.

No, seriously. We pulled the couches out from the walls, sat down, and engaged in epic 3-player platforming action.* The students, needless to say, were thrilled, even if none of them had played Little Big Planet previously.** They scuffled along through the first few levels, each group of three getting just enough play time to whet their appetites and to become comfortable with the basic controls. Meanwhile their classmates played games of their own: Apples to Apples, Chess, and "Trumps," a card game similar to Whist or Spades.

* It would have been four, but the fourth controlled wouldn't recognize the PlayStation, and I didn't have the USB cable to plug it in with.

** Isn't this generation supposed to be all game all the time? How have they not played LBP? I was even more shocked to discover this than I was when I heard they had not seen The Princess Bride.

Now hold on, you're thinking, how could you possibly get away with doing that in a high school creative writing class? Games are for wasting time, for eating away at kids' brains and turning them into useless zombie-people, right?

To which I can only respond: yes, and soon my zombie army will be complete.

Actually, my reasons for playing Little Big Planet stem from the core values of the class: collaboration, dialogue, and metacognition. The playing itself doesn't really hit those - there's a degree of collaboration, but the other two are limited - but it's not what you do that counts, it's how you do it. On the front end of our LBP adventure we used LBP's character creator to imagine a story snippet involving a zombie-pirate, and then worked on a (seemingly unrelated) mini Design project. On the back end, we designed games of our own using the materials available in the classroom (from Apples to Apples to dice, cards, chess pieces, and so on). Tomorrow, the students will be writing essays about the design of LBP, their learning while playing it, and their own experience designing a game. And then we'll be talking about how all of that connects to creative writing.

How does it connect to creative writing? Easy, it's creative, and it's writing. Playing a game is constructing a narrative. Designing a game is even more so, because you have to build into your design the learning and narrative-building of your potential player. Is that any different from writing, where you have to build a narrative, ensure that your audience can read (and sometimes learn to read) your work, and be engaged? Perhaps the outcome is different - indeed, there's no question that the outcomes of game design and creative writing differ - but the processes might have a lot in common, after all.

That's certainly my bias, and that's a big part of why I've made design a pivotal part of my curriculum. But it's no good doing design and restricting it to writing in the narrowest sense of poems, short stories, and essays. The real value of design, to a writer, is taking it to other areas: games, architecture, movies, and even other-class-interrupting-presentations (about which I will remain mysterious). Thinking outside the box - letting "writing" become bigger than just words on a page and letting "design" replace "creativity" - is a great way to become a better writer (and maybe even a better, or at least more interesting, person?). And, what's more, a great way to learn how to become a better writer, which is the real thing.

It's no accident then, that as we wrap up our mini design projects - including game design - tomorrow with finished products, an essay, and a discussion (see, playing PlayStation can lead to actual work) we'll start looking at Invisible Cities,* start trying to repaint the campus and the city and the world in which we live in terms of both design and literature. Having digested, or at least partially chewed, all of that, the students will be drafting a proposal for a final project. My hope? Collaboration, and a shortage of traditional short stories and poems. If the lot of them want to, say, write an interactive fiction computer game as a team and publish it on the Kongregate Arcade... Frankly, I'd be thrilled.

* For the longest time I couldn't decide whether I should do this work in the prose week or the poetry week. And then I realized that, duh, it belongs in the design week. It is, really, a quintessential "design literature" book. Heck, they even read it in architecture programs, or so I've heard.

So why Little Big Planet? Well, it fits into what I'm doing. But I used it not just because it fits, but because I want to model imagination, stepping beyond the bounds of what's expected, breaking "the rules." We played Little Big Planet today because it was fun, but also because it was a small, trivial, and totally essential step towards a set of entirely original, creative, and against "the rules" final projects.*

* Or at least I hope so...

Observational Haikus

2011-06-23T16:40:00.000-07:00

A couple days back I took my creative writing class outside to write haiku. The following are mine (the ones I don't hate, anyway). Also, I should mention that I'm a long-time reader of Jack Kerouac, and thus don't believe that the 5-7-5 syllable rule need apply to English haiku. He called them "pops."

It's a banana,
   but what
Does it mean?

Interrogating fruit
   is a sticky
Business

Sitting near food
   makes me
Hungry

Summer in Honolulu
   recalls
Winter in Honolulu

Too many poems
   walking around
To write them all

"Oriented"
   box is
disoriented

Lunch ladies talking
   as if they wish
We didn't exist

What's the difference
   between
Cook and Cooke?

Pimples abound
   on the kid
Wearing socks

"Chicken of the Sea
   the best tuna
Just got better!"

(that's an actual slogan, prefaced by "ask any mermaid")

Sometimes it's unwise
   to ask a mermaid
About her tuna

A poem is a sale
   dolla fitty
A word

The older you get
   the harder it is
To be profound

Leaving the Classroom

2011-06-20T20:42:00.001-07:00

The title doesn't refer to myself, but rather to my novel-in-progress. I've decided that sticking the whole thing in a college - and focusing it on the seminar - is too esoteric, for one thing, and too hard to write, for another. Part of the goal of this novel is to talk about - or, rather, to show - how important dialogue is, but if I only demonstrate that to be the case in the ivory tower of a St. John's-like college, what point have I made, really?

So the so-called "real world" it is. I'm sure the story will still be philosophical, and I'm sure it'll be esoteric even without the Phaedrus or the Symposium to geek it up. But this way I hope the characters become more relevant, the conversation more germane, and, above all, the argument for the value of dialogue the more persuasive.

Overall, this is kind of a major shakeup, but I take that to be a good sign. I knew when I embarked on this endeavor that there would be surprises along the way, that my initial concept would undoubtedly shift. I just didn't know how. Looking back, this change was inevitable, but I never would have predicted it, and that convinces me that it's the right one.

Designing Learning

2011-06-16T16:50:00.000-07:00

It's easy to think that learning is what happens at school. It's not particularly difficult to imagine other places of learning to go alongside the classroom: museums, for example, or (many years ago) libraries. It's a little more challenging to imagine learning taking place while watching TV or playing a video game, sending a text message or reading an email. But as long as the mind is remotely active, I would argue that learning, in some form, happens.

Now, it's not particularly interesting that learning happens all the time. In some ways, it's so obvious that it's hardly worth mentioning, and so much of our learning is so mundane that we'd rather not hear or think about it for fear of choking on our boredom. Learning, for example, that it's slightly faster - or at least more pleasant - to walk to the left of the science building on the way to class in the morning, is not particularly groundbreaking for anyone, including the learner (unless he were to fall through an unnoticed but open manhole, but that's not the point).

No, what's particularly interesting about this learning that happens all the time is how much of it is designed, despite how incidental it seems. That is, even the route from car to classroom is designed in some sense, if not with learning in mind, with learning as a kind of ancillary and unanticipated outcome. Of course, a science building on the whole very much is designed with learning in mind in a much more direct way. And that's only the beginning.

Rather than list all of the myriad areas where learning design is potentially relevant, I want to talk about a couple in particular, an obvious one and a not-so-obvious one. The first is the school, the classroom, the curriculum. The second, video games, and not those horrid "educational games," so many of which pollute the game-o-sphere with their terrible controls, their convoluted plots, and their utter disdain for fun. No, I mean real games, games like Portal or Final Fantasy, Civilization or Little Big Planet.

What do I want to say about each of the very different worlds of game design, on the one hand, and traditional education, on the other? Well, I want to say that, at their hearts, they share a fundamental commonality: they are both designed, and they are both deeply concerned with learning. Now, education might shun the "design" label and games might shun the "learning," but words are just words, and the actual actions behind these particular words bridge the vocabulary gap with or without my help.

That game design and curriculum construction have much in common is hardly a unique idea. James Gee's career, for example, is largely built on recognizing the parallels between gaming and more traditional teaching and learning. It is my opinion, however, that there's more that could be done here, not just in recognizing and defining those parallels, but in uncovering how the two might inform each other better, seeing what game design has to teach educators, and what educators have to teach game design. I would not be surprised, moreover, if the expected conversation - that is, with game design bringing an understanding of design, and education bringing an understanding of learning - is totally reversed. Game designers may know a lot more about learning than we'd like to give them credit for,* and educators more about design, even if they're using different language.

* Consider the challenge they face daily: make a game that is just hard enough to keep the player's interest, and make sure that difficulty scales well as the player gets more advanced. In doing so, however, the designer must take into account the learning of the player - that is, the rate at which he or she improves - as well as the wide variety of potential play styles, learning styles, and personalities that might come in contact with the game. In many ways, that's very much what a teacher does, with the added difficulty that the game designer has to code his game ahead of time. He has to anticipate, because he won't be there to fix it on the fly, except in the abstract way of writing patches.

These suspicions of mine, however, about the potential exchange of information, ideas, and learning design between two very different industries are not sufficient or advanced enough to be beliefs or even arguments. Rather, they are questions. What explicit and hidden learning design processes does the gaming industry use? What about education, both formal and informal? What are their vocabularies? What are their objectives, and how do those objectives aid or detract from improving learning (for example, does making learning itself your core objective make it harder to produce good learning)?

Within the gaming industry - as within the world of education - there are, I'm sure, an infinite variety of approaches. There are certainly a variety of types of studios, from the major AAA production companies like Electronic Arts or Sega to the smaller, lesser-known mid-market studios like Paradox or Stardock, all the way to the miniature independent producers like 2D Boy (makers of the wildly popular World of Goo). In addition to wondering about the game industry as a whole, I think it's fair to ask about the differences within the game industry.

I suppose what I'm suggesting is a kind of ethnography of learning design in the video game industry, and in traditional education. The value of such an effort seems to me to hinge on the observation that learning - if only learning how to play the game - is built into each and every game that gets put on the market. Failure to do so means failure to sell and, thus, failure to survive. Despite the (mostly) non-profit incentives in education, failure to adequately design for learning has much more dire and far-reaching consequences, and yet the conceit of the educator (or education policy maker, or education researcher) is too often to assume that no one else has faced the question of how to design for learning.

The First Day of the Rest of the Class

2011-06-14T18:00:00.001-07:00

Today was the first day of the creative writing course I have mentioned intermittently in this space over the past few months. I'm not going to detail what happened in the class, but I will wax philosophical about creative writing, curriculum, teaching, and my plans for where the course is going.

The course is organized around a single goal - per backwards design - of working together to learn how to be better writers. That is to say, I my goal is not for the students (and myself) to be better writers, but rather to learn to be better writers. That's a fine distinction, perhaps - especially because becoming better writers is a natural outgrowth of learning how to do so - but it's an important one. It is, as I told the students, much like the famous saying about catching fish: if you give a man a fish, he'll eat for a day... If you teach a man to write, he'll be a better writer, but if you teach him to learn to write, he'll be an ever-improving writer.

In order to accomplish this goal, I've posed two questions (of a highly philosophical and basic nature) in the class: what is writing? and what is creativity? Now that's perhaps a little glib, and I'll acknowledge that those are actually impossible-to-answer questions. But the point is that a part of learning how to write is asking yourself what the limits of writing even are. If I think of myself as a writer only when I sit down to compose a blog post, I'm missing out on countless opportunities to learn to write in other ways. A conversation, a video game, a trip to the beach... in some sense, can't all of those things be writing, or at least a precursor to it? Perhaps, perhaps not. Regardless, creativity might find its way into each and every of those things, and so it's worth, to my mind, keeping those two impossibly broad questions in your mind.

I've also organized the activities of the class around three values: metacognition, dialogue, and collaboration. Metacognition is, simply, thinking about thinking. So I mean it broadly, in terms of self-awareness, self-critique, learning about learning, and generally taking ones understanding of a situation, text, or whatever to another level of complexity.

Dialogue is, of course, essential to writing, and a wonderful analogue as well. Good conversations are, to my mind, a kind of writing. Moreover, dialogue lets writers communicate with each other about their writing, which thus enables them to learn more about both their own writing process, and that of others. In a class where learning how to learn to write is paramount, dialogue is a natural complement.

Collaboration is a value I had tapped that, I later discovered, is also prominent in the Punahou mission statement. In a writing class, however, collaboration can be difficult to achieve. With that in mind, I've tried to put together a number of activities that encourage - if not force - students to work together. Workshopping is a kind of collaboration, of course, but I believe critiquing the work of others and communicating about it is too limited. Rather, I will make the students write in teams, both because collaboration is valuable in itself, and because most creative writing in the modern world (at least the type that people get paid to do) happens in teams.

Having gone through the process of deciding on and shaping these high-level goals, the nitty-gritty details of what we do, why, and how came together in a matter of hours. The result is a curriculum with five content themes (as opposed to the process or philosophical themes above), one for each week. This first week we're looking at, talking about, and working on prose. The second week will center on verse. The third will cover design and its role in writing. The fourth will be a broader look at art and creativity, and the fourth will be about refining and polishing writing.

It's not a lot of time, and we've got a lot to do:
- A trip to the art museum
- Comparing scenes from The Princess Bride movie to the book
- Writing observational haikus
- Going to a poetry reading
- Playing Apples to Apples and Balderdash
- Playing and writing about the Oregon Trail
- Watching the special features and commentary of the Lord of the Rings to unearth design decisions
- Critiquing the venerable Elements of Style
- Watching The King's Speech and listening to other wartime speeches to investigate propaganda and persuasion in writing
- For the students: writing two mini-projects (one prose, one verse), giving two presentations, proposing, drafting, and completing a final project, and keeping an exhaustive journal.

And there's more. Frankly, some may have to be cut as we go, just to make sure there's time to do enough writing in class. But I'd rather err on the side of too many good learning experiences in my curriculum than too few, and culling is easier than adding in.

Finally, a word on assessment. I'm going to grade the students on three things: participation, a journal, and a final project. Each is vital to measuring some part of my goal and values of the course.

Participation will be a measure of dialogue, of course, but also a way of keeping track of how students are feeling about writing, reading, and language in general. Participation in conversations is important, then, because it's a big part of how I know what a student is thinking. A major barrier to conversation with high schoolers is, of course, that they're used to being graded based on what they say and how much they understand, whereas I'm only interested in whether they're engaged. Indeed, I'd rather have them all clamoring to ask for clarification, to say "I don't get it" than I would have them clamoring to give answers to questions. That's a process, of course, and a challenge to me as a teacher to make our discussion environment support that kind of a dialogue.

The journal is a measure of, well, just about everything. And that's because it's exhaustive. As I told the students, everything and anything goes in their journals. They should put in text messages, tweets, facebook status updates, grocery lists, and anything else they write in the next five weeks. Part of the point, then, is to demonstrate that they already write a lot. Wait, that's not the real point... No, the point is for them to be conscious of the fact that they are writing - to be metacognitive - when they do things they normally don't think of as writing. Of course, the journal will also contain drafts and ideas and outlines and poem fragments and so on. And, really, those things should be the bulk of it, at the end of the day. But I think it's valuable to turn that writer's eye on everything one does for a while, just to see what you see.

Finally, the final project will be a single work (or small portfolio) of the highest quality. By virtue of amassing a large, unwieldy, messy, nonsensical journal, my hope is that the students will not be able to help coming up with good ideas for a final project. The challenge I levied at them was this: publishable. Will they reach that level? Maybe, maybe not, but we can try, and I can do my best to support the effort. Regardless, they're not going to get there - or anywhere close to it - without writing a lot in the next five weeks, and writing a lot that's not the final project. Why? Because learning about the process, about how to learn to write, about how to collaborate and how to dialogue and how to think about thinking... All of those things that the course is designed around are, to my mind, the real key to good writing. And you can't get to writing well without doing a lot of writing poorly along the way.

Conversation Sketch: Xavier and Jonnathan after the Symposium

2011-06-10T15:05:00.001-07:00

Now that I've shared sketches of pieces of two of my characters, I thought I'd put up a draft of a conversation between the two. This exchange takes place after a seminar on Plato's Symposium.

After seminar that evening, Quinn and Xavier made their way back to the latter's dorm room, talking solemnly about problems other than those of the class, and yet somehow the same. As they entered the cramped room, the Xavier took a dignified seat on his chair, while Quinn leaned idly against a wall.

“I guess I don't get it. Why all this talk about love in a book about philosophy? It just seems... weird.”

Xavier shifted uneasily, unsure whether he wanted to talk about the subject, “What do you mean by that, Quinn?”

“I mean I wouldn't expect Plato to talk about love.” After a pause, he went on, “It's not that it's that surprising, I guess, since he talks about just about anything else. It's just, the Symposium is whole book that he's dedicated to the subject, and I don't see what's so profound about it.”

“Perhaps that's the point, Quinn.”

“Oh, I understand, I can see how that might be the point. I don't think it's Plato's point, but I can see how it might be yours anyway.” He shot a sly grin at Xavier, but received only a typical dignified, cold stare in return. “Anyway, I certainly don't buy Ms. Forsyth's argument that love is essential to thinking philosophically.”

Xavier declined to respond to this observation, instead seizing on one of Quinn's earlier thoughts. How easily do people jump around in their ideas, Xavier thought. “Well what isn't profound about love? Love has, without a question, been one of the most important words in the history of mankind, the subject of more arguments and duels, poems and songs, and even philosophies than just about anything else I can think of. Why shouldn't Plato dedicate a whole book... Two whole books, if you count the Phaedrus, to the subject.”

“Oh,” Jonnathan replied, “the Phaedrus is about writing. I thought our seminar was pretty well-decided on that.” Xavier waited for him to continue, not wanting to pursue this new strain. “Anyway, I see what you're saying, and that's why I said it makes sense to me that Plato goes there. But he does it in such a weird way. I mean, the conversation is so implausible.”

Xavier couldn't help but laugh, “You've been to seminar. What's so implausible about a conversation like the one in the Symposium?”

“Good point,” Quinn offered a bemused smile. “Oh well, I guess I just don't understand.”

“Ah,” said Xavier, “Now you're getting there. That's the key to surviving Plato: a healthy dose of confused resignation. Trying to 'get it' is futile, because, I think, there's really not that much to get. Like so much philosophy, it's just trying to confuse you more than anything.”

“I'm not sure I agree with that, but then again you may be right.” Quinn stepped away from the wall, taking a seat on the edge of Xavier's bed and puzzling over whether philosophy had any meaning or purpose at all, other than to confuse people. If Xavier felt that way, he thought, why did he stay here at Barr? If there's really no way to read and think about important questions and, maybe, get to some answers, what's the point of thinking at all? Quinn struggled, to his frustration, to even pose these questions, instead asking Xavier a pale shadow of his deeper concerns: “Xavier, what's the point of seminar?”

“You might as well ask what's the purpose of life,” responded Xavier, sensing the deeper intent of his companion's question.

“Ah, well, I would like to know that too. But I'm content to start small.”

“I'm afraid,” said Xavier, “That there is no 'small' when it comes to questions like that. In fact, they're probably not even good questions for that reason. If you ask me about the purpose of seminar, there's not really anything I can say. The point is to have a conversation, to try to understand, to think, to read a book with other people instead of alone. And the point, I suspect, is much deeper than all of those things. Or, maybe, there's not a point at all. I feel that way sometimes. But does there have to be one?”

Quinn mistook this last question as rhetorical, instead responding with what he thought was a clever insight: “Xavier, are you talking about seminar or life?”

“Seminar,” Xavier responded without hesitation. “Life is much more complicated than seminar, anyway, and I don't think the point of life is to have a conversation.” Just as Jonnathan was about to respond, Xavier jumped in again, “Nor do I feel as though there's not a point to life. I may not know what it is, but I've never felt it was meaningless.”

“Never?” Quinn was surprised. He had become friends with Xavier, true, but he did not yet understand the young man. He had assumed, like so many others, that his arcane and, frankly, bleak dress implied a certain depressed, gothic outlook on life. He was puzzled to discover that, at least in word, Xavier was not actually as lugubrious as he seemed, even if he was very much still intense and more than a little strange.

“No, never,” said Xavier, perceiving the same confusion that marked his more intimate interactions with, well, just about everyone. He did not, however, try to clarify his position, choosing to remain an enigma. Instead he simply sat quietly, peering out the window through squinting eyes, trying to make out the shapes of the other students passing through the courtyard below.

Quinn sat quietly as well, unsure as to whether he had offended Xavier, and unwilling to push the issue further. He was confused, by the just-concluded seminar, by the intense, visceral reaction to it that had lead him to speak with Xavier, and by the conversation that ensued. He needed to walk, to think, to clear his head. He looked at – and noticed for the first time – Xavier's mini-grandfather clock, wondering where he had gotten it, but wondering more how he was going to finish his reading for tomorrow's classes in time to go to bed at a reasonable hour. “Well, Xavier,” he said, “It's been good talking to you, but I need to get to work and to bed. See you next seminar.”

“Indeed,” was all that Xavier said in response, shaking Quinn's hand firmly once it was awkwardly offered. Quinn then shuffled to the door, leaving without another glance at his former interlocutor.

Character Sketch Fragment: Jonnathan Quinn

2011-06-08T15:59:00.000-07:00

Jonnathan Quinn is, at this moment, slated to be the main character of my novel-in-progress. This is a short, two-paragraph sliver about his background.

Even before enrolling at Barr, Jonnathan Quinn's friends called him “Quinn.” Even as early as middle school, his family name had been his primary appellate, and indeed he had become so accustomed to hearing it that his first name sometimes failed to elicit a reaction from him. There wasn't anything wrong with “Jon,” mind you, it's just that there were so many other Jons and Johns and even a couple Jhons (presumably with either foreign or troublesomely negligent parents) running around with less interesting – or at least less easily pronounceable – last names than Jonnathan Quinn.

Like so many things in his life, Jon had not been consulted on this particular indicator of his identity. Without objection he had allowed the world around him to alchemize his name, and by the time he was a student at Barr he couldn't even remember whether it bothered him or not. He simply was “Quinn,” for better or worse, and there was nothing he could do about it.

Character Sketch: Xavier Moon

2011-06-04T19:28:00.003-07:00

An early character sketch from my novel-in-progress. Xavier Moon is not the main character, but at this early juncture I imagine him playing an important role in the story.

Xavier was a kind of superhero – at least a superhero as far as Barr College was concerned. He was frighteningly intelligent, with just the right amount of discretion to keep him from dominating a conversation. He was soft spoken, but unafraid to use his vocabulary to its fullest. He clearly did every reading thoroughly, and took the time, moreover, to think carefully about the meaning and implications of the text, but was nevertheless frequently seen wandering the campus engaging with his classmates in his reserved, elitist way. That he seemed to rub no one the wrong way despite his air of superiority was perhaps his greatest gift: rare is the person who is manifestly great without inspiring the hatred – or at least the jealousy – of the masses.

That's not to say Xavier was entirely beloved. Having Mr. Moon in your class was a double-edged sword. On the one hand, there's no question it would be excellent. On the other, that very excellence sometimes crushed the free-spirited atmosphere that the best conversations need in order to truly blossom. It's not that Xavier actively forced caution on his classmates, but rather than they took it up as a matter of course, as if they were more concerned with his judgment than with the actual evaluation of the grade-book-holding Tutors.

Xavier's fashion sense was keen, if a bit anachronistic. Indeed, it was sometimes said about him that he would be less surprising among 19^th century noblemen than among his actual peers. Even so, there was no question that Xavier “pulled it off,” that his appearance, if anything, made everyone else look anachronistic. He was dressed for the occasion, while they had mistaken Barr as a college, and not the meeting of the aristocracy it was.

One was hard pressed to pin down Xavier Moon's beliefs, despite his striking and self-assured demeanor. He was a professed atheist, but nevertheless was deeply interested in religious texts of all kinds. He clearly had an empirical bent, favoring modern science over the “nonsense of the ancients,” as he called it, and yet he himself would admit that Laboratory was his worst class. When asked about his political views, Xavier was – like so many Barr students – noncommittal. In short, despite being very much in the public eye, very much a topic of discussion when not present, and very much an object of admiration among both the young men and young women of the campus, Xavier remained very much an enigma.

What the other students failed to realize, and this was because Xavier kept it to himself, was that Xavier was as much an enigma to himself as to his classmates. His archaic dress was something he had begun and cultivated as teenage rebellion, which now he thought, if not silly, at least unnecessary. But it had become so much a part of the way other people understood him that he dared not change it. His intellect, as he was the first to acknowledge, was indeed formidable, but his knowledge of things useful was sparse, and he felt this lack keenly when he would try to, for example, troubleshoot a computer problem or mend a broken dresser handle.

Above all, Xavier was mystified by his interactions with other people. His cynicism and sarcasm – which often accompany young intelligence – did not seem to deter almost universal admiration. Xavier, however, did not know how to cope with being beloved at Barr. Throughout his life in middle and high school he had been reviled and teased. His attire was, amongst the brutes of his previous schools, mocked. His intelligence and, more to the point, his propensity for earning high marks without appearing to try aggravated his classmates and even frustrated his teachers.

Having a kind of natural emotional reservedness, Xavier's experiences heretofore in school had helped him to develop a calm introversion, an attachment to older and more sophisticated friends, and an ironical and wry sense of humor regarding the immaturity – in both action and thought – of others his age. The underpinnings of that attitude were shaken at Barr – at least by some of the students – but the expression of it remained very much intact, as Xavier honestly did not know how to change it, or even if it was worth changing. His fame, then, was a kind of strange accident, his excellence not quite a full-blown ruse, but rather an accidental illusion of fortuitous brilliance. Like light passing through a prism to reveal its component colors, Xavier's latent virtues were brought out by the particular circumstances of his place and time.

So Xavier Moon rode the wave of his fame at Barr not without a sense of irony, for he knew himself well enough to see that, while he perhaps was excellent in certain ways, it was precisely his greatest weakness – his inability to blend in and be “just another student” – that was most responsible for his gleaming reputation.

Novelling

2011-05-31T03:42:00.000-07:00

As a part of my upcoming creative writing class, I've undertaken a creative writing project of my own. That is, I've begun to write a novel.

That's not entirely true. So far I've begun to write character sketches and vague ideas for a setting (and even vaguer ideas for a plot). The process of writing an actual novel, it seems to me, hinges much on creating these kind of component parts first, which presents an interesting challenge for me as a writer who tends to think and write in blog-post-sized increments.

More to the point, there's the challenge of writing fiction. While I don't display it here, I do have an active imagination - it's a part of why I'm such an avid gamer - but actually tapping into that when I write is something I have never really tried to do. Or, at least, I haven't done so since high school when I took creative writing myself.

Why this project, then, and why now? For a couple reasons. Firstly, I am a firm believer that one of the best ways to teach is to model learning. By working on writing a novel of my own, I will certainly be learning and struggling and creating and all of the good things I want the students to be doing. Secondly, as my world shifts to education research, my focus will be so much on academic things that I'm unlikely to be able to carve out the space necessary to work on such an ambitious creative project. There are other reasons, but these two are the most pertinent.

As for the subject, well... It's going to be a little esoteric, but that's only because I would rather write well about what I know than pretend to be able to write about things I do not. My hope is that, though the setting and characters will be inspired by, if not drawn from, personal experience (which, I suppose, is true for all writers), the core of the story will extend beyond any narrow personal connections. In short, I'll be struggling to walk the paradoxical line between personal and impersonal that marks good writing.

The subject, then, is the academic and romantic life of a "Barr College" (modeled after St. John's, of course) student by the name of Jonnathan Quinn. Perhaps soon I'll post one of my early character sketches for Jonnathan and/or some of his classmates and teachers. It will be some time before I can give more detail about the plot. Nor can I say what strange twists I'll put into the style and the - for lack of a better word - design of the novel. Needless to say, while I want to write something at least moderately accessible, I also am drawn to the fantastical and strange stylings of authors like Italo Calvino.

So, in short, this is an ambitious project that will happen - if it does - in stages. Some pieces will undoubtedly appear on this blog. The act of working on this project will likely curtail, at least somewhat, the regularity of my posting here. In the meantime, wish me luck, and hopefully before the end of the year (that's my goal), I'll have at least a draft of my first novel.

Listening to Beethoven's 3rd Symphony, Part Three: Catastrophe

2011-05-26T17:10:00.000-07:00

To get to parts one and two, as well as the introduction, use the handy-dandy side bar. These posts are listed just under the "search" and "subscribe" widgets.

"Catastrophe" is a Greek word, a combination of "strophe" - meaning turn - and "kata" - meaning down. "Strophe" was used primarily to describe the actions of the chorus in Greek plays, with each choral poem either a Strophe or an anti-strophe, a figurative motion in one direction, or in another. Catastrophe, then, is a total interruption of that process, a proverbial wrench in the works, a form-defying event in the course of the narrative.

In the development section of the first movement of Beethoven's 3rd Symphony, the listener confronts what can only be described as a catastrophe. The common name of this section is "the train wreck," and it shows Beethoven at his most intense, most devious, and most, well, catastrophic. Here's the development section of the opening movement, up to and including the "train wreck," but leaving out the resolution that follows (because that's the next post):

As you can hear, the beginning of the development is a tumultuous back and forth between the second theme (see part two) and the opening theme (see part one). I think it's fair to say the development starts out relatively cohesive, but each repeat of either theme adds further and further chaos. The opening theme starts to sway against itself, raising in pitch and intensity, the secondary theme finds itself beset by all kinds of strange counterpoint. New melodies are introduced, adding tension due to their dominant feel and the urgency of the violins playing them. Before long, the back-and-forth of strophe (the militant first theme) and anti-strophe (the pastoral second theme) collapses on itself in what can only be described as catastrophe. As the piece bucks and writhes, it reaches its climax in the "train wreck," separated from the development below:

All semblance of meaningful melody or rhythmic progress disappears from the piece here. While harmonically the progression still makes sense, that's hardly the point. This section is barely, by the classical definition, even music. So many of the chords are dissonant, the entire orchestra is blaring, and there is nothing to do but to push on from one horrible, full-voiced, dissonant chord to the next.

It's too easy to focus just on the train wreck itself, however, and that's why I've included the build-up to it, also. If the first and second themes truly are incompatible - as I suggested earlier in this series of posts - it's no wonder that, once they were really forced to reckon with each other in the development section, they created a kind of musical conflagration. A potentially helpful image, if an imperfect one, would be the Viennese elite at their dancing and partying (the second theme) suddenly beset by an invading revolutionary army. The result is chaos, the destruction of the court itself, and along with it the decomposition (so to speak) of the courtly music to which the nobles were dancing.

A particularly interesting part of this collapse, to my mind, comes not in the loud and flashy places that jump out even during a cursory listening to the development. No, there's a subtle trick Beethoven plays in the buildup to the train wreck, an inversion of the melodic and rhythmic quality of the second theme that says more about what's going on here than just about anything else. Listen again to the last statement of the second theme before the train wreck, and then the passage that follows it and leads into our catastrophe:

Can you hear the rhythmic inversion? Here again is a piece of the theme:

And here's the inversion:

The waltz is still there in the inverted version, but it's hidden behind a strange and different rhythmic emphasis. All that's really different, actually, is that strong beat of the melody used to fall on the first beat of the measure, in the original theme, but instead falls on the second beat of the measure in the "inverted" version. The result of this minor change, however, is a fundamental shift in the feel of the melody, a transformation from Viennese waltz to urgent escape from impending disaster.

That this variation of the second theme leads into the train wreck is telling. Rather than returning to the opening theme, which has found some measure of stability in its back-and-forth washing earlier in the development (perhaps it's not a satisfying kind of stability, but like a pendulum, at least it's not going anywhere), it's the second theme that leads us into catastrophe. And it does so by allowing itself to be broken, by succumbing to the chaos that surrounds it in the development section.

As for the train wreck itself, there's little to say except that it is completely different from anything in any symphony that comes before it. As I said earlier, it would hardly be considered music by Beethoven's contemporaries, chiefly because of its dissonance and lack of melody, but also because it plays more of a narrative role than a musical one. By pointing out the strange motions of the second theme, I hope I've helped you to see how the train wreck is not just a sudden and loud interruption, but rather an inevitable collapse after increasingly strained efforts to put the square peg of the second theme into the round hole of the symphony.

As a wrap-up to this post, I want to ask a couple of questions about meaning. Well, a question anyway. What, really, does all of this mean? In the first couple of posts of this series, I've talked some about potential narrative interpretations we might impose on the symphony, but at the same time I've been hesitant to pick one and stick with it. Even in this post, I've used the "Viennese nobles confront revolutionary army" idea, but I tell you know that it's only a crutch, a way to help getting at the music.

I suppose, as I listen more and more to the Eroica, as I dive deeper (and I'm diving deeper now than I did even when writing my thesis), I truly am starting to feel like the music has its own narrative, its own meaning, and its own mode of communication. I don't think that's purely emotional, because I can trace it with some semblance of literary objectivity. Nor do I think it's purely spiritual, because, while it's mysterious, I'm not sure how meta-physical it is (would, for example, I be able to follow the narrative in the same way were I deaf?).

No, I think the narrative of Beethoven's music is musical, and its meaning equally so. It's unfortunate that we're stuck using words like "meaning" to describe a meaning that is non-linguistic, but then again isn't that exactly the point of this effort, to find a way to bridge that gap? Ah, but the point is also to help bring myself (and my readers) closer to an understanding of that musical meaning, even if that understanding is fundamentally non-linguistic. What I mean is, I will not be able to write a sentence that says: this is what the Eroica means, but I hope that, by sharing the process of trying to understand and - inasmuch as it possible - translate it, we might all get a little better at our music comprehension.

It is no accident, either, that the train wreck raises this conundrum. I know of no moment in any other piece that is so direct an attack on the notion that music has no meaning, no narrative value on its own. Then again, it remains one of the most difficult-to-penetrate moments in Beethoven's oeuvre, precisely because its lack of melodic structure makes it less "musical." Perhaps, then, our next assay into the symphony will help, when we look at the third theme, the resolution of the catastrophe.

Defining a Season: 2007-2010

2011-05-24T17:09:00.000-07:00

Part the last of a Rockies mini-series of posts.
Part three is here. Part two is here. Part one is here. The introduction is here.

2007 Colorado Rockies: 90-73, 2nd place, 0.5 GB, Wild Card, Lost World Series

The Rockies 2007 season is best remembered for the absurd late-season run of 14 wins in 15 games to close the regular season. By sweeping the first two rounds of the playoffs, the Rockies ultimately won 21 of 22 before being swept by the Boston Red Sox in the World Series. Because of that flukey run, however, it's easy to forget that this Rockies team was actually solid top-to-bottom all season. Indeed, the Rockies underperformed for much of the year, and that they needed such a winning streak just to make the playoffs was not indicative of their quality season-long. There truly was no weakness on the 2007 Rockies roster: the rotation, bullpen, and lineup were all solid, if not spectacular. Nevertheless, the transition from under-performance to playoff darling was fueled by two out-of-nowhere players.

Defining Players: SPs - Ubaldo Jimenez and Franklin Morales

These two pitchers' careers went in opposite directions after the miraculous 2007 runs, but that only masks how fundamentally similar their mutual arrival on the scene was during the Rockies World Series season. If anything, Morales was the better of the two in 2007, starting 8 games and putting up a 3.43 ERA (compared to Ubaldo's 15 starts with a 4.28 ERA). Regardless, both players were a surprise to people outside of the Rockies organization, young guns who came from nowhere to lead - or at least serve as 2/5ths of a dominant rotation - the Rockies into the playoffs. In a sense, their careers since 2007 are also perfectly indicative of the Rockies: Morales's failure to harness his awesome stuff speaks to the 2008 and 2010 additions of the team, while Ubaldo's better command and work-horse mentality indicative of the 2009 campaign.

2008 Colorado Rockies: 74-88, 3rd place, 10.0 GB

The 2008 season was extremely disappointing for the Rockies, both because they had just made the World Series the year before, and because the NL West was as weak as it had ever been (the Dodgers won it with a 84-78 record). It's hard to say exactly what went wrong in '08. A number of offensive players took small steps backwards and the rotation was just a touch worse. Above all, the late run that saved '07 from the same fate failed to materialize, with the team all but collapsing down the stretch.

Defining Player: SS - Troy Tulowitzki

After nearly winning both the Rookie of the Year award and the Gold Glove (but losing out on both) in his 2007 campaign, Tulo suffered as bad a sophomore slump as a great player can. His batting average fell from .291 to .263, his OBP from .359 to .332, and his SLG from .479 to .401. In all, his value to the team was so much less in '07 that a not-insignificant portion of the Rockies failings can be pinned on him. Add to that an injury that cost Tulowitzki much of the '08 season, and it's not hard to see how 90 wins became 74 for a team that was never quite great in the first place.

2009 Colorado Rockies: 92-70, 2nd place, 3.0 GB, Wild Card

The '09 Rockies were eerily similar to the '07 version. After a slow start, a solid rotation and reasonably deep lineup woke up under new manager Jim Tracey - after Clint Hurdle, who had been at the helm since 2002, was fired - and eventually rode a late-season charge into the playoffs. The trade of Matt Holliday the previous off-season proved a stroke of genius, netting both the young and improving Carlos Gonzalez and excellent closer Huston Street in exchange for a player who was destined to leave Colorado after '09 anyway. While Gonzalez would share time in the outfield with Brad Hawpe, Seth Smith, Dexter Fowler, and Ryan Spilborghs, Street was the anchor of another excellent Rockies bullpen. Beyond the solid performance from the pitching staff and the Holliday-less outfield, bounce-back seasons from two key Rockies both lead the way, and were symbolic of the season as a whole.

Defining Players: SS - Troy Tulowitzki and 1B - Todd Helton

Both Tulowitzki and Helton has miserably disappointing seasons in 2008, but both bounced back to produce well-above league-average campaigns in '09. While the rest of the lineup and pitching staff improved incrementally from their under-performances in 2008, it was Tulo and Helton's giant leaps forward that propelled the team back into the playoffs. Helton's .325/.416/.489 slash line harkened back to the good old days of his early career, while Tulo's .297/.377/.552 showed that Tulo might end up being more than just a great fielder with a decent bat. Indeed, Tulo eclipsed 30 homers for the first time in 2009, becoming not just the leader on the field for the Rockies (a role he shared, by default, with the veteran Helton), but securely becoming the leader in the lineup as well.

2010 Colorado Rockies: 83-79, 3rd place, 9.0 GB

It's easy to forget how much better a season 2010 was than 2008 for the Rockies, because the narrative that has been constructed is that they were parallels. The narrative goes like this: coming off of an improbable last season charge to make the playoffs, the Rockies followed it up in the next season by promptly collapsing and failing to compete. But the '10 Rockies did compete, only falling apart late in the season, echoing 2007 in the reverse by losing 13 of their last 14. Before that collapse, the team had been a very respectable (and competitive) 82-66, well within reach of the 91 wins that would have won them the wild card. The problem was, beyond the continued excellence of Tulowitzki and the emergence of Carlos Gonzalez, the offense lacked a single other player who put up a 100 or better OPS+. The offense wasn't bad, per se, but it just wasn't good enough, even with an excellent pitching staff and a near Cy Young season from Ubaldo Jimenez.

Defining Player: C - Miguel Olivo

Like the team he played for, Olivo actually started well in 2010, making a strong case for an all-star berth. Like the team he played for, however, Olivo ended up not having enough offense. By the end of the season his OBP - his longtime nemesis - rested at .315. That was a career high for Olivo, but not good enough for an every-day Major League player, even a catcher. His 27 walks were also a career high, but it bears remembering that he drew the vast majority of those in the first half of the season. Perhaps the most damning moment for Olivo in 2011, however, has nothing to do with him, but with the front office. After extending Chris Iannetta in the offseason, Olivo's hot April, combined with some early-season struggles from Iannetta, resulted in 'netta's demotion to AAA and Olvio's promotion to full-time starter. That itself was not the cause of the Rockies shortcomings in 2010, but it certainly did not help.

Conclusion

Trying to determine a defining player for a single season is, ultimately, an exercise in futility. But it doesn't look like it.

The reason it doesn't look like it is simple enough: we love to construct narratives. It's how we understand what goes on around us, how we make sense of a complex and often confusing world. It's a lot easier to remember, in short, a season as a failure or a success, a disappointment or a surprise, than to remember the exact won-loss record, the number of games back, the statistics of each and every player.

In trying to find a player whose individual narrative either matched up with or underscored the narrative for the entire Rockies team, I did exactly that: I looked through the won-loss record, the number of games back, and the statistics of each and every player. But then I turned it into a narrative, and that's where the futility comes in. Ultimately, how can I do justice to Miguel Olivo's 2010, or Todd Helton's 2006, or Andres Galarraga's 1994? Sometimes I listed statistics, but only to illustrate a point: the players I selected were, in some sense, a microcosm of a team's successes and failures. But in other ways they were no such thing: they were merely grown men playing a game for a lot of money, men who undoubtedly care about winning, but whose narratives are far less intense than those of a fan.

In the end, though, it's impossible to escape narratives, and undesirable to boot. Ironically, even the most sabermetrically-minded baseball fan is doing little more than building narratives. Are his narratives more quantitative? Sure. Are they more objective? Probably. But they are narratives just the same, built of words and sounds and ideas and stories, even if those stories are contained in season-long numbers and fancy statistical acronyms instead of anecdotes and clutch homers.

Of course, I've been more stat-head than story-head in this series, but that's exactly the point. The stats tell a story, too, and an interesting one. Silly though it may be to pin a whole season - for better or worse - on a single player, doing so might just give us a certain insight, or help us better enjoy a sport we already love.

Defining a Season: 2002-2006

2011-05-22T19:41:00.001-07:00

Part three of a series of Rockies-centric posts.
Introduction here.
Part one here.
Part two here.
Part four here.

2002 Colorado Rockies: 73-89, 4th place, 25.0 GB

It was during 2002 that a new era of Rockies baseball began with the hiring of Clint Hurdle as manager. Following a slow start, the Rockies let go of Buddy Bell and replaced him with the former hitting coach, a move that I would not go so far as to say defined the Rockies for the next five seasons, but definitely set a certain tone. Clint Hurdle's hiring was an indication that the team was changing, trying to get younger and trying to build from within. While witnessed the disastrous collapses of Neagle and Hampton, Rockies fans in 2002 also watched the first wave of young up-and-comers from the Rockies growing minor league system in Jason Jennings, Juan Uribe, and Juan Pierre.

Defining Player: CF - Juan Pierre

Pierre was an exciting young player in 2002, but despite his impressive speed, he wasn't a particularly good player. He didn't get on base enough, was not quite a good enough fielder, and was completely without power. His slash line (.287/.332/.343) left much to be desired, especially playing at Coors Field, and despite his youth it was hard to see him as a centerpiece on a future contender. Nevertheless, on a team now stuck with aging, mediocre, and largely overpaid players around the diamond, Pierre was a symbol of a different approach, a glimpse of a future of home grown talent. Beyond being a symbol for a future approach, however, Pierre was also an important part of the post-2002 trade that sent Mike Hampton to the Florida Marlins, meaning he also played a key, if ironic, role in the transition to the home-grown approach.

2003 Colorado Rockies: 74-88, 4th place, 26.5 GB

There was little compelling about baseball in Colorado during the dark-ages of the mid-2000s. Todd Helton and Larry Walker would quietly put up All-Star numbers year after year, but no one else was particularly compelling. Sure, the offense hit plenty of homers (the 2003 team had 7 players with 10 or more HR), and the bullpen was usually solid, and the rotation usually at least a little better than it looked, but there were simply too few players good enough to push the team to .500, let alone to contention.

Defining Player: 3B - Chris Stynes

Unless you're a die-hard Rockies fan, you probably have never heard of Stynes. Even if you're a die-hard, you probably had forgotten about him. But he was the Rockies starting third baseman for the whole of the 2003 season, punching up a miserable slash line of .255/.335/.413. Of all the players from the dark ages of Rockies baseball, Stynes is the most mediocre, the most forgettable. If someone were to ask: why couldn't this team manage to win more than 74 games, you could do worse than answering "Chris Stynes," not because of who he was, but because of what he represented for an organization treading water.

2004 Colorado Rockies: 68-94, 4th place, 25.0 GB

After the 2002 and 2003 seasons, things got worse before they got better. The 94 losses the Rockies suffered in 2004 was the worst in franchise history since the inaugural season in 1993. Nevertheless, at the bottom of the proverbial barrel (so far, anyway), there was a scrap of hope. The new organizational focus on building from within didn't quite start to payoff in 2004, but it did bear its first fruit.

Defining Player: LF - Matt Holliday

Perhaps its not fair to say that Matt Holliday was the defining player of one of the worst seasons in Rockies history, but I still think he fits precisely because it was him - and his generation of minor league teammates - that the organization had changed its philosophy. As the Rockies floundered throughout the 2004 season, Holliday put up a solid .290/.349/.488 line. Excellent? Hardly, but at only 24 Holliday showed promise that none of the other young players the Rockies had developed ever had (since Helton, that is). Here was a power hitter, an anchor for the lineup to replace the now departed Larry Walker. Here was, in short, the future.

2005 Colorado Rockies: 67-95, 5th place, 15.0 GB

Things began to come together for the Rockies in 2005. That's strange to say, given that they finished in last place in the worst division in baseball (as the mere 15 games back indicates, the Padres won the division with an 82-80 record). However, this was the rookie season for Clint Barmes, Garrett Atkins, and Brad Hawpe. While none of those players would ever approach Holliday in talent or production, they would all become important pieces to the 2007 World Series team. And, more importantly, each of them was drafted and developed by the Rockies. There were growing pains, to be sure, as the 67-95 record indicates, but the future was looking bright.

Defining Player: SP - Jeff Francis

The future was bright not because of the offensive players listed above, important though they would be in 2007. No, the most important rookie in the '05 season was Francis, the first of so many first-round pitchers the Rockies had drafted to actually make it to the big leagues. Francis, like the Rockies, was far from impressive in 2005. His 5.68 ERA was well-deserved, given a SO/BB rate under 2, a fairly high 1.3 HR/9 rate, and a pitch-to-contact approach that is always dangerous in Colorado. Nevertheless, there were glimpses from Francis (and his young rotation-mate, back from a near-fatal blood clot suffered in 2004, Aaron Cook) that he could tame the Coors Field beast, along with the help of the now operating humdior.

2006 Colorado Rockies: 76-86, tied for 4th place, 12.0 GB

In a still-weak division, the Rockies in 2006 were a team on the brink. That's easy to say after-the-fact, but the signs were there even at the time. The core of Helton, Atkins, Holliday, and Hawpe provided enough offense that little else was needed to fill out a contender's lineup. Meanwhile the top of the rotation, featuring Cook, Francis, and Jason Jennings, was well above-average. The bullpen remained solid as well, though mostly a collection of cast-offs from other teams (a trend for the Rockies front office). Though the team finished 10 games under .500, they were really just another year of development from their young players, plus the arrival of a certain shortstop and certain pitcher, away from ending nearly a decade of futility.

Defining Player: 1B - Todd Helton

Though the team as a whole was young, unproven, but about to explode, the 2006 team's shortcomings were defined best by the Helton. This season looked like the beginning of the end for Todd, the first season in which he would fail to hit 20 home runs, and easily his worst season by batting average, OBP, and slugging percentage in his career. However, his place here is not merely because he underperformed his talent as the team struggled to a 76-86 season, but because the beginning of his decline underscored the urgency of the next few seasons, and because Helton would, like the rest of the team, have an excellent season in 2007. On a team of young up-and-comers, a team transitioning from age to youth, from hitting to pitching, Helton was not merely harkening back to old days, but also a reminder that he too was once a young star, an up-and-comer, and that chances to win are sometimes few and far between. Not for his shortcomings, but because he was for so long the only shining light on a miserable team, does Helton deserve to be remembered as an iconic player not just for the 2006 Rockies, but throughout the early 2000s.

Defining a Season: 1998-2001

2011-05-20T17:59:00.002-07:00

Part two of a series of Rockies-centric posts.
Introduction here.
Part one here.
Part three here.
Part four here.

1998 Colorado Rockies: 77-85, 4th place, 21.0 GB

If the '96 and '97 seasons were the beginning of the decline of the Blake Street Bombers, the '98 season was the end. Ellis Burks was traded for a just-as-old, but not-nearly-as-good Darryl Hamilton, Vinny Castilla turned 31, and Dante Bichette's power contined to fade. Even the outstanding rookie campaign of Todd Helton couldn't lift what proved to be a fatally flawed roster in what ended up being manager Don Baylor's final season. The '98 season was disappointing, perhaps, because expectations were still high after three straight seasons in which the Rockies were at least good, if not great. But it was impossible to ignore that a team already in decline had taken a fateful step towards sub-.500 baseball.

Defining Player: SP - John Thomson

I know what you're thinking. Who is John Thomson? In 1998, Thomson was the Rockies best pitcher, the only member of the rotation with an ERA under 5.00 (his was 4.81). While Coors Field didn't do any favors to Darryl Kile and Pedro Astacio, they didn't do any favors to themselves, either. Despite the still potent - if decreasingly so - lineup, the Rockies rotation in 1998 was inadequate, and Colorado found itself on the losing end of a few too many blowouts. That the bullpen was, once again, excellent was some consolation, but hardly enough for a team who's best pitcher was, in the end, John Thomson.

1999 Colorado Rockies: 72-90, 5th place, 28.0 GB

As if it wasn't bad enough that the Rockies finished in last place for the first time in 1999, the second-year Arizona Diamondbacks broke their record for fastest expansion team to make the postseason, winning 100 games and the division in only their second season. Meanwhile the Rockies were a mess. The once vaunted bullpen began to crack, the remaining Bombers - except for Helton and Larry Walker (who spent a significant part of the season on the disabled list) - lost their clout, and the rotation was, if not terrible, at best mediocre. Coors Field, meanwhile, continued to inflate offensive numbers to an absurd degree, which excused the horrid offense and deflected blame to a not-as-bad-as-it-looks pitching staff.

Defining Player: SS - Neifi Perez

In many ways, Neifi is the defining player for a whole era of Rockies baseball. He manned shortstop almost every game between 1998 and his trade in 2001, and at no time was he even a remotely passable offensive player. In 1999 he had one of his worst seasons, hitting a good-on-the-surface .280, but with only a .307 OBP and .403 slugging percentage. Neifi's 12 home runs in 1999 would end up being a career high, but even so, his OPS+ was 62. For that reason, he is the defining player of the 1999 season because he looked like an acceptable player, but wasn't. He was a sinkhole, an out waiting to happen, an incapable hitter even at Coors Field (where his OBP was a measly .326) whose road numbers were simply awful (.251/.287/.356). Neifi's empty batting average, his mirage power, and the perception that he was actually good typify the Rockies organization during a season in which the team lost 90 games despite looking like they weren't that bad.

2000 Colorado Rockies: 82-80, 4th place, 15.0 GB

Despite a strong NL West and an offseason during which the team made few significant changes, the Rockies bounced back from their 1999 season with a surprising above-.500 campaign in 2000, giving hope for a post-Bombers future. This was a fateful season, however, because the rotation was better than mediocre, and the offense worse, and yet the offseason that followed would see the acquisition of Denny Neagle and Mike Hampton. In reality, the offense needed far more help than the rotation did, but Coors Field made it seem the other way.

Defining Player: SP - Pedro Astacio

Pedro Astacio had a 5.27 ERA in 2000, and his was the second lowest in the Rockies rotation. His 12-9 record was nice enough, but he surrendered 32 home runs, and gave up almost 10 hits per 9 innings. What gets lost in those sub-par numbers, however, is his 193 strikeouts against only 77 walks, and the adjusted ERA+ of 110, meaning Pedro was actually 10% better than league average. Throughout his career with the Rockies, Astacio was a victim of misperception: he always seemed a worse pitcher than he was. Sabermetrics hadn't yet taken hold in the baseball world at large, and so the Rockies saw what was actually a strength as a weakness.

2001 Colorado Rockies: 73-89, 5th place, 19.0 GB

In many ways, this was the worst season in Rockies history. After a lot of preseason hype - including some bold proclamations that the Rockies were the team to beat in the NL - and a hot start, the Rockies fell apart. The chief reason was an offense that sported only two better-than-league-average hitters, Larry Walker and Todd Helton. Moreover, the expensive contracts for Hampton and Neagle did not pay dividens, as John Thomson lead the pitching staff in ERA and ERA+, and Pedro Astacio was, in many ways, better than both free agents.

Defining Player: SP - Mike Hampton

Could there be a more perfect symbol for a team with high expectations that didn't work out? Could there be a better symbol for a team that looked like it could hit, that pitched better than it seemed to do, but was not quite good enough at either? Hampton was all of those things, with a price tag of over $100 million. What doomed Hampton, more than anything, is that he couldn't strike anyone out (5.4 SO/9). At Coors Field, in a part where batted balls turn into hits more than almost anywhere else in baseball, this was a cardinal sin. That said, Hampton wasn't horrible. His ERA+ in 2001 was 99, placing him firmly as league average. But for a supposed ace, the highest paid pitcher in history (at the time), that wasn't good enough.

Defining a Season: 1993-1997

2011-05-19T17:45:00.005-07:00

Part one of a series of Rockies-centric posts. See the introduction here, part two here, part three here, and part four here.

1993 Colorado Rockies: 67-95, 6th place, 37 Games Back (GB)

The Rockies inaugural season was impressive despite the abysmal .414 winning percentage. Colorado led the league in attendance with almost 4.5 million fans, thanks to Mile High Stadium, and boasted their first batting champion in Andres Galarraga. In all, the 1993 was a season of unbridled optimism, an unspectacular but promising first step in a career.

Defining Player: SP - David Neid

Neid was the Rockies first pick in the inaugural draft, a former Braves prospect and a promising young talent. Though injuries would stop him from ever becoming the pitcher he had the potential to be, in 1993 Neid showed glimpses of his quality, including a complete game 5-3 win against the Mets in April. Indeed, Neid - the Rockies' opening day starter and presumptive ace - started the season 3-1 with a 3.10 ERA. Beyond all that, though, Neid was a symbol of all things new in Colorado: a rookie pitcher on a rookie team, an early promise that the Rockies would have an anchor in their rotation for years to come, and an early fan favorite. That things didn't work out that way only further reinforces his place as the defining player of the '93 season, for reasons that will become clear.

1994 Colorado Rockies: 53-64, 3rd place, 6.5 GB at time of strike

The strike season was disappointing for fans across baseball, but it was especially hard on the Rockies* because of their rabid new fanbase. By the time the season was called off, the Rockies attendance had already surpassed 3 million, and while their 53-64 record was far from great, it was a vast improvement over the '93 campaign. The mere possibility of losing the 1995 season was frustrating to fans who had approved a new ballpark to be opened that year. After the expectation and excitement of 1993, 1994 should have been another step forward - and it was, to a point - but it turned out a kind of limbo.

* It was hardest on the Montreal Expos, who comfortably lead their division by 6 games - at 74-40 - when the rest of the season was called. After the strike fan interest waned and, before long, the team was moved to Washington, D.C.

Defining Player: 1B - Andres Galarraga

The Big Cat gets the nod here because he was good in 1994, but not nearly as good as he was in '93. He followed up his league-leading .370 batting average with a .319 effort, and while he crushed a crowd-pleasing 31 homers in only 103 games, he also struck out 93 times, and the lack of adequate support in the lineup left him with only 85 RBI to go with his power. What's more, the strike put him in limbo as much as anyone. The promise of stardom - after a solid, but far-from-special career before the Rockies - had started to shine on Andres, but the strike robbed him of a full year of productive baseball at a time when he could least afford it. Like Neid in '93, he was destined never to be at the heart of the Rockies again after 1994, as Larry Walker and then Todd Helton would steal the spotlight.

1995 Colorado Rockies: 77-67, 2nd place, 1.0 GB, Wild Card

Never before had a team made the MLB playoffs as early as the third year of their existence, but thanks to the shortened season, the addition of the wild card, and some shrewd moves by the front office and career years by the players, the Rockies managed to play their way into the postseason in 1995. They were promptly crushed by their nemesis, the Atlanta Braves (who had, incidentally, beaten them in every matchup they had in 1993). Even so, the Rockies were historically good for a 3rd year team, and their new ballpark and hitter's heaven named Coors Field was packed every night.

Defining Player: RP - Curtis Leskanic

The '95 Rockies performed better than expected thanks largely to their bullpen, and that bullpen was great thanks largely to Leskanic. He worked in over half of the teams games, leading the league with 76. He struck out 107 in 98 innings. Despite Coors Field, he boasted a 3.40 ERA, and surrendered only 7 home runs all season. Above all, though, Leskanic represents the '95 Rockies because, while he had always had decent stuff, this was by far the best season of his career, and it was totally unexpected. He was still relatively young, like the team he pitched for, and he came out of nowhere to outperform all expectations quietly, but consistently.

1996 Colorado Rockies: 83-79, 3rd place, 8.0 GB

The '96 Rockies were the victims of an excellent division. Both the San Diego Padres and the Los Angeles Dodgers won at least 90 games, leaving a solid Rockies team in the dust. Despite a solid record and another season of leading the league in attendance, 1994 was a disappointment coming off of the playoff berth in 1995. Despite being in only their 4th season, this Rockies team is the second oldest (by average age of the players) in Rockies history, behind only the 2004 edition. Though young in a grander sense, this was a team with a rapidly closing window.

Defining Player: SP - Kevin Ritz

Not only was his own window rapidly closing, Kevin Ritz was the perfect mix of good and bad in 1996, capturing the essence of the team's season. His 17-11 record was good, but his 5.28 ERA (and 99 ERA+, meaning that even adjusted for Coors Field he was merely league average) is none-too-pretty. He was a horse, starting 35 games and working 213 innings, but he walked exactly as many hitters as he struck out (105). At 31 years old, this was a strange season for Ritz: good, but not as good as his 1995. Nevertheless, he was rewarded with a raise from $740,000 to $2.5 million going into 1997, expectations high after his moderately successful '95 and '96 seasons, but set up for disappointment.

1997 Colorado Rockies: 83-79, 3rd place, 7.0 GB

Expectations were high coming into 1997, and in many ways this was the Rockies most disappointing season. They were contenders for most of the season, and were once again done in by a solid division and a lack of depth in both the rotation and the lineup. The Blake Street Bombers were in their heyday, but four of the team's regular starters had an OPS+ under 100 (league average). Similarly, the Rockies used six different starting pitchers regularly in '97, but only two managed to be above league average. Even another excellent campaign from the bullpen wasn't quite enough.

Defining Player: LF - Dante Bichette

No player was not-quite-enough enough than Dante Bichette. As Larry Walker bashed his way to a deserved MVP award in 1997, putting up incredible numbers (Coors aided or not), Bichette was the poster-child for the overrated Blake Street Bomber. He hit 26 homers, with a .308 average and .343 OBP, but those numbers are less impressive thanks to Coors, and his defense was bad enough that he actually was worth exactly 0.0 Wins Above Replacement for the season. Dante was coming off of a number of good - or at least better - seasons, but like the Rockies he was getting too old too fast, and it was too hard to admit that this iconic figure for a young organization wasn't good enough to play for a contender.

A New Mini-Project: Constructing Narratives with the Colorado Rockies

2011-05-18T19:21:00.007-07:00

I want to try an experiment. For a while I've had this idea of going through the Rockies history and picking the player from each season that most exemplified the team that year. I don't mean the best player, or the most famous, or the most highly paid, or anything like that. I mean the player who's individual narrative most mirrors that of the team as a whole.

There are a few ways to do this, I think, but the method I'm going to use is this: I'm going to write a sentence (or maybe a haiku?) to describe each season, and then I'm going to look through the roster from that season and see which players best reflect the sentence I've written for the team. While the result, hopefully, will be an interesting - to a Rockies fan anyway - trip down memory lane, I also expect to do some meta-analysis, to ask questions like the broad "How do we construct narratives?" and the more specific "What is the relationship between statistics - like W-L record or home runs - and the words that make up our stories?"

To save both you and me from an incredibly long post, I'm going to break this up and post a bit of it each day or two. After that, and barring any significant event that demands a Nicht Diesian commentary, I promise I'll get the next Beethoven post up soon.

Part one, covering 1993-1997, is here.
Part two, convering 1998-2001, is here.
Part three, covering 2002-2006, is here.
Part four, covering 2007-2010, is here.

More Internets: Responding to a Comment

2011-05-14T15:33:00.000-07:00

While writing a response to this comment on my last post, I decided I might as well just make my response into a new post. Heres' the comment:

Interesting post, Paul, and I was glad to finally read your conclusion to such an ambitious project. I also have quite a lot of doubts about the quality of human interaction over the internet, but that said, I'm not sure I totally followed your arguments.

You wrote that cynics "would point out that, in the long history of mankind (and especially in the last 300 years), almost every human interaction can be characterized according to political economy." Though your obviously sincere belief in the benefit of actual human communication seems on one hand to separate you from the cynics as you characterize them, but then you say quite categorically "It is undoubtedly the case that there is no online service which actively promotes communication in the sense I've talked about it above." You argue that all the best social sites do is to actively promote networking without standing too much in the way of communication. But I ask, why must the two be mutually exclusive? Moreover, if you truly believe that the real empathy necessary to true dialogue exists, then why must networking always be slave to the selfish inclinations of the political economy? What if the networking is for the purpose of solving a larger problem?

On the same note, you say "it is clear to me that communication...has been largely ignored, harried, or even battled against by the political economy of the last 300 or so years." The past 300 years more so than any other time in human history? How so? It seems to me that true dialogue has forever been a harried, ignored phenomenon happening most often in secret or on the unimportant fringes of this or that power. Has the overwhelming increase in availability to education and information (putting aside debates over the quality of the two) not helped at all? Have all those benefits been so outweighed by modernity's correlated evils? I guess I would have to say that despite all the very pertinent and important evils you've pointed out in these posts, I think the past 300 years have been a net positive in terms of dialogue.

Finally, you twice picked out the number 300 years. What has been so especially bad about the past three centuries in your opinion?

Phew! Sorry for the lengthy comment! Keep up the good work.

P.S. Ok final question, I swear: where do thoughtful comments on blogs stand in the networking v. communication discussion?

And here's my response:

Thanks again for the thoughtful comment DC. I'll do my best to address some of it briefly.

On your first set of questions, I'm not sure whether communication and networking have to be mutually exclusive, per se. I do think, however, that networking has a kind of addictive effect, simplifying our view of interaction to the point that communication becomes undesirable because of how much more effort it is than merely "poking" people and writing on their walls. It doesn't necessarily actively discourage communication, on a small scale, but on a large scale, while it increases the number of contacts we make, it might decrease the depth of those contacts.

You do make a good point about the problem-solving potential of networks. The ability to connect to people with disparate abilities and specialties allows us to more easily put together teams of problem solvers than any time in the past. There's no question that the Internet's ability to help us find things, people, knowledge, and so on is a boon to all people.

You're right that dialogue has always been harried, of course, and largely ignored society wide. However, despite its myriad corruptions, the intellectual and academic world used to hold dialogue in much higher esteem than it is now. There's no question that the scene has changed in the ways you describe (better access to information and more widespread education) in the modern world, but I guess I would argue that dialogue is a process, and not an outcome, and that in our modern world we're in the stranglehold of outcomes. That is, while there are way more "smart" people, who know more about more things, and who are specialized experts in their fields, I think the proportion of educated men and women who are generalists and process-oriented enough to talk about actual ideas and not just the jargon-infused specialized knowledge of their discipline is woefully small. To my mind, the web encourages, rather than discourages, that kind of (what I consider) intellectually deadly specialization.

That's not to say specialization doesn't work. It does. It drives technological progress, it leads to multi-disciplinary teams of problem solvers, and so on. It's just, having been on such teams, seen such progress, there's a distinct lack of real communication, a failure to ask why we do what we do, or what kind of progress is really desirable. Increasingly it seems to me that we're not only afraid, but maybe even incapable of having that conversation.

As for 300 years, it's partially an arbitrary number. More than anything, I'm pointing to the inception of a modern capitalistic-economy and the coming of romanticism, which ultimately lead to the myopic, every-man's-truth-unto-himself philosophy of post-modernism. I also wanted to encompass the industrial revolution, because it was the time in which the philosophy of "progress" became so powerful. But, again, I could just have easily picked out another time, because the actual past is not nearly so broken into discrete eras as our narrative of it is.

As for your ps, that's a good question to which I don't really have an answer. I often ask myself "why do I write this blog?" Passionate as I am about dialogue, there's little question that I'm as trapped by the medium as writers have been throughout history. The written word can't respond to a question,* to paraphrase Plato, even if I can respond post-facto. Though there is tremendous value in writing, reading, responding, and so on, I don't know if it's fully a dialogue, in that we're stuck exchanging declarative and/or interrogative monologues.

* At a certain point, of course, I might as well critique the shortcomings of books as Plato does. Really, the lesson is, with any technology (like books) there are benefits, which we usually champion, and drawbacks, which we too easily ignore. Unfortunately, in addition to this optimism, we often fail to ask questions like "why do we need this?" or "how should we best use it?"

Then again, much as I prefer dialogue, the alternative is for you and I not to communicate in any form, since you're halfway around the world from where I am if I'm not mistaken. But I think there's an analogy to be made with distance education here. Yes, it's better than nothing, but that doesn't mean we should rest on our proverbial laurels and say "oh how great a thing is the Internet!" I'd instead challenge you, myself, and any other thinking person to think bigger: how might we make the Internet a venue for communication and dialogue?

It's that last question that inspired this series of posts, and I think it's a sticky and difficult question, because it's not so simple as "what kind of website" could accomplish that goal. And really, I'm talking about the effort to bring real dialogue online - to code it into some experience, and not merely to make it possible or to not make it impossible - requires confronting the commercial, informational, and networked aspects of the Internet experience.

Interrogating the Internet, Part Four (and Conclusion): Networking

2011-05-10T17:00:00.001-07:00

Let's get all the chips on the table. Networking is the purpose of this series. Or, more accurately, the distinction between networking and communication. You see, in the early days of the web I feel like there was a rampant philosophical debate about the value of this new technology. What would dominate the web, the question went, information or communication? In one camp firmly sat Google and Yahoo, the early bastions of information search. In the other camp sat AOL and, to a lesser degree, Microsoft (with MSN and Hotmail leading the charge), services that connected people through instant messaging and email.

In the years that have followed it has become clear that the Internet had room - perhaps infinite room - for both communication and information, along with the added and not-totally-unexpected third wheel of commerce. In my last few posts, I've talked - in broad and inexpert strokes - about commerce and information. Because we are increasingly natives of the digital landscape, I felt it was worthwhile to point out the obvious, to challenge us to remember aspects of the Internet that we now take for granted or ignore. For example, information on the web is rarely unbiased, even when it strives to be, and is sometimes wildly inaccurate. At the very least, search engines do little or nothing to filter results for reliability or accuracy, rather choosing to filter based on more arcane algorithmic criteria like "relevance" as determined by computational linguistics or, more simply, the criteria of the dollar.

That money underpins everything on the Internet, even free networking services like Facebook or Twitter, is another important reminder. Increasingly we feel entitled, I suspect, to the long range (in time and space) contact that social networking has made possible. That the services are "free" only increases our sense of entitlement. But they are not free, no less than a phone, a radio, or a television is. That does not, in itself, corrupt said services any less than charging for a book corrupts the book, but corruption is not the point. The point is that we forget too easily that Facebook is not just a website, but a company trying to make a profit. For day-to-day use, that may not impact us much, but it has implications for a philosophical discussion of the platform.

Before we venture too far down that road, however, let's return to communication and networking. What do I mean by each of those words, and why have I gone to pains to distinguish between them? I'll start with networking, since it's the easier of the two to capture.

By "networking," I mean making connections. When two people network, they try to assess each other's position, and contribute resources - intellectual, physical, or otherwise - to each other in an effort to be of mutual use in the effort to meet emotional, psychological, physical, or professional needs. Networking is, in short, a kind of poking at each other and shoving stuff (whether tangible or intangible) in each other's direction. Building a network, then, is about creating a vast web of people to whom one can go for such assistance, and from whom one expects requests of a similar nature.

The beauty of the Internet - as opposed to previous incarnations of the same concept, all the way down to bartering at the local swap meet - is that it makes the whole thing both asynchronous and distributed. Asynchrony is important because the exchange between one node on a network and another need not be simultaneous, so I might borrow emotional support from a friend or borrow a potentially useful business contact from a mentor without needing to engage in immediate payback. Granted, this asynchrony of networked exchange is not unique to the Internet, as the phrase "I owe you one" indicates, but it is particularly strong on the web because no face-to-face meeting is even necessary. "I owe you one" is built into the structure, rather than something that has to be said after an arrangement has been reached.

That networks are distributed on the Internet is by far the more revolutionary and vital of its differences with traditional networks. What I mean by "distributed" is simply this: it is not important that the person who "owes you one" be the person who pays you (metaphorically) back. In a sufficiently advanced network redundancies abound. "You and Connor have 82 friends in common." If you, then, help out Connor by connecting him with a potential employer, it is not fully necessary, in a world where networks are distributed, asynchronous, and - a third important piece that warrants mention, if not discussion - instantaneous, for Connor to provide a similar service to you. It is taken as granted that he might, and maybe even will try to do so, but when you have needs that become paramount, you will not seek Connor on the basis of him owing you, but rather only if he is the member of your network most able to help you.

As a result, in a distributed network, there is ample commerce, but it is not always direct. A cynic would point out that, in the long history of mankind (and especially in the last 300 years), almost every human interaction can be characterized according to political economy. The debits and credits of that political economy are what made up the networks of the past. That cynic, then, in order to understand the Internet and the kind of networking that the web has created, would have to decentralize the political economy, shifting it away from the exchange of capital (be it fiscal, emotional, spiritual, or whatever) from one person to another and towards a new model where exchange remains individualized, but the reserves, so to speak, are more communal.

Despite that shift from individual to community, however, the Internet is far from socialist or communist. It is innately capitalist, innately concerned with individualism and personal gain. Modern networking is in some sense the epitome of the capitalistic notion of the "invisible hand," where each person looking out for himself allows things to work out for the good of everyone, where the rising tide does, indeed, lift all boats.

Wither communication, in that picture? Before I can answer that, I need to distinguish communication from networking. Communication, as I imagine it, is an actual exchange of ideas, an effort not merely to assess the material or emotional needs of oneself and one's interlocutor, but to actually understand the spirit and mind of that person. Communication is what happens when neither party in a conversation is looking out for his own advancement or the advancement of the other, but rather the shared effort of the two people is dialogue: a talking, thinking, and reasoning through difficult questions about meaning, purpose, and truth. A modern cynic will say that such a conversation is not possible, because we're all too myopic and too self-absorbed to achieve the level of objectivity necessary for such a conversation to occur. Moreover, said modernist (or, really, post-modernist) will argue that never in history have such conversation occurred; they have only seemed to do so because of the narrowness of the perspectives of those culturally hegemonic (or, at least, culturally isolated) societies in which conversations are said to have happened.

I suppose, on some level, the capacity for real empathy and, thereby, true dialogue is an article of faith. Once convinced that such a thing does not exist, it is impossible to be persuaded otherwise, because the opinion itself precludes any evidence to the contrary. Nevertheless, I believe firmly that such communication can and does happen. Indeed, while this blog is hardly dialogic, in that I write all of these posts by myself, at its heart is the belief in ideas and communication, despite my doubts that such is possible over the Internet.

Which leads me to the end point of this series of posts. Twitter and Facebook are two of the most successful and revolutionary services on the Internet. We might also lump in email, skype, Linkedin, or any of a number of other networking services. Regardless, however, we will be talking about networking. It is undoubtedly the case that there is no online service which actively promotes communication in the sense I've talked about it above. My question is, is there any service that does not, actually, actively prevent communication, in favor of networking? What's more, is it possibly the case that some networking services begin to trick us into believing that we are communicating when we are actually networking?

Those are questions to which I do not have answers, even if I pose them rhetorically (as if I do have answers). Regardless, it is clear to me that communication - or, we might also say, learning (a connection that might require a whole post to itself) - have been largely ignored, harried, or even battled against by the political economy of the last 300 or so years. That dialogue has held on - if only in a few places - is a testament to how important it is to actual human progress. That it has not yet, to my knowledge, broken through in the digital world is a testament to how powerful the myopic impulse for networking (we might as well say, for personal gain) is.

I leave with an analogy. Networking is not merely with people, but with ideas. Increasingly, we are concerned with what ideas link to other ideas. While there is evidence that learning happens largely through making connections, and that building networks of thoughts and definitions and concepts is an important part of thinking critically, I wonder when we synthesize. Building a network - of people or ideas - does not seem innately good or bad, any less than a blueprint or a scaffold for a building is innately functional. Rather, the question is what do we do with that network. If we merely connect ideas (or people) to each other, but never bore into them, try to discern their meaning and import, try to improve ourselves and our world, what good is that network? It is as if we have made a blueprint for a building but have never actually built it, instead going from room to imaginary room, thinking about how we might decorate them, instead of how we might live in them.

Interrogating the Internet, Part Three: Information

2011-05-05T16:05:00.000-07:00

In spite of all the mean things I said about e-commerce in my last post, there is a notable exception to the Internet-as-giant-money-machine routine. Wikipedia is a free website, a vast and successful experiment in crowd-sourcing, and a remarkable human accomplishment. While the site still requires money to run, it is the rare enormous non-profit enterprise run truly for the good of mankind, and not for the good of some one man.

Wikipedia is the height of information on the Internet, but it is not the hub, nor is it perfect. Like any source of information, it is constantly in flux, a battleground for ideology and interpretation. That scholars often scoff Wikipedia does not make it less valuable, but it does indicate that, especially when highly specialized knowledge is involved, the site might be just as guilty of perpetuating myths or, at least, subtly flawed characterizations of information as it is deserving of praise for striving to make anything and everything available to the curious. Of course, while the debate continues over Wikipedia's overall fidelity compared to traditional encyclopedias, there is no question that it is more comprehensive and more-userfriendly. The "wiki" has spread far beyond wikipedia.org, and for good reason: behind the specific information presented on the site, there's a process for how to present information that has proven extremely effective.

As I said above, however, Wikipedia is not the hub of information on the Internet, because Google is. Whereas Wikipedia is a non-profit organization dedicated primarily to providing articles on any and every piece of information available, Google is a for-profit, publicly traded search engine that, some time ago, began to reach far beyond search. Google's success in part owes to the fact that, when the search engine battleground was still densely populated, Google chose to separate out "sponsored results" from organic ones, giving users the opportunity to make their own decision, rather than being forced towards some marketing campaign by a page worth of disguised but paid-for search results. Google, internally, put this kind of decision under a broader heading: "don't be evil."

I won't venture into the question of whether Google has become evil, whether it has maintained it's plucky start-up idealism as it has become a publicly traded corporation, slowly but surely taking its place as one of the most successful companies - and certainly the most successful brand - in the world. Rather, I want wrap up this post by talking about where information fits in the picture of the Internet, in light of the two organizations discussed here.

Can information ever be unbiased? Probably not. Any historical event, for example, will have dozens of different interpretations, even at the time that it occurred. How much more so twenty years later, or a hundred, or a thousand? What, then, can a provider of information do? Wikipedia strives for an unbiased account, where possible, but its crowd-sourced mechanism for doing so is susceptible to the tyranny of the masses. On the other hand, the expert - who pens the Brittanica entry, for example - is liable to skew information in favor of his own perspective, ignoring competing theories or interpretations, even if he does so subconsciously. Especially troubling is not just interpretation, but hierarchy: not just what happened, but how important any given event - or other piece of information - is might also be debatable, and the cause or result of bias.

The Internet does nothing to change the conundrums of information, it merely makes them more pronounced. Wikipedia, to my mind, has as good an approach as can be expected: tap into the knowledge of the masses, edit carefully and vigilantly, strive for a lack of bias even when impossible. As a source for answers to factual questions, there is no better resource in the history of mankind.

Google's approach, meanwhile, is more complex. As a search engine, it is not actually designed to provide the user information. Rather, Google connects users with websites, websites which may contain information, but may (and usually do) also contain advertisements, interpretations, arguments, and other kinds of networks. Google takes minimal responsibility for what you find on the other end of your search, and rightfully so, but it bears remembering that the output part of the search enginge experience is not merely fallible, but often malicious as well.

We might say the same about Wikipedia, of course, if in a different way, because we might say the same about information as a whole. What the Internet does, I would argue, is that it elevates information by making it so sublimely accessible. That we can answer almost any question about history, etymology, science, mathematics, sports, weather, or just about anything else almost instantly has made us almost too comfortable with information. So much of our web-based learning, thanks to Wikipedia and Google, is the transmission and acquisition of information that we might not be doing so well on the critical thinking, interpretation, and creativity side of the equation.

Not that those things don't exist. Indeed, I have no evidence to suggest that we, as a society or as a world, are any less creative or critical now than we ever have been. Rather, my point is that, from my own experience, easy availability of information can inspire a kind of intellectual laziness that is far from fatal, but is troubling nonetheless. Where we should see an opportunity to do more and better critical thinking thanks to the Internet, all-too-often we're satisfied merely to link from one piece of information to the next, as if connections alone comprised analysis. Society wide, it seems to me that we're more interested in saying what a text (for example) reminds us of or what it resembles than we are in what it means, as if meaning were just another piece of networked information.

What does the Internet do, then? It makes information readily available to anyone and everyone. What doesn't it do? It doesn't assess the validity and uncover the biases of that information, it doesn't interpret it, and it doesn't create meaning. None of that is troubling, in itself, because those tasks are - to some extend - the exclusive right of the mind. Rather, what is troubling is that it is so easy to believe that the Internet does assess validity and bias, does interpret, and does create meaning, and, indeed, that it does so better than we can. Combined, especially, with the obvious but secret fact that the Internet is moved by money, first and foremost, and there is a strong incentive for information to be a commodity, for interpretation and meaning to be bought and sold.

Podcasting

2011-05-03T16:07:00.000-07:00

Just wanted to let my readers know that earlier today I joined Eric Nusbaum and Ted Walker from Pitchers and Poets on their regular podcast. Zip over to the post and give it a listen.

Interrogating the Internet, Part Two: Commerce

2011-05-02T16:30:00.000-07:00

In my last post I introduced a new mini-project, an attempt to gaze into the Internet and to see what it looks like. A cursory glance at web traffic rankings suggests that there are three primary uses of the internet: information, networking, and commerce (or, as I called it in the first post, shopping). My next few posts will address each of those areas, starting with the last of the three: commerce.

Beneath the surface of the Internet is money. Each and every server - and therefore, each and every website, email account, or bit of streaming media - exists somewhere in the real world, if only as little bits of electrical charge on a hard drive somewhere, demanding day-to-day energy usage, maintenance by IT professionals, and the occasional replacement. That the Internet feels "free" because the user experience is so abstracted from the silicon heart of the beast, but in reality it is anything but.

I don't just mean that the user pays his ISP a monthly connection bill. I mean the very fabric of the web is financial, that sites like Google or Facebook are able to operate not because they are popular, but because they are profitable. In the case of those two sites, extreme popularity and profit go hand in hand, of course, because they make so little from any given user that the user barely notices. There are sites, however, with much smaller user bases that are just as profitable because of the nature of their work.

Amazon and eBay are, of course, the two biggest online marketplaces because they understand the capabilities of the Internet better than sites created by traditional stores that had a real presence before the web. Amazon and eBay both thrive by allowing people to connect directly with each other, cutting the middle-man (the bookstore, for example) out of the buying and selling of used merchandise. Where Barnes and Noble is just a bookstore online, Amazon is a whole different kind of beast, a commercial enterprise that simplifies and democratizes commerce. Where Amazon started as a bookseller, primarily, they have been able to branch into just about every area of consumer purchases because they were built not on books (like Barnes and Noble), but rather on a retail process.

Make no mistake, however, about Amazon's motives. As great a company as Amazon is, it is still profit-driven. Stocking, shipping, and selling merchandise from their own warehouses is obviously a priority, given that they put their own results at the top of search results, and encourage consumers to register for Amazon credit cards, use "Super Saver" shipping, and so on.

Moreover, Amazon shares with eBay its primary means of making a profit: taking a small chunk out of every sale that occurs on the site. Given the sheer volume of commerce occurring on these two sites, it's easy to see that the small (around 10%) cuts that the sites take adds up fast.

Even Craigslist - which does not charge a commission - remains financially solvent thanks to a simple business model. According to Forbes.com, Craigslist survives by charging companies ($25, a pittance) to post job listings in the six largest US markets, plus a tiny $10 fee for New York apartment listings. That alone more than covers the cost of operating the site for free in every other category it works in, and in every other city.

The lesson from Craigslist - or even from Amazon and eBay - is that there are a lot of people on the Internet, and it doesn't take much to run the machine. But the machine must run, nonetheless. Google, despite its fundamental role as an information search site, is also a business that absolutely rakes in cash pennies at a time. When you click on that Amazon link from Google, you are greasing the wheels of the corporate Internet machine, because a small part of your Amazon purchase goes to Google, also.

It is hardly surprising that the Internet is commercial, but it's easy to forget. Rare as it is to see people working for free in the real world, it is even more rare to see it online. Indeed, the Internet is, in the end, a kind of abstracted, simplified version of real human interaction, with advertising at the heart of it all. But advertising alone cannot drive any economy unless actual purchases follow, and on the Internet they certainly do. What's more, since increasingly the things we purchase are digital to begin with, profit margins can be much, much higher in the web space. The traditional economic notion that purchase cost is derived, at least in part, from production cost is essentially meaningless online, where a game developer (for example) or a book for the Kindle need only be produced once, and distributed according to what people will pay for it, and not what it is "worth."

Perhaps what a thing is worth is what people will pay for it. That's a bigger economic and philosophical question. Regardless, as sales of digital media increase, the profit margin for each sale approaches something close to 100% (minus the negligible, compared to traditional commerce, increased costs of managing more sales). Scale - often a bugbear in traditional business - is the whole point of online business. The more people buy a product or use a service, the better the company does unequivocally. Does that make the capitalistic competition of the web more robust, or less robust? Is the consumer better off in a digital economy? Are businesses? Are governments? Those are important questions that to my knowledge have not been adequately answered.

Needless to say, the point here is remember that money makes the Internet go round, even more so than the material world. To most people I'm guessing that is no surprise, but it might just give us pause as well move forward and try to understand what the Internet is and does. First and foremost, it's a business, and it does sales. What deeper value we are able to pull out of it may or may not be corrupted by this fact (I truly do not know), but at the least it bears remembering that behind each and every corner of the Internet is the wall of commerce.

What It Is, What It Isn't, What It Does, What It Doesn't: Interrogating the Internet, Part One

2011-04-30T00:08:00.000-07:00

What, really, is the Internet all about?

That's probably not a great question, since, hey, we all use the Internet all the time for all kinds of things. Part of the point is that it's not really about anything, it's just there. The digital world is a part of our lives in much the way that eating, or, if it's not quite at that level, making insurance payments is.

Looking at the most visited - according this list to Quantcast.com - there are a few focal points of our web-lives. There are three primary categories that jump out to me:

1) Information
2) Networking
3) Shopping

If human experience is richer than these three things, it's not reflected in our Internet usage. Almost every top-50 website fits into one or more of these three categories.* I could go through the entire list, but I think each of those categories has a site or two that capture the essence. You can probably guess what those sites are, but I'll go ahead and tell you anyway.

* The exceptions are interesting (all rankings at time of writing, by the way). A part of me thinks that microsoft.com at 11 and adobe.com at 22 are none-of-the-above, though information kind of works. Microsoft's presence on the list owes to Windows, of course, and Adobe's to Flash. GoDaddy.com checks in at 31, despite being a kind of meta-website. In some sense it fits under networking, in some sense shopping, but really it's just a web-hosting site. It's place this high - way above any other hosting service, owes to their aggressive Danica Patrick advertising campaign. Monster.com is kind of reverse shopping, at 34. Pandora rates 36th, the first website explicitly designed around artistic purposes, even if it also has a financial goal as well. There are a few others further down, but you get the idea.

The top information site (and top overall site) is, of course, Google. Quantcast estimates approximately 150 million users per day. Google, however, as a search engine, is not an information provider so much as, well, a search engine. The other end of the information spectrum is the 7th most visited site on the Internet, Wikipedia. At over 70 million daily users, Wikipedia may be outstripped by other search sites like MSN and Yahoo, but is the most visited pure information site on the web.

The top networking sites, of course, are Facebook and Twitter. Youtube has an argument, as well, but it straddles the line between information and networking a bit too much for it to really count as either, to my mind. Moreover, Youtube is less a networking or informational destination than a hosting service for videos hosted or linked to from Twitter and Facebook or found on Google. That it is a part of Google only goes to show. Anyway, Facebook attracts about 140 million users a day, Twitter nearly 100 million.

Shopping is the least robust of these three categories, with Amazon's 70 million users and eBay's 60 million falling well short of Facebook, even when combined.

Now none of that is likely to be news to you, but I wanted to get the numbers on the table as a kind of primer for the picture I want to paint. I've been trying to grapple with the questions in the lamentably verbose title of this post, lately. What, really, is the Internet? What does it do? Is there, maybe, a way that we're using - or, more to the point, failing to use - it that might be particularly good. And I don't mean good, as in useful, I mean good, as in good. For all the talk about the meritocracy of the web, about the role of Twitter in revolutions, about the educational opportunities afforded by technology, I can't help but wonder whether there's an untapped potential, a chance to do more than make the things we do easier, a chance to actually make the world better?

There's an argument to be made - and a good one, I think - that it has done exactly that, and not just because is it difficult to separate "easier" from "better." Even so, there's something missing, something essential to real human progress. You see, despite the presence of the Internet, there's still so much social injustice, so much corruption and greed, so many profound and profoundly dangerous flaws in human society. It is not, of course, possible for technology to address the bits of human nature that make us cruel, ignorant, or both, but that doesn't mean that we people who believe in trying to create a better world ought not to use whatever tools are at our disposal.

With that in mind, I want to talk about these categories of our digital lives, in my next few posts. What do each of them represent in us, why are they so important, and what potential is there for something better. I am leery of this project exactly because it requires me to take a moral stand, to say that certain actions or ways of thinking might be morally superior to others. That's always a slippery slope, because it can be hard to separate real, fundamental morality from cultural and societal norms. Nevertheless, without any moral compass, without a vision for a better world in which "better" actually has meaning, what's really the point of anything at all?

In any case, I don't presume to have answers, here, but part of my sense of "good" is that it has more to do with the way in which we do things than what we do. That is, I may not know what the right thing to do is, but if I act out of compassion, empathy, and a desire both for the joy of myself and others, it doesn't really matter whether I do the "right" thing by some social, cultural, or religious standard. What matters to me is the intentionality, not the action (really, this is just a repackaging of my preference for process over outcome).

Before we launch into actually looking at the biggest, best, most popular, most successful sites on the Internet, then, as we try to understand what it is that they are and aren't, and what it is that they do and don't do, I want to bring up two points as a wrap to this introduction. First, I've chosen "networking" over "communication" for a reason that I'll discuss more when I write on those sites. Suffice to say, I'm not convinced that communication actually does happen on the Internet. Or, if it does, it does so in spite of, and not because of, the web-based services that currently exist.

Secondly, I want to make a point about intentionality on the part of designers of extremely successful websites. There is no question that the entrepreneurs that founded Facebook and Google had good intentions. There is also no question that they were a part of a system where the purpose of any product is not the betterment of mankind, but profit. Were they motivated by money? Are they now? Does it even matter? Those are questions I won't try to answer now, but I do want to share a true parable, that may not totally make sense now, but hopefully will be helpful in my next few posts.

Back when I was a music assistant at St. John's, we would make the students in the class write a Gregorian chant. That sounds more complicated than it is, because what it really means is "write a melody." So students wrote melodies. The problem is, students wrote melodies that didn't follow the rules of chant. Rather, their melodies followed the rules of tonal harmony. They would begin with a tonic, they would move to a subdominant, they would reach a tension point on a dominant, and they would return to the tonic. Of course, the melodies didn't really do this, because they were melodies, but were you to write a harmony to those students' melodies, it would, almost always, be a I-IV-V-I chord progression.

What is interesting is not that this happens - after all, each and every one of us has heard thousands of I-IV-V-I progressions in our lives - but that it happened most with the people who didn't know the language of tonal harmony. Completely non-musical (even tone-deaf) students would write perfectly prim and proper tonal harmonic melodies. It was stunning.

The analogy, then, I'll phrase as a question. What happens when young entrepreneurial people who don't know the language of business, but are trying to create a service based upon the perceived needs of people (and not their own desire for fame or profit, at least not first and foremost) actually go and build those services? What, actually, ends up being the purpose of those projects?

Where Does the Money Go?

2011-04-26T15:37:00.000-07:00

A breakdown of US Government spending in 2010, from Wikipedia

I'm not going to offer much commentary, here, especially since my last post was a tad, um, long. What I want to point out, though, is that our Congresspeople and President have recently been fighting over a budget for the coming year. Mostly - as I understand it - the discussion about where to make cuts is focused on the upper-left quadrant of this graph. My question is, what about that gigantic maroon section? What about the 18.74% (in 2010, almost $700 billion) we're spending on our military every year? In 2010 the USA's military operations - that is, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan - budget ($283 billion) alone was larger than our Education, Justice, Agriculture, Energy, Labor, Commerce, and Environmental (EPA and Interior) spending combined. What does that say about our priorities, as a nation? What does that say about the parties that we enthusiastically vote for?

Keep in mind, while you listen to the news talk about the vehement arguments between Democrats and Republicans over a hundred million dollars here and a hundred million there that neither party - including the President - supports a reduction in our military spending, even though a mere 10% cut therein would more than cover the total discrepancy between the Republican and Democratic budgets for 2012. Keep in mind, while your state cuts pension programs for government employees, including teachers, and slashes non-core education programs like the arts and physical education, that most state budget shortfalls are dwarfed by our defense spending. Keep in mind, when you go to vote in 2012, that neither major political party will do anything to change that.

Rethinking the Great Books

2011-04-24T19:16:00.000-07:00

Introduction

As a graduate of St. John's college, it's practically sacrilegious for me to suggest that there might be some flaw in the curriculum of the college. "The Program" may not be sacred, per se, but it is founded upon the thinking of philosophers that the modern world - though perhaps not philosophy departments - largely ignores, and therefore there's a kind of internal sanctity to the whole thing. You see, St. John's is an academic institution that shuns modern academia, a place where research - the modus operandi of every University in the world - is not frowned upon so much as regarded with a bemused detachment. That is, it's taken very seriously, in a certain sense, but also challenged on the grounds that it cannot answer all of the questions it asks. Where modern academia believes that the best questions are the ones that can be answered with rigorous experimental design and good implementation, St. John's rather tends towards the view that the best questions are the ones that cannot be answered, and, furthermore, that the process of dialogue around those questions might be more valuable to students - and to the world at large - than the more "practical" aims of research.

Perhaps "more valuable" is too much, there. I should say, instead, that we live in a world overrun by research, largely devoid of dialogue (in its root sense*). As Husserl might say - if he weren't such a terrible writer - we have plenty of answers, but we don't really know what any of them mean, or why they are important. Perhaps we can't know, but at least we can ask, and we rarely do that anymore, either.

* OK, a parenthetical isn't enough here. Dialogue comes from Greek, dia meaning through, logos meaning all kinds of stuff, such as language, words, logic, ratio, and so on. So dialogue is kind of talking through, but also thinking through, or logic-ing through. We do plenty of talking in the modern world, but how often do you see two (or more) people talk through the logic of a question, try to analyze it together and really build an answer, or at least a framework from which to understand that question? I certainly don't see it often.

Not surprisingly, given its anachronistic concern with meaning, St. John's has been largely misunderstood by most of the academics I have met since my graduation. Unfortunately, that misunderstanding has been for reasons I would never have guessed. Rather than objecting to its philosophical purposes, I've heard time and again that the problem with St. John's is the Great Books, the hegemonic, conservative, rich-white-maleyness of the whole endeavor. It matters not, it seems, what the books Johnnies read are about, or even the way in which those books are read, but rather what matters is who wrote the books in the first place. Context, to the modern researcher's mind, is more important - or at least easier to pin down - than meaning, so St. John's is attacked on the basis of context.

It would be foolish to discount the criticisms of the Great Books, however, simply because they misunderstand the purposes of the college. No, it is my belief that while St. John's itself may not be in need of any drastic reform, any program based on the principles of the college might benefit from an infusion of some of the modern research on learning, for one, and some of the great - or at least very good - works of the last hundred years. With that in mind, I want to discuss the two distinct parts of the St. John's program, including whether they are interdependent or not, and what might be done differently.

The Great Books

It is certainly true that there is a preponderance of work from white males in the traditional Great Books curriculum, but that owes more to the vagaries of history, I would argue, than an innate bias from the founders of the program or the current faculty and administration at the college. It is an unfortunate truth that, for much of the history of the western world, it has been only wealthy white males who have had access to the resources and means to print and distribute works widely and effectively enough that those works had a chance to survive to the modern day. It is inevitably true and extremely frustrating that there were great thinkers who never had an opportunity to write among the oppressed women of Europe or the many foreign cultures that the Europeans subjugated, from the Islamic Northern Africans to the Arabic civilizations of the middle east (who did, incidentally, produce plenty of writing, much of which was lost to marauding crusaders) to the various islanders and tribal societies crushed under foot during the age of imperialism.

The fact of oppression, however, does not mean that we ought to ignore the works that are available to us, written by the oppressors though they may be. Indeed, it is among what we now consider the "Great Books" that the most vocal opposition to said oppression can be found, where writers like Montaigne dare to suggest that the "savages" of the New World might be just as civilized - or moreso - than their European counterparts. That, I know, does not excuse Europe any more than, say, American citizens who objected to Japanese internment camps during World War Two, but that's not the point.

No, the point is that history is valuable, and not just history as a retelling of the past. The history of ideas is important, the history of science and philosophy and art and music and literature. I, because I have read the Great Books, because I am white and male, have been accused of being a part of the hegemonic, oppressive culture that is still, in many ways, at work in the modern world. But I would argue the opposite. Because I have read Aristotle, Plato, Descartes, Aquinas, Kant, Hegel, Hume, and so on (and so on), I actually know that "oppressive" world from the inside out, and I can tell you that despite the context, the meaning was, more often than not, valuable. Tracing the philosophical history of a patriarchal and oppressive West may come across as a worthless (at best) or even evil (at worst) project to the staunch multi-culturalist, but in fact it is remarkable and too easily overlooked how deeply, and often subtly, influenced by the authors and thinkers that comprise the Great Books curriculum our modern world is.*

* I don't have anything to add, here. This is just a ploy to get you to re-read that sentence, especially the final clause.

The real distinction here, then, is the same as I mentioned above. As a reader of the Great Books, I may have all kinds of hidden (or not so hidden, but potentially "dead white male" inspired) biases - like my insistence that meaning matters - but as a St. John's student I was never asked to read books from the perspective of a dead white male, or a European conquistador, or, for that matter, from any subaltern perspective either. No, I was asked to read the works sans context, sometimes to the point of absurdity (ignoring, for example, collecting knowledge or interpretation of American colonial history while reading the Federalist Papers). We were never asked to think about how Aristotle wrote, about what the condition of his Athens was, about who was oppressed and who wasn't, about his place in history. While some of these things inevitably would come up, from time to time (and depending on the author), they were never the focus. No, instead we were asked to think about what Aristotle was saying, why he was saying it, and why it mattered (or didn't).

Now there is a legitimate argument to be made that what St. John's tries to do is flawed, that meaning cannot be separated from context. But I guess my argument is that context cannot be separated from meaning either, and that in a world where we are much better trained to think about context, thinking about meaning is more valuable precisely because it is rare. To talk about context alone is to talk about nothing, and while I am amenable to discussing the flaws in the Great Books curriculum as a list of books worth reading, the perspective that something is wrong with the inherent process behind the way those books are read and discussed is, to me, a deeply flawed argument.

Unfortunately, the arguments I have heard against the Great Books do exactly that: they throw the whole thing out simply because it challenges the context-centric thinking that dominates modern academia, refusing to acknowledge that there might be something to be gained in such an education, at least for some students. Without a hint of irony, the modern academic does to the Great Books curriculum exactly what they accuse the European authors of the Great Books of doing to other cultures throughout history. I know, not a fair comparison, but worth pointing out because it underlines the main point: the kind of thinking that the St. John's curriculum is after is the kind of thinking that sees and understands how and why we think about questions and problems in the ways that we do.

The question is, where does that thinking really come from? The Great Books themselves - the vast reading list - is only a part of the story. Perhaps more important is the approach, which is much more than just the focus on meaning over context discussed above. No, in spite of what is perceived as an anachronistic, conservative, and just generally stuffy curriculum, there's a pedagogy at St. John's so radical that it inspires the most progressive of educators.

A Dialogic Pedagogy

In the St. John's classroom there is no Professor. Each class is led by a Tutor, a faculty member who is responsible for guiding and facilitating a conversation, but not for having mastery over the material or the ability to answer difficult questions about the reading in question. Students and Tutors, in fact, use the same naming conventions, calling each other by "Mr." or "Ms." even when the Tutor holds a Doctorate. Whereas the modern academic environment in the broader world, then, is extremely hierarchical, St. John's is not.

In addition to the somewhat superficial - but very telling - nomenclature of the college, there are other pedagogical policies that truly make St. John's radical. For example:

- Instead of hiring experts in various fields and assigning them to Professorships in those fields, every St. John's Tutor is made to teach classes in every subject. A Tutor with a PhD in Political Science will, in time, lead courses in Ancient Greek, Music, Science, and Math. The result is that Tutors are often learning as much (or more) than the students in their classes, operating functionally as another member of the class - "model learners" - instead of teachers.

- All classes are discussion based. There are no - or at least only very rarely - lectures at St. John's. There is also, however, no hand raising. The Tutor does not call on students, either. "Discussion based" classes at St. John's are different from discussion based classes everywhere else I have been in this regard, because they depend upon the focus and listening of the members of the class, the experience that makes it possible to hold a dialogue with over a dozen people without some artificially imposed system to stop everyone from talking all at once. While this may seem crazy in our modern world (on a political television show it's a miracle if three people can have a conversation without constantly interrupting each other), after the Freshman year actual interruption is fairly rare. As much as Johnnies are learning to think about meaning, they are also learning to listen.

- There are no tests, no worksheets, few papers, and only superficial grades at St. John's. Assessment remains the job of the Tutor, but only as a way of helping the student to learn to assess his or her own learning. Tests would serve no purpose in a college where the effort to understand the material is more important than the material itself. Moreover, tests notoriously do a better job assessing student ability in taking tests more than content knowledge anyway. Instead, St. John's assesses based upon classroom participation and by means of the occasional writing assignments, which emphasize good ideas over good writing. In the end, grades are awarded, but only because graduate schools demand that they be. Philosophically, St. John's would not award grades if it did not have to.

- The classroom is only the beginning of the conversation. While there is no requirement that Johnnies carry their philosophical musings outside the classroom, in inevitably happens. In a small academic community where every single student shares the same reading list, the same pedagogical style in their classes, and many of the same questions about what the books they are reading mean, it is only natural that the conversations permeate throughout the life of the student. Oh, college students are still college students, but there's something to be said for the drunk 21 year old who's arguing about Kant at a party. Even conversations about things that are not on the reading list take on characteristics of the classroom conversation, and ideas are put through the same intellectual ringers. In short, St. John's is a community of learning, a place where thinking, reading, and conversation happen constantly. I have heard it compared to a military academy in terms of the level of discipline and the amount of single-minded focus on the curriculum that the students generally have. The difference is, at St. John's that happens without students being required to have that discipline and focus.

The pedagogy of St. John's is unlike the pedagogy of any other school, university, or academic program I have encountered.* Obviously there are a great many preconditions to creating such a culture: it has to be institution wide, it helps that students are old enough to take responsibility for their own learning, etc. Nevertheless, the unique approach of the college towards how learning ought to happen contains lessons that are more widely applicable. Particularly, it turns out, in multi-cultural, progressive classrooms. Indeed, I was stunned to read Paolo Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed, only to discover that, ironically enough, the pedagogy he describes as being ideal is almost exactly what St. John's does.

* The closest thing, strangely enough, is the d.school at Stanford, which holds many of the same philosophies about academic hierarchy, group participation, and learning assessment, despite the very different end-goal of producing things.

Curriculum and Pedagogy in the 21st Century

As much as I love the St. John's curriculum and its attendant pedagogy, I feel as though there is room for improvement. Two areas, in particular, afford a great deal of potential for the college's approach to education, namely 1) a re-imaging of the curriculum with an eye towards incorporating more works from the last eighty or so years, and 2) incorporating appropriate technologies, where appropriate, to enhance what is already going on in the classroom.

A Multi-Cultural Great Books Curriculum

The first of these two possibilities is almost too obvious. Of course St. John's should incorporate more works from the last eighty years! How could they not? Because the still in-use Great Books curriculum was founded and shaped around the 1930s, it has changed little since that time. At its inception, then, it was modern, including works that were then contemporary and influential. The core of the program has always been historical, but the finishing touches, I believe, were never meant to stagnate in the way they have. The Great Books, in any time, ought to span from the earliest available writings to the most recently available, as long as those works are, by some measure, great. That's a sticky distinction, of course, and difficult decisions have to be made at every turn (for example, focusing on the West in the core program of St. John's means that the great works of China, India, and Japan are largely ignored, though the college also offers an Eastern Classics Master's program).

Any re-imaging of the St. John's curriculum, then, would require sacrifices and compromises, which is unlikely to occur as long as faculty and staff each have their own and separate favorites. When arguments for staying the same and for changing are equally valid, we tend to resist change, and so St. John's is slow to adapt to the modern world because there is - as seen above - a compelling case for the status quo. Nevertheless, I do believe there are things which could be cut which would not ruin the curriculum or rob it of its heart, and which would allow for the inclusion of more modern works. I won't bore you with details, especially because any one personal opinion need not be decisive in reforming or recreating the St. John's curriculum.

Instead, I see a new Great Books curriculum as a backwards design challenge. If the ultimate core goal of St. John's is to produce critical thinkers, and the secondary goals are to acquaint students with the history of Western thought, to encourage students to learn to dialogue, and to ensure participation in a community of learning, then there are many legitimate curricular choices that might lead to those end goals. Indeed, my argument boils down to this: I believe St. John's could actually do a better job acquainting students with the history of Western thought.

The danger of making the Great Books curriculum more multi-cultural is, of course, tokenism. When you add, for example, a book by Toni Morrison, are you adding it because it's great, or because it was written by a black woman? Even if the answer is the former, the problem remains in the perception of people looking at the program. So it is even now, as when I tell people we do, in fact, read W.E.B DuBois and Virginia Woolf (among a few other non-white men) at St. John's I'm told that we're just engaging in tokenism, and not really taking seriously the subaltern viewpoint.

What's more, in the multi-cultural world there are a preponderance of cultures and sub-cultures, so much so that the very notion of greatness has lost its perceived legitimacy, or at least its practicality. It is simply impossible to read the seminal works of every single sub-culture of American society (much less world society), because there are just way too many sub-cultures with way too many seminal works. To me, however, this is a challenge that a modern Great Books curriculum ought to rise to, rather than ignore. If it is impossible to read the great Japanese-American, Korean-American, Chinese-American, Phillipino, Hawaiian, American Indian, African-American, Afro-European, Polish-American, Czech-American, Arab-American and so on and so on (and so on) great works, at least we can raise the question by picking those particularly influential academic works like the famous Can the Subaltern Speak? or by choosing (and even rotating?) important literary works like The Woman Warrior or Their Eyes Were Watching God (or so many others) from among the many wonderful options.

The explosion of excellent, provocative, and maybe even great writing in the modern world is not something that the Great Books should ignore. There's an opportunity to shape an even better curriculum, here, if only the few people who are shaping such curricula would rise to the challenge.

Dialogic Pedagogy in the Digital Age

Perhaps even a bigger opportunity than reshaping the Great Books curriculum, however, is the chance to use technology to further the goals of the dialogic pedagogy of St. John's. I do not believe that technology can significantly improve the classroom experience and discussion at the college - though certainly there are times when a quick Wikipedia check for factual information would be beneficial - but that does not mean that there's no place for it in the Great Books education. Even when I was a student, the Internet had already become a source not just of news, but of contextual or biographical information.

"Now wait," you're saying. "Didn't you say that you're not supposed to talk about context at St. John's?" I did say that, but only because I was contrasting a focus on context with a focus on meaning. Inevitably questions about context do arise, not as a central talking point, but as aids to understanding meaning. Sometimes it is useful to know context not because it can explain, and not because we want to hide behind contextual connections between texts as a way to ignore talking about more difficult and more profound matters. Rather, the value of context is in coloring meaning, in resolving a dispute about who came first, or who studied with whom. The easy availability of something as simple as a timeline can radically transform a conversation not because era and meaning are innately interconnected, but simply because era does sometimes explain away things like simple lexicographical differences.

Beyond merely making more information available, however, I think there's another dimension to what St. John's could do with the Internet. As social media have become increasingly prominent on the web - with Facebook (a social site) occasionally outranking Google (an information site) - it has become clear that we, as a society, need to understand how human interaction translates to the web. Unfortunately, it seems to translate fairly directly; that is, where most person-to-person interactions are rife with people refusing to listen to each other, willfully misunderstanding, and generally being pigheaded and closed-minded, the same is doubly true on the Internet thanks to the added veil of anonymity and the security that affords. It's all too easy to come to an Internet forum (whether a literal forum or a networking site like Facebook or Twitter) with an agenda and an opinion that never gets revised. True, the availability of information means that opinions based upon faulty factual information can be easily proven wrong, but even then the pigheaded will not change their minds.

Now, obviously not all denizens of the net are guilty of closed-mindedness. Like in the real, material world, there's a range, and some people use the Internet precisely because it's a way to expand one's exposure to ideas and cultures and ways of thinking. I just think that's relatively rare, because it's much easier to use the Internet for pleasure of various kinds, whether carnal, social, or intellectual. Technology easily fools us into thinking that everything should be easy and fun. But good thinking is still hard, even with technology to help (though perhaps it is more fun), and doing things that are hard requires a certain discipline of mind.

So where does St. John's - or some other dialogic Great Books-y curriculum - fit in this picture? Well, I believe that it can shape - perhaps only for its students, but perhaps more broadly - a more dialogic mode of digital interaction. Perhaps true dialogue is impossible on the web (perhaps it's impossible, period), but a place as committed to dialogue as St. John's ought to at least explore the possibility that some of the ways of communicating that it holds dear might be transferable to an online space.

What does that look like? That's a difficult question, the answer to which would require a careful effort to understand what good dialogue really is, and how it might be recreated in a web space. Maybe, in the end, that looks like Twitter or a Facebook wall? Maybe - and this is what I would guess, but can't know - it looks unlike anything currently available on the web. The thing is, in order to get there someone needs to make the effort to design and create a real web (or other technology) based tool for real dialogue.

If such a thing existed, in whatever form it might take, the role in a modernized St. John's is at least partially obvious. The classroom could be supplemented, yes, but the more valuable use would be in reaching beyond the 800 or so enrolled students at the college. If the world desperately needs to learn to dialogue, why not make it possible to learn - at least in part - with technology

Conclusion

Not surprisingly, my suggestions and analysis here are based upon processes and not outcomes. If I were tos summarize this essay, I'd say that the St. John's (or any other program with similar goals) could stand to reevaluate not what they do, but the way they do it. How might St. John's better fit itself into the modern world, keeping its fundamental strengths intact? How might St. John's reshape its curriculum to encompass Western thought not just from 1000 BC to 1935, but to 2011? How might St. John's use technology to support its dialogic goals, both in the classroom and beyond? Given that St. John's does do a good job - in my opinion - preparing it's students for life, how might St. John's do an even better job preparing its students for the modern, networked, distributed, changing, technological world? In the end, the answer might be "stay the same," but it's a question worth asking, nonetheless.