Two Research Ideas

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.

Win Probability and Tennis

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.

Economy, Purpose, and the Fallacy of Infinite Growth

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?

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

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?

The List

For the past few weeks - since my resignation at NALU - I've been mired in a search for an appropriate PhD program.  If you know anything about academia, you know that my timing is particularly awkward, because most programs put their deadlines smack dab in the middle of December, which is, you know, very soon.  So I've been exploring research angles, having conversations, browsing websites, sending emails, and doing all the legwork I need to do as quickly as possible.

The result is that, as of today, I've made my decision as to where I'm applying, and for what.  I don't think it's a perfect list, but it's a list, it's actionable, and I know - or at least strongly suspect - I would be happy in any of the programs I've narrowed my search down to.  So, without further ado, here are the five programs.

Stanford University, Learning Sciences and Technology Design

I'll be applying to LSTD for the third time, and from a third completely different angle.  When I was accepted to LDT I applied at both the Master's and PhD levels, but my application was broad and vague to a degree that made me an undesirable PhD candidate.  Last year, I wrote a more specific statement of purpose, but unfortunately my specific interests didn't align with anyone at the University.  This time, and now that I know the Professors better (and they know me better), I feel I can write an even better statement of purpose, and potentially latch on with a suitable advisor.

In short, the question I'm pushing will be this: what is the most effective design in terms of providing students access to secondary, tertiary, and contextual sources?  There are more than a few angles here, including whether it's better to simply let students surf the Internet for contextual information about the books they're reading or the history they're learning, or whether there are ways to specifically limit that vast set of information.  Likewise, one might focus on the difference between learning from primary source materials alone versus learning from primary source material supplemented by secondary sources, interpretations, and contextual information.  Regardless, it is vital to consider pedagogy here, as well, and what kind of teaching goes best with what kind of information.

So yeah, that's jargony, I know.  But it's also the kind of focused question that not only might help me get into a school that I do love, but also would set me up to be a successful doctoral student there, with a sufficiently nuanced, but also sufficiently broad research question.

University of Chicago, Committee on Social Thought

Now I haven't really chosen a specific research focus here yet, but the program is fascinating to me.  Perhaps the most appealing part of this program is its breadth, and its inherent similarity to the St. John's education I received as an undergraduate.  Indeed, the program shares common roots with St. John's and the "Great Books" curriculum - as well as the dialogic pedagogy - they use.

The Committee on Social Thought website states that students are encouraged to come without a specific dissertation topic already in mind, but rather a broader area.  The purpose of the first two years, then, is to study a variety of works in that area, to select a dozen-ish of them, and then to begin laying the groundwork for doing a dissertation on the confluence of themes and ideas in those dozen books.  So, really, it's like a Johnny's dream.

The broader area, however, is something I still need to think about.  The application asks me to check a box: philosophy, literature, history, classics, or art history.  I'm inclined towards literature and/or art history, and perhaps even the combination of the two.  Peter Quince at the Clavier is, of course, an example of that intersection, and something I felt compelled to write about for fun.  I'm leaning, however, towards an explicit study of art history in the form of music.  That would be in line with my undergraduate thesis, on the one hand, but would allow me to reach far beyond the narrow scope that I began to explore in my paper about Beethoven's 3rd and 9th Symphonies.

Needless to say, this won't be as specific and jargony an application as my Stanford one will be, but I dare say it's not supposed to be.  Rather, this program would signal a return to my educational roots, but at a much higher level of sophistication.  And, armed with some knowledge of education and technology design, who knows what fun ways I'll come up with to synthesize my learning.

University of California Santa Clara, History of Consciousness

Besides having an awesome name, this program fulfills the requirement of being sufficiently cross-disciplinary and creative for my liking.  The website notes that the program is "in transition," and that the next cohort will be a smaller-than-usual one, which doesn't necessarily bode well.  But, on the other hand, that means that if I am not a good fit, it's extremely unlikely I'd get in.

I'm applying, however, because my intuition says that I am a good fit.  Unlike Chicago, UCSC asks for applicants to have a fairly specific project in mind, and of the faculty research interests they list perhaps the most interesting to me is "global capitalism and cultural process."  Now, I have almost no economics background, but culture and I spend a fair amount of time with each other, and the relationship between the two is the kind of question that I could easily get lost in for a few years.

That said I'm also intrigued by the possibility of formulating some of my own questions about culture and learning.  More than any non-education program, it strikes me that I might be able to formulate the intersection of my questions about culture, learning, and technology into a single actionable research path.  The question, of course, is if anyone at UCSC is interested in that kind of thing.  If not, well, that's why I'm applying to five schools.  If so, then maybe this is the place.

University of California San Diego, Communications

Yes, that is half of a green telephone at the top of their website.

The program here was described by someone I trust very much as "the only good communications program in the country."  So I figure it's worth an application.  Back before I enrolled in the LDT program, I looked long and hard at communications as a field that I might want to do graduate work in.  I think that education ended up being the right choice in the short term, but now that I have at least some education background, branching out into a cross-disciplinary communications program makes sense.

One of UCSD's Communications listed sub-genres is, in fact, "mediational theories of mind and of learning."  UCSD might be, for that reason, the perfect place to pursue something along the lines of a study of how people learn music, and in what role "communication" plays in that learning.  That would be an outgrowth, in some ways, of my undergraduate studies combined with my graduate work at Stanford.  In short, it would be wonderfully synthetic of what I have already done, meaning I can write a compelling application, and I would enjoy the hell out of studying it because I could go so much deeper into the issues at hand than I had an opportunity to as an undergraduate (or Master's student).

University of Hawaii, Educational Foundations

Perhaps the least "ambitious" of my applications, I nevertheless feel as though there are significant benefits to potentially staying in Hawaii and receiving a PhD from the School of Education at UH.  For one thing, if Jericha and I want to live and work in Hawaii in the long term, I could do worse than getting a degree from UH.  It's hard to explain, but I honestly believe that a PhD at UH will get you further in Hawaii than a degree from Stanford, Harvard, Yale, Oxford, or any other school.  That's just the way it is here.

Beyond the practical, however, I'm happy to note that UH has a very interesting School of Education.  Like all of UH's programs, the Educational Foundations program is cross-cultural.  And, moreover, it strikes me as fairly interdisciplinary as well.  That is, the goal is to understand what is at the heart of education, and how to build meaningful thought and learning processes that serve as a foundation for further learning.  The question "How do we learn?" may be too broad for PhD work, but it's a good entry point, especially coupled with the cultural question: "In what ways do different people's learning differ, and what do various cultures and peoples have in common?"

In summary, I am legitimately excited about the possibilities in all five of these programs.  What's more, the geography is agreeable as well.  The three California schools are, of course, in the good parts of the state (two in the Bay Area, one in San Diego), the Hawaii school is, well, yeah.  And the University of Chicago may be in Chicago, which would test my anti-Cubs patience, but is also the location of the Baha'i National Assembly for the United States, which would make Jericha very happy.  Plus, a lot of people do swear by Chicago, and it does have a good reputation as big cities go.

Unfortunately, deadlines loom, and so I'll be holed up working for the next couple of weeks.  Then, once I'm done, I'll be waiting for a few months.  Ah, academia.

Exploring Research Questions

Having effectively joined the ranks of the unemployed following my resignation as Director of NALU Studies, I have begun not only looking at other jobs - which is lots of fun in the current market - but also looking at PhD programs.  In the case of the former, my range is fairly narrow.  I'm looking, basically, for work with schools that want to do technology integration in their curricula because, after all, that's what I got my Master's in.  In the latter case, the angle is much more obtuse.

Pursuing a PhD is something that makes sense to me, as an avid writer, reader, and thinker.  While the politics of the University world are somewhat abhorrent, the intellectual community is appealing nonetheless, and a doctoral degree hardly means that I'd have to stay in academia if I found it too distasteful.  On the other hand, the real challenge here is not navigating politics or soft money, but rather defining an area of interest sufficiently narrow to ensure finding a fitting advisor and, ultimately, a fruitful dissertation.

For a generalist, however, that is a difficulty that cannot and should not be overlooked.  Part of the appeal, indeed, of the specialized job of instructional technology and curriculum support is that it is, in reality, a generalists job.  I would be the expert on what tools are available for classroom use, and good implementation practices, but I would (at least in theory) have the opportunity to work with teachers of English, history, science, math, music, foreign language, and anything else a given school offers.  In short, I'd be a specialist who nevertheless gets to work across fields, who gets to talk to people who know, between them, know a lot about almost any subject you'd want to know about.  Contrast that with most Universities, where the world is more insular, where conversations don't frequently happen across departments, and you'll see the appeal to a generalist and a learner of being able to span multiple disciplines.

So the challenge, given the fast approaching deadlines of many PhD programs, is defining not only a question, but even an area of study.  Hence this post, which is more for me than my readers, as I try to explore the implications of a few ideas and, hopefully, get some ideas back in return.

Music

One of my first thoughts in my current exploration of graduate programs was, "Why not return to music?"  I do love music, as the title of the blog suggests.  The biggest challenge is that, though I am a marginally competent pianist, I am no expert, certainly not at the level that PhD programs expect.  In the last two years, especially, my practice has been limited, and while I have more or less maintained my skills, I am no better at the piano now than I was as an undergraduate.

Nevertheless, my Senior Thesis at St. John's was a musicology paper, I was an assistant in music courses for three years, and I conducted a chamber orchestra.  I don't think selling a program on my background would be easy, but it would be far from impossible.  Which leaves the bigger issue of what part of music I'd like to study.

Regardless of the field of study I pursue, integrating some of my Stanford LDT knowledge is a no-brainer.  And, ultimately, I'm still passionate about education.  So the angle from which studying music is most appealing is the musical-cognition angle.  That is, how do people learn to understand music?  Perhaps there's a cultural and anthropological bent to that question: how does culture and language effect the learning of music?  How, for example, does classical music differ from jazz harmonically, melodically, and rhythmically, and how would a classical musician describe those differences relative to a jazz musician?  Beneath all of that, how does learning the music from one or the other perspective (and we could throw in many others, from pop music to modern rock to Hindu chants) influence the comprehension of the others?

It seems to me that there are two chief ways to explore those questions.  The first involves neuroscience, studying cognition using brain waves and such.  But that science is still in its infancy, and the more interesting angle (though probably the less fund-able one) is the anthropological one.  The ethnography necessary to do research into any of those questions would be fascinating and enjoyable.

Another angle, here, is strict musicology, but that seems a little bland and self-serving.  At least the above has implications for education, assuming schools ever teach music again, anyway.  On the other hand, musicology could also be a curricular focus.  Is there a way to teach music to students that combines theory, history, and appreciation.  As it is, those are all usually separate classes (as the college level, of course).  Why not make a single class that incorporates all of those?  The question, I guess, is does that effort even belong in a PhD program, or is it more of a professional deal?

Fellow Johnnies will point out that St. John's does indeed combine those three points, which leads to a possible research project: how do students of St. John's music program compare to students who take music classes at other colleges?  But that's a can of worms that leads to a different area of study, as well.

Education

Working towards a PhD in education makes some sense given my Master's in education, and I certainly feel I can ask a more sophisticated and specialized research question in this area than in any other.  Of course, the question I'm most fascinated by brings with it certain challenges: St. John's and research are not always friends.

What I mean is, I'd love to study the differences between a St. John's education, a different liberal arts education, and normal University education, and a parochial education.  I of course know that the curricula and pedagogy are wildly different, and I more or less know in what way and why.  But the question is deeper than that: how do students in those various settings differ?  What is the culture of St. John's compared to Williams College, compared to the University of Michigan, compared to a Community College?  How much of that owes to geography, how much to pedagogy, how much to some other factor?  Of course, the outcome piece is important, too: which graduates are more "successful," and in what ways?

I'm not convinced, however, that St. John's buys the kinds of processes that go into that kind of research project.  I'm not sure I do, either.  Try as they might, even the most objective education researchers usually have an axe to grind, and have biases built mostly (or even exclusively) on their own educational experiences.  "Best practice," in that cynical world view, is "what worked for me."  And, without a doubt, that's the challenge I would face.  St. John's is, to me, one of the best colleges in the country, if not the best.  Could I really overcome that bias and look at it objectively?  Would St. John's even want me to?  Do they care if they are "effective" in any modern, researchable sense?

Which leads me to narrower questions that might be more researchable, and still fit under education.  For example, do students do better working from original source material alone, or do they do better working with secondary sources and interpretations?  This question comes from a conversation I had at Stanford with a Professor there, and it still is fascinating to me.  It captures a piece of St. John's, without a doubt (since Johnnies are discouraged from using secondary sources and interpretations, so much so that we're often asked not even to consider context).  But it also captures high school English, where Hamlet is usually read without any accompanying documents.

The linchpin here is "better."  What exactly constitutes "better?"  Do secondary sources improve comprehension, interpretation, analysis?  Do they improve creativity?  Do they improve the level of conversation in the classroom?  What's more, is there even a good way, pedagogically, to introduce them without being boring?

There are other rich angles here, as well, such as the differences between high school and college level students (which benefits more from secondary source material).  Moreover, we might ask about the cultures of the schools and classrooms involved.  Perhaps a lecture class is much better with secondary sources, but a discussion one is not.  Or maybe it's the other way around?  Who knows?

Needless to say, I could probably generate a good dozen questions that fit under the heading of education, but the underlying theme to all of them is the same: I want to know about the components of a St. John's education, and what makes it work (assuming it does).  Discussion versus lecture is the key here, and that's a cultural question, which leads to a whole other kind of thought.

Anthropology

I have never taken a single anthropology class in my life, though the Alienation and Deprivation in Fiction and Education course at Stanford was close.  I don't know the language, I don't know the research, and I don't know the questions.  Nevertheless, the concepts keep hitting me again and again.  Cultural anthropology is the kind of research I keep coming up with, even if it's in music, or education, or literature, or anything else.

Now there's no question that I am a math person, and I don't know what place math has in anthropological research.  I'm wary of numbers, because too often we let them stand in for real meanings and real people.  That said, mere anecdote does not knowledge make, and so the best bet is to combine the two.  I'm sure that anthropology does this, but I simply don't know enough about it.

So what questions do I even have?  Well, I don't have archaeological questions.  That's not totally true, but I don't want to get a PhD in them.  My questions are more about modern cultures, and especially the Internet.  Ironically, though I do not use Facebook or Twitter, I'm fascinated by the cultural implications of both.  A study of how social networking is effecting people's understanding of self and culture would be extremely interesting to me.  And I'm sure it's already happening.

Anyway, that's just one of many questions in the anthropology world that appeals to me.  Some of the questions from my music and education sections could probably fall under this heading as well.  And that's the rub.  How and where can I bring subjects together?  What school is cross-disciplinary enough, what advisor enough of a generalist to help lead me through not only doing research, but narrowing my focus enough to be effective without gimping my generalist tendencies overmuch?

The truth is, I'm leaving off disciplines, even here.  I've explored Stanford's Modern Thought and Literature program, which runs out of their English department.  I've considered Linguistics.  I won't rule out Neuroscience, even if I'd have a lot of catching up to do.  I'd even consider Statistics!

The trick, to me, is not finding the right field, it's finding the right school and the right advisor, and then breaking the rules.  My academic success has always been built upon stretching the limits of what is acceptable, whether that means turning in a poem instead of an essay (but a poem that is still an essay), or taking courses that don't fit into a degree but using them to inform projects, or purposefully trying to break rubrics.

Which is all well and good once I'm in a structured, academic environment, but I'm smart enough to realize that I need that structured environment, too.  The rebel has to rebel against something.  The innovator is only innovative relative to his surroundings.  Finding a good environment, then, is the real key, and the truth of the matter is, I don't know what I'm looking for.  Or, rather, I know exactly what I'm looking for, but I don't have the slightest clue how to find it.

But maybe that, more than anything else, suggests to me that I'm ready to work towards a doctorate.

The Specialist and the Generalist

A recent Pitchers and Poets podcast spoke to an issue about which I have a strong opinion.  I suppose I have a great many strong opinions - or at least I present them strongly - but I would argue that the vast majority of those remain conditional.  It is important, I think, to be open-minded enough to be persuaded by a contrary, or more likely, an entirely new perspective on an issue.

For my own part, my political convictions - which were (and are) quite strong - have undergone quite a few radical shifts since I first was granted the right to vote.  The outcome of that was, in the 2008 election, a ballot which included at least one vote for a member of each of the following parties: Democrat, Republican, Libertarian, Green, and Independent.  Why? Because I felt, in each of those races, that the party in question was irrelevant, and that the person most capable of doing the job was worthy of my vote.  Anyway, the point here is not to discuss politics, but to point out that even what seems a fervent position on my part is liable to change if I am confronted with a valid alternative that seems compelling enough.  At the very least, I am easily persuaded by nuance, especially nuance that takes on accepted cultural narratives.

There is, however, one duality which I reluctantly accept, and about which I firmly and probably irrevocably believe in one position.  That duality is specialization versus generalization, or the competing ideas that a person should focus on learning a small number of things exceedingly well, on the one hand, or a large number of things in less depth.  Of course, as Ted and Eric point out in their podcast, we live in a time where being a generalist is almost impossible.  Specialization has so much won the day that it's practically a sin to have too many interests.

Of course, I think it's difficult to draw an exact line between the specialist and the generalist.  How many fields must one study to be a generalist?  How advanced must a person's knowledge of a particular field be in order to qualify as a specialist?  What about people who are somewhere in between?  And, moreover, isn't the true generalist also a specialist in some sense?

All of those are valid questions, and I think the duality here is - like most dualities - not totally fair.  I believe there are a great many people who are, in fact, both generalists and specialists, and there's no reason those things have to be mutually exclusive.  I think there is, however, a marked difference in mentality between the two.  It is especially rare to find someone who will advocate specialization whilst also celebrating the "Renaissance Man," as we like to call generalists (implying their anachronism).

It seems to me, however, that this is a horrible mistake, and particularly important in education.  A lot of what people say is "wrong" with education amounts to this: it's not specialized enough.  Certainly it's not fair to look at students and to say that they all need the exact same, incredibly broad education, but it's also not fair to say that we should tailor everything we teach to some appropriate and predetermined career pathway for each student.  Specialization, at its extreme, suggests that students should not learn anything that isn't directly relevant to what they're going to do in their lives.  Of course, the extreme generalist learns anything completely regardless of its value, which is equally silly, but that's the point.  Going to an extreme here is bad, and these days, as we cut arts programs, recess time, and gym class, we're much closer to the extreme of specialization.

The reason this debate is important in education, however, reaches far beyond the classroom.  It is in our adult lives where we, generally speaking, are forced to specialize most.  Indeed, the older we get and the further along we go in our career paths, the more and more narrow our focus becomes.  Professors at most Universities don't just study a field (like Sociology) or even a sub-field (like the Sociology of Business), but a specific aspect of that sub-field (like gender relations in rural small businesses, or some such).  At a certain point, the robust thought processes that shaped the original study become so fine that, I would argue, they are no longer useful.

The same could be said in the business world.  One of the reasons we have such a strongly established hierarchical structure in business - besides being a vestige of feudalism - is the fact that all of the specialists that make multi-national corporations go can't speak to each other without an interpreter.  The fact of being able to talk to the IT guy, the operations guy, the finances guy, and the engineer, and the ability to translate between those branches is, as far as I'm concerned, the primary function of most executives at major companies.  Making decisions and selling the company are of minor importance by comparison.

Unlike in academia, however, in business there is an established method for getting specialists to interact, and it mostly works.  Indeed, if specialization didn't work, we wouldn't use it.  It's almost impossible to argue with specialization, in fact, from within our existing social and economic system, because of how effective it is.  The point, however, is that if we step outside of the specialized world and look at the other consequences of a society built around the extreme specialist, it's not quite as pretty as it seems from the inside.

Bertrand Russell was fond of pointing out that things like useless knowledge and idle inquiry are vital to a person's happiness.  A child does not ask questions because he wants to master his world, but merely because he is curious.  Over time, curiosity tends to diminish and ambition increase, and as a result people become more successful and less happy.  Education, from my perspective, works best not when it forwards a person's professional goals, but when it reminds him or her that there are other important goals as well.  What good is money if you are so specialized that you don't know where and when to spend it?  What good is success if you are so specialized that you can't have a conversation with anyone?

From the individual point of view, specialization, I think, can be somewhat soul-crushing.  A professor I had at Stanford told me that the day he got tenure was one of the best and saddest of his life.  Best because he was secure and successful, saddest because it meant he was locked in, all of the potential paths he might take had been narrowed to one that he had taken and would take from then on.  Why must we do that to people?  Does our society benefit so much that taking away the wonder of exploration and inquiry into ideas unknown and unconsidered is necessary?

The answer, I think, is clearly no.  Our society may benefit from specialization in that we are able to produce more goods, more "knowledge" (which so few people can use, because it's highly specialized), and more advertising.  But isn't one of the biggest problems we face as a world that we produce too much?  There are too many people on the world, eating too much food, using too much plastic, guzzling too much gas, and wasting too much electricity.  It's all well and good to address those problems by creating legions of conservation specialists, I suppose, but wouldn't it be better to just ease up off the ever-racing production line?  Indeed, it seems to me a self-perpetuating cycle.  Less specialized work means more generalization, more "Renaissance Men" who can step back and see that, hey, the world is a better place when we communicate more and produce less.

Again, I don't advocate the extreme, here, else nothing at all would get done and we'd all starve, but it seems to me that we've ventured too far in the direction of specialization.  What's more, my other fervently held opinions - that process is more important than outcome, and that cooperation is generally a better model than competition - seem to me to be complementary here.  Specialization encourages competition, which in turn is concerned with outcomes.  Generalization encourages cooperation, which is much more about processes (stuff like how people work together and whether they're doing the right thing) than outcomes.

All told, it's unlikely that we'll see a world of generalists anytime soon.  But it is the case, in my experience, that we "Renaissance Men" have serious advantages, even in this society, over extreme specialists.  Generalists learn to say "both... and..." while specialists are stuck with "either... or..."  As a teacher, there's no bigger selling point: generalists get to be leaders and visionaries, while specialists have to do what they're told.    As a human being, I believe my breadth of interests may make it harder for me to define myself to other people, but it makes it easier for me to move around joyfully and inquisitively.  And, really, what else is there?

Stealth More Interesting: Ralph Waldo Emerson

One of the most attractive and problematic aspects of the "Great Man" theory of history is that it allows us to pack stories into neat packages of a few important people. World War Two, for example, is largely a story about Hitler and Churchill, with supporting roles played by the leaders of other countries and, of course, J. Robert Oppenheimer. These few men dictated, the story goes, the fates of millions, and it was their interactions and their decisions which shaped the modern world. Similarly, if we look back at earlier wars, important scientific discoveries and theories, or famous and influential pieces of art, the dramatis personae is always small.

In reality, of course, no story is so simple as to be about a single man or woman. At the most basic level, the massive network of personal interactions and cultural influences that any given "hero" experiences means that no one is shaped solely by himself. Even the most stubborn, self-assured, and rebellious personality stands in contrast to something, and so the lone voice of a Galileo or a Lucretius hardly exists in isolation. Those voices were alone - though not entirely, of course, even that gets overblown - because they contravened excepted dogmas and cultural narratives so strong as to be unquestionable.

What makes such people memorable, however, is rarely their genius. In that regard, I suspect that there have been and are many more people capable of great fame than have achieved it. What's more, even genius may be culturally mitigated, and one time's luminary may be another's villain, or, worse, Average Joe. No, fame is mostly about luck, about being in the right place at the right time, to use a tired phrase. Even an unquestionably great man like Gandhi would not have been Gandhi without South Africa, and without a colonial oppression so vile that a nation of a billion wanted desperately to fight against it. Without his context, Gandhi is just another deeply spiritual man, and not a man who changed the world.

Which is not to say that the fact of fame is accidental, but rather that the bestowal of fame on particular people is. We, as Westerners, and likely as human beings, much prefer to condense our stories into manageable chunks. Without some synthesis of the vast account of a particular bit of history, how could we possibly build an understanding of meaning? Leave the detailed examinations to the experts, we say, and let the school-house narrative of George Washington and the Founding Fathers suffice when the Fourth of July roles around. There is, frankly, nothing to be done about the simplifications we make, because they are necessary in order for us to accomplish much of anything. To study the thousands of years of recorded history across the many different cradles of civilization that exist in depth is the work of dozens or hundreds of lives.

Nevertheless, it is easy to forget that we are reducing, reducing, reducing. It is easy to forget that even Galileo was not solitary, and that even Beethoven's music was impossible without his interactions with his father, with Haydn, with the music of Mozart, with the women he lusted after, with the countless unnamed and unremembered princes and patrons and musicians. I as much as anyone am guilty of letting the name of some famous person stand in for an unimaginably complex situation which I don't understand, and more often than not I forget that I am doing it and come to a conclusion about that bit of history that supports my own biases and ideals.

How much more so media, politicians, advertisers, text books and teachers, who are in the business, to varying degrees, not only of informing, but of convincing as well? How much of our understanding of the world shaped by our confirmation bias? Because we grew up with a certain narrative, and from that narrative - be it historical, religious, moral, or some combination of all of those (and more) - we have each built a set of ideals and expectations, our own schema for interpreting and defining and rewriting complex events to make them comprehensible, we tend to find that the world either agrees with our preconceptions, or is not worth bothering about. Approaching history from any other way is not only difficult, it may very well be impossible.

What is there to do, then? Well, ignoring the problem is perfectly valid. I say that without irony, because frankly, it is not in the least bit upsetting to me to imagine a world where we tell wonderful stories about the exploits and tribulations of great men and women. Though we call such things history and myth based upon their supposed accuracy, they are more often than not the same thing, and regardless both excite the imagination, inspire the heart, and stimulate critical thought. I am just as likely to talk about Beethoven as a paragon as I am to talk about him as situated within his cultural and society. Indeed, I am more likely to do the former, because it's a more compelling and more entertaining story.

On the other hand, I do have some interest in the truth, and while ignoring complexity is valid, so it charging headlong into it. That is a more complicated task, granted, but a rewarding one as well. Indeed, many of the stories of greatness we have come from people who did exactly that: consider, again, Galileo's challenge to our most fundamental beliefs about the nature of the world. Consider the development of calculus by Newton and Leibniz, who violated the established principles of mathematical truth to do so. Consider more modern examples like Erving Goffman, who challenge the very notion that gender is anything but a socially and culturally mediated display of differences, and not nearly so rooted in biology and neurology as we like to think. Consider Stanford's Ray McDermott, who argues that learning disabilities acquire kids more than kids acquire learning disabilities.

Yes, there's certainly something to be said for challenging accepted narratives in order to, just maybe, get closer to something that is true. But even in so doing we tend to find a similar set of biases and ideologies. The dogmatic belief in being anti-dogmatic is itself dogmatic; the insistence on challenging established cultural and historical narratives can itself become (and has, in some circles) an entrenched cultural and historical narrative. So what is there to do? Nothing, and everything. Who can really say? It's a too tangled web to unravel in a mere blog post. Rather, I'll make reference to Emerson in Self-Reliance: "Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind."

Culture

Do people make cultures, or do cultures make people? The obvious answer is both. Of course no culture can develop without the desires, the philosophies, the art, and the simple facts of day-to-day life that the people in that culture express in their very being. On the other hand, no person can develop without being surrounded by other people and the culture that they too were brought up in, or adapted to, or helped to forge. Indeed, the latter possibility - that cultures make people - seems all the stronger when you consider how few individuals are ever in a position to make culture, whereas all individuals exist in relation to others.

Consider the Nietzschian "ubermensch," who is so frustrated by the existence of an external world that shaped both his society and himself that he has to transcend the very basis of culture in order to even exist. Going "beyond good and evil" is little more than going beyond your very upbringing and existence, and while there is no doubt Nietzsche was in earnest in his conviction to do so, it remains an impossible - a frustratingly, maddeningly, utterly dispiriting impossible - dream.

The irony, then, when the culture we cannot escape is a culture that values, above all else, the heroic individual. Our reductionist stories about history, politics, art, and even our own lives turn us into individualists, bent on ignoring the vast and impenetrable backgrounds from which we emerge and in which we continue to exist. We do not celebrate or chastise, all told, the thousands or millions involved in some great accomplishment (landing on the moon) or some awful tragedy (a terrorist attack). The story of each becomes the story of one man: Neil Armstrong, Osama Bin Laden. Good and evil lurk behind our archetypal humans, all events, all people fit into some beautiful Biblical, cultural structure that remains unbending even when we criticize it most carefully.

It is all well and good to attack the seemingly deepest assumptions of a culture. Ideas like Good and Evil are the most obvious targets, after all. Examples abound of the awful practices of savage tribes which, when considered from the point of view of the particular tribe, cease to seem to awful. We cannot but feel moral outrage at a polygamous society, or the homosexuality of the ancient Greeks. We cannot but honor the European aristocracy that produced such wonderful artists as Leonardo Da Vinci. We cannot but stand in awe of Japanese temperance. In short, we reduce, reduce, reduce, and find the exemplars, the protagonists, the antagonists of the stories we wish to tell, all about the grandest and greatest of human problems.

More telling, to me, are the little things. "It is all well and good" is a cliche that says more about how we, as a culture, interact with good and evil than our reaction - or lack thereof - to ongoing war. In so small a phrase you see the grammatical stretching that cliche engenders, because we are a culture that loves and flaunts and loves to flaunt its rules. In so small a phrase you see "good," but ironic good. You see the desire to never say exactly what is meant, if only because such saying is impossible. But, in that the saying is a cliche, you see also our propensity for shared meanings and shared innuendos. There is no reason for utter individualism, even in the most individualistic culture, because it is impossible to communicate if letters, sounds, and words are strewn randomly about the page without sense.

I assume the page and letters, of course, but that is the proverbial rub (a phrase whose meaning has changed and grown thanks to the legend of Shakespeare, and despite the fact that almost no one knows its true meaning). Any and all resistance is couched within the thing resisted. Any and all analysis of culture - whether as deconstruction or reconstruction or simply an attempt to understand - is ruined at its outset by the mere fact of culture at all. One could say the same about language, which perhaps is the same thing as culture anyway, but is an even harder entity to attack because it is so much less tangible.

As with atomic particles, humanity is harder and harder to pin down the closer we zoom in. Likewise the further we zoom out. We get caught failing when we try to understand "humanity" as a grand class, and likewise fail with the individual. If we are to understand anything about the world, we are stuck doing it in categories. The prejudiced stereotype, it turns out, is just as correct as the academic categories we prefer, because ultimately both contain the same grains of falsehood and truth. The "red-neck," himself a stereotype, thinks of the awful moral shortcomings of other races, the terrible socialist liberalism of the intellectuals, and so on, but the academic classifies those other races instead by academic achievement, and talks about the need for affirmative action, and even the best multi-culturalist gets stuck in what boils down to stereotyping (even if it is data driven stereotyping).

Reality is more complicated. The interaction of culture to person and back is too nuanced for a tool as blunt as language. We have invented a whole system of unexamined gestures to convey even the simplest of our meanings (like hunger or the desire to be alone), so how much more would we need to invent to explain such ambiguous ideas as love, family, happiness, peace, war, good, beauty, and so on?

The problem arises when culture goes the other direction:
How many gangs are founded upon the vision and leadership of an individual? How many, instead, on some vague cultural acquisition?
How many failing students fail because they are truly stupid? How many are simply foisted into the stereotype of stupidity that they are forced to live up to?
How many women, indeed, implicitly desire high-heeled shoes, makeup, and perfume? How many men implicitly love sports and drinking beer? How much of the interaction, when it comes down to it, between a man and a woman is organized by a complex set of cultural and societal expectations?

And what is this thing called culture, to which we can broadly attribute so much of what we do, why we do it, and even who we are? Plunging into words is like plunging into people: the deeper we plunge, the messier it becomes. It is no accident, perhaps, that most every culture shares this: that people are turned into words. The name is a powerful thing, because it allows for us to try to understand what previously simply existed. Understanding, thought, consciousness... Do these things actually make any sense? Does culture? Does humanity? Or are those just words meant to signify, but which have turned in on themselves and now do much more than signify? How much of our reality is determined not by what it is, but by the very words - the very culture - we use to interact with it?

Hard Education in Hard Times

One of the benefits of reading works written in previous centuries is that we might find informative patterns. I do not say that "those who do not know history are doomed to repeat it," because that is a tired phrase. Rather, there are dynamics which are so much repeated that they might easily be mistaken as eternal components of the human condition. Social, political, and economic structures change with time and technology, to be sure, but do they change so much as we think they do? Is it really the case that the year 2010 is a marvelous and impossible dream to the people of 1850? There's not really a meaningful answer to that question, except the remembrance that people remain people, in every time.

Much changes in cultures, and across cultures, with geography and technology and so on, despite some essential similarities, and so it is with a combination of surprise and expectation that Dickens, in his Hard Times, captures so perfectly some of the very issues which are fundamental to us today.

"Utilitarian economists, skeletons of schoolmasters, Commissioners of Fact, genteel and used-up infidels, gabblers of many little dog's-eared creeds, the poor you will have always with you. Cultivate in them, while there is yet time, the utmost graces of the fancies and affections, to adorn their lives so much in need of ornament; or, in the day of your triumph, when romance is utterly driven out of their souls, and they and a bare existence stand face to face, Reality will take a wolfish turn, and make an end of you!" - Charles Dickens, Hard Times, Book II, Chapter VI

Replace "fact" with standards, replace "the poor" with students (or don't, it still reads; but that's a weightier discussion), and you have very much a picture of school. Dickens speaks, in the 1850s, to a commodified education, wherein the learning is bought and paid-for, the purpose being to elevate economically (the purpose of life itself being the same). "Now, what I want is, Facts," begins the book, in the classroom. If education is a commodity, we have to treat it as such, and we can and should only measure that which is measurable about it.

It is a remarkable fact - I say with irony - that economic trouble often is met with a stiffening, rather than a loosening, of the grip of industry on education. As with food, where the most abundant and cheapest of things - namely fruits - are the least prevalent in restaurants and grocery stores exactly because they occur without being manufactured by mechanical intervention, in education we have manufactured long strings of standards and facts to memorize, and accompanied those with an economy of learning disability, fancy hardware, and unstoppable grading programs, all when we might just have easily lived off the land with discussion. A classroom discussion is cheaper, easier to prepare for, and more rewarding than a highly contrived lesson, and yet we use it not, because no one manufactures it.

Dickens does not speak to discussion, per se, in Hard Times, but he may as well. Instead his opposition to fact is fancy, much engendered by the flightful dialogues that take place between children, especially the younger and, therefore, less beaten-down by their acquired identities as "cool kids" or "special needs" or "jocks" or "goths" or what-have-you. Hard are the times, indeed, when learning in school is more about learning how to play your apportioned role than it is about learning how to think.

When has it been otherwise? That's the rub, of course. Never and nowhere, except perhaps in those elite schools for the elite and wealthy members of societies who have, generally, had no interest in promoting the fancies - and, along with imagination, critical thought - of the sordid students of the world. We get locked into cultural morays more easily than we perceive. When was the last time any of us did something that did not correspond with our selected and ascribed identities? Even the rebel is rebel by dint of his society's culture.

I do not incite to action, here, because what action to take is a question far too complicated to begin to answer. That is not to say we ought to ignore the mysteries of how political economy drives education, for good or ill, but rather to say that we ought not allow ourselves to be easily fooled by the statements of "experts" that "studies show" or that "America is falling behind" or that, heaven forbid, we are leaving children behind despite our federal mandate to the contrary. A skeptical eye, I ask, in these deceptively credulous times, wherein we are inclined to believe any evidence that supports our inclinations. A skeptical eye goes a long way not just in education, but in politics broadly, and in philosophy and science and, indeed, life.

Life, indeed. Perhaps it is naive to ask - O me! O Life! - but when did we stop asking such important questions? What, after all, is the meaning of life? Why, after all, are we here? Surely it is not to produce and consume widgets? Surely not to memorize facts? Surely, enough of us stand face to face with a bare existence each day that we ought to demand better.

The Scientific Process (feat. Vincent Van Gogh)

I've teamed up with a fellow LDT student, and we're heading towards the first draft of our proposal for a Master's project. I should say, rather, that our proposal is due tomorrow, and we're in the process of constructing something like a draft. Really, our problem is that we have more writing than we can possibly use to fill our 2,000 word limit, and we still haven't written everything we need to write. Such is proposal writing.

Anyway, I won't get into the project too much yet, since I'm sure I'll be sharing more about it as it gets more advanced, and because I want to leave room for a little suspense and imagination. Instead, I want to offer a few thoughts that are central to what we're doing: the scientific process. What, in short, really is the scientific process? How should it be taught? How is it used? What does it look like?

There is, of course, no systematic agreement about what the scientific process is and exactly which steps should be a part of it. Indeed, there is much debate about whether it should be called the "scientific method" or the "scientific process." I choose process because I think that fits better with my conception of how it operates, but "method" is more historical (Francis Bacon deemed his work on the matter a method). Nevertheless, there are generally five steps, through which the scientist is meant to proceed in order (methodically) in order to come to a better understanding of the external natural world. Those steps are as follows:

1) Observation
2) Question
3) Hypothesis
4) Experiment
5) Conclusion

Generally speaking, the scientific process is taught like this, as I said, with perhaps some linguistic modifications. It is not uncommon, of course, to call out the iterative nature of the scientific process - that is, that a conclusion might just qualify as a new observation - but there is general agreement that these steps in this order more or less make up the effort of science, and they are not accidentally a prominent feature in science standards and benchmarks across the country.

Do scientists really follow this process? That is not so clear. It certainly seems as though observations, questions, hypotheses, experiments, and conclusions are important parts of the act of doing science, but are they always used sequentially, in just that order? Reflecting on thought-process in general, it is not clear that we always begin with an observation; rather, we might start from a hypothesis or even an experiment. We might say that we are, nevertheless, making an unconscious observation to get there, but does that substantively change the process, or not?

More telling, however, is when we go from observation to question, back to observation. Or when we go from question to question. Or when we go from question straight to experiment without formulating a hypothesis. All of those things unquestionably do happen. Sometimes, before experimentation, we pass through a long series of observations, questions, and hypotheses. Sometimes, unfortunately, we jump straight from questions to conclusions, favoring action over information-gathering (especially when there's insufficient time to test).

That's all abstract, so here is an example. To keep this broad, I'll use a famous work of art rather than a physical and scientific phenomenon. By analyzing a piece of art, I also want to point out that the scientific process is a heuristic tool useful in more than just science:



Observation - I see houses in this painting.
Question - Why are the lines in the houses so much straighter than lines elsewhere.
(Unconscious) Hypothesis - It has something to do with the nature of houses.
Question - What else is in the painting?
Observation - I see a large green thing.
Question - What is that?
Hypothesis - Maybe it's a tree or a bush?
... (note that here I could do the "experiment" of looking up interpretations)
Question - OK, what else is in the painting?
Observation - There seem to be hills, and a highly stylized sky.
Observation - The lines in the hills are less wavy than those in the sky, but they are still soft and flowing.
Observation - The sky is quite swirly.
Observation - The painting's title, Starry Night, tells me that the yellow spots are starts, though somewhat abstracted.
Observation - The big "star" on the right is actually the moon!
Hypothesis - The moon is meant to imply the sun in this painting.
... (again we could "experiment" here, but I'm trying to stay on the path of my initial question)
Hypothesis - Van Gogh is painting natural things with more and more flowing lines than man-made things.
Observation - The church steeple is quite prominent.
Experiment - An analysis and interpretation of the painting suggests that Van Gogh painted this whilst desiring to reconnect with nature. He was in a psychiatric hospital, and was disconnected from the world literally as well as figuratively - a fact augmented by his recent decision to cut off his own ear, which landed him in the hospital to begin with.
Conclusion - The town in Starry Night is soft and forgiving, but remains less free than the natural aspects of the scenery. The steeple could signify a very human sense of hope, but could also be a menacing intrusion on a much more beautiful and interconnected natural world. It does not seem to me that Van Gogh is arguing anything - least of all a "return to nature," - but nevertheless he expresses a stirring (which seems just the right word) picture of the contrast between the form of nature and the forms constructed by man, all-the-while knowing that his painting expresses more than fulfills his desire to bridge those gaps.

A few things here. First off, I don't have the slightest clue whether this interpretation - my "conclusion" - is at all reasonable. I do know, however, that I arrived at it by following a certain process, which I have traced out above. Part of the reason for giving an example with a work of art, here, is to emphasize that scientific knowledge is not unlike the interpretation I've offered here. A scientific conclusion may be reasonable, but it is hard to claim with certainty that it is necessarily correct. Even expressing the actual, and more verbose, process of scientific thinking - as opposed to the 5-step formula we generally teach - there are steps that I've likely left out (I did go back and add a unconscious hypothesis, and could likely add more, but you get the idea).

At the very least, there are points of contention throughout the process I've laid out. Where did I observe, and where did I hypothesize? How many of those observations were genuinely observations, not constrained by hypotheses I had already built? How well did I do in asking questions that did not lead to an expected answer? All of those things I should reflect on, because a good scientist tries to be objective, not by destroying his subjectivity - an impossible task - but by becoming conscious of what directions his subjectivity is likely to pull him in. Indeed, I might ask, is it problematic that my conclusion was in part determined by the prejudices and beliefs that I brought with me into the analysis? If not, would it be problematic if a scientist doing, say, pharmaceutical research, were guilty of the same thing (that is, expecting or desiring a certain outcome)?

As you may have guessed, a part of opening up the scientific process like this - understanding it as a dynamic and iterative process that need not proceed "in order" and can happily dance around especially in the early stages for a long time - is opening up dialogue. Science, contrary to much modern pedagogy, is actually one of the liberal arts, and the division between science and the humanities is less than helpful. My choice to analyze Van Gogh instead of photosynthesis implies this bias on my part, but I hope that you can see by virtue of my selection that scientific thinking is critical thinking, just as much as literary or artistic analysis, and that science should embrace dialogue.

With that in mind, I want to pose a final question. How could we express this messy, but genuine, version of the scientific process more succinctly, thus making it easier to digest and, hopefully, easier to talk about?