Questions for the Liberal Arts Major

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.

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.

Rethinking the Great Books

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.

Why I Chose Stanford

It's official, I've accepted Stanford's offer to attend their Learning Sciences and Technology Design PhD program starting next fall.  Initially I'll be studying under Roy Pea and Hilda Borko, both - since we're talking about, you know, Stanford - renowned researchers and well-respected in their field.  I know Roy from my time as a Master's student, during which my friend and co-conspirator Coram and I consulted Professor Pea as often as we felt we could get away with while working on our project.  As a result, I'm certain I'll be able to work with him and learn from him.

Ultimately, this decision was not an easy one, even though Stanford is an "obvious choice."  To the common layperson, the name Stanford alone is worth so much that, when I have posed my conundrum to certain people the response has been a resounding, "you mean there's actually a question?"  My answer is, yes, there is (or was) a question.  You see, PhD work is less about prestige and more about fit.  My decision, then, was not about trying to find the "best" program, but to find the program that most matched my own learning style, research interests, pedagogical biases, and general outlook on the world in general.

The Communications department at the University of California, San Diego matches me very well in almost all of those areas.  Their pedagogical model is highly discussion driven, the amount of reading and writing that students do their lines up well with the amount of reading and writing I do of my own volition, their conversations are lofty and philosophical, and the people are quirky, critical, and equal parts cynical and optimistic.  In short, a lot like me.  Indeed, had I chosen to attend UCSD I'm sure I'd be having a number of conversations with a variety of people right now in which I would be pointing out exactly that: I definitely fit at UCSD, and that's the most important thing.

So why not UCSD?  Well, I also fit at Stanford.  In fact, I think I fit better at Stanford.

While the people at UCSD are a perfect match for me, and while I would have the freedom to pursue my research interests, I'm actually not convinced that the general outlook of the department matches my own and that, even more importantly, the pedagogical bent of the program would suit me.  I don't mean to say I think there's anything wrong with the outlook or pedagogy at UCSD, I just think they wouldn't work for me.

As a graduate of St. John's College, I come from a strange academic tradition.  I'm a student of the so-called "Western Canon" at a time when a lot of the academic world - and places like UCSD in particular - seriously doubt whether there really ought to be such a thing as a canon.  The questions at the heart of this objection are valid, and look like this: How can you determine which books are Great, or even if there is such a thing as Greatness?  Isn't that a hegemonic, colonial tool to marginalize the values and cultures of all of those people who are not white male Europeans?

By themselves, these are important questions that, frankly, St. John's probably doesn't do a good enough job answering.*  The problem, to me, is the double-reversal jiu-jitsu that comes next.  Because those are good questions, the answers are assumed to be, basically, that there is no such thing as Greatness, that the Great Books are a total sham, and that any curriculum that reads them and takes them seriously on their own merits (instead of through alternative cultural and contextual lenses) is itself an instrument of intellectual and cultural tyranny.  The result, of course, is the laissez-faire, anything goes attitude towards ideas that pervades the post-modern world.  That attitude says, "your ideas and my ideas are equally valid, because they each come from our own perspectives.  Right and wrong are relative, and meaning is personally constructed, and if we all just agree to disagree and get along the world will be all right."  To me, that's a shameful intellectual surrender.  Maybe this is a hegemonic idea, but I like to think that there's more value in consensus - and, even more so, the effort to get there - than there is in tolerance.**

* Of course, any graduate of the college who continues in academia will inevitably have to confront these questions anyway, and will be - I think St. John's would argue - equipped to do so because of the critical thinking skills they've gained as Johnnies.  I suspect a great many St. John's graduates end up being heavily critical of the curricular content of the Great Books program precisely because it is so Anglo-European centric.  So it's hard to criticize the college for picking a narrower curricular goal that it can achieve in four years, instead of trying to bite off more than it can chew when it knows students will get there after-the-fact anyway.  That's just good curriculum design.

** That the position of tolerance for differing ideas is also held be many self-proclaimed radicals - many of whom are only actually tolerant up to a point - only serves to remind me of this Eva Brann (St. John's Dean, not wife of Hitler) quotation: "To the radicals we might say: you don't begin to know what radical is; we are the ones who go to the roots."

Now that's not to say that I know anything like enough about UCSD to say where the institution as a whole stands relative to this issue.  In reality, I'm sure there are a range of opinions.  I did, however, get the sense from the brief time I spent there and the one class I visited that I would likely end up very frustrated by the "make connections" instead of "find meaning" model that goes with their post-modernist academic culture.  That each week's reading on the syllabi I saw included multiple and intentionally disparate authors in order to build background and force cross-cutting interpretations rubs against my Johnnie sensibilities, in which those things are not exactly bad, but nevertheless can undercut the effort to actually understand a given text's content, instead of just its context or impact.

Again, I'm not sure that there's anything wrong with the way UCSD is doing things, I just don't think it's right for me.

Now you might be thinking that Stanford is vastly different.  It isn't.  If anything, it's less discussion and dialogue oriented than UCSD, and it is just as much concerned with post-modernist questions and processes.  The difference, then, is that Stanford is not just talking and reading and dancing around the theories and philosophies of these issues, but is, in fact, actually out in the world doing.  My experience as an LDT student was one of project-based classes and practice-oriented learning, which lines up well with modern learning theory.  While not every professor I had was a brilliant teacher using the more cutting edge pedagogy and technology, many - including Roy, incidentally* - were just that.  For all of its stuffy, privileged, businessy, ivory tower reputation, Stanford really does strive to practice what it preaches.

*Or not incidentally at all.

Being political (in the root, Greek sense of dealing with society) has its drawbacks.  It can be frustrating to try to make a difference.  But as much as I'm sure I'll have days and nights when I feel like I'm just a small, insignificant part of a broken system, and I can't do much to improve the situation, I think that Stanford will encourage and support (and, really, actively enlist) me in fighting the good fight.  The potential for myopia at UCSD, on the other hand - the ability to remove myself from the world and just do whatever I want - frightens me much more than the frustrations I'm sure I'll feel at Stanford sometimes do.  I am, despite myself, equal parts idealism and practicality, and I feel like Stanford understands that dichotomy (and supports both sides of it) better than UCSD does, at least in my case.

There are, I suspect, a great many other things I could say about what draws me to Stanford (including my previous experience there compared to the relative unknown of UCSD), but they would be variations on the theme from above.  The truth of the matter is, both programs were the "right decision," but in different ways, and I was fortunate to have an opportunity to pick between the two, even if it meant the decision was a difficult one.

A Music Project

I cannot tell you how many times I've started to work on my Beethoven-Wagner post and stopped, unsure as to how exactly to proceed.  You see, the problem is, every time I try to put the thoughts together, I end up falling back to all of the work I did for my undergraduate thesis, tracing the spiritual and political motions of Beethoven's 3rd and 9th Symphonies.  More importantly, I reflect on how many holes I left in that project.  Even though the result was a nearly 40 page paper (cut down from a maximum of over 50 thanks to the wisdom of my advisor), it was a synopsis of what I really wanted to accomplish.

In reality, what I wanted to write was a book and not an essay.  Not a normal book about music, either.  Like the St. John's music curriculum that I went through three years in a row as an assistant, I wanted to think about and write about and talk about music at the intersection of rigorous music theory, simple music appreciation, real music history, and, perhaps above all, music philosophy.  I suppose you could call all of that, in short, "musicology," but that only obscures the particulars.

The problem is, my Beethoven-Wagner post - which, really, could be a one paragraph long "isn't this cool?" - hinges upon at least some semblance of musical knowledge from all of the above fields.  On some level my perception of the link between Tristan und Isolde and the 9th Symphony is merely "feeling," but there's so much history, music theory, and, perhaps above all, a philosophy of how to understand the meaning of music tied up in my understanding of the two works.  That makes it impossible, as T.S. Eliot says in Prufrock, to say exactly what I mean.

Does all that sound pretentious?  Perhaps, but this is one area where I don't care about sounding pretentious.  I respect that musical tastes differ, of course, but I also think that the ad-hoc dismissal of the project of understanding music - and especially classical music - smacks of willful ignorance.  Too often I have heard - from people who love baroque music to people who love hip hop - that to study music is to rob it of its life, its passion, and its power.  To me, that is an excuse.*  It is a shameful agreement to disagree.  For example, the tired "classical music is boring but I'm ok if you like it" argument strikes me as being lazy, principally because even a cursory study of classical music will demonstrate that it is certainly not boring.  Perhaps classical music concerts are boring, and the stuffy culture surrounding the music is often boring, and writing about classical music is frequently boring, but the music itself is intricate and complex, full of (objectively) more harmonic, rhythmic, formal, and melodic variation than the vast majority of modern music.  That means it might be more difficult, more complex, and thus less immediately accessible - all legitimate complaints - but hardly more boring.

*Furthermore, it misses the point.  One's appreciation of music increases with its study, just as in every other field.  It is difficult to find a cosmologist who is not even more awestruck by the universe than an amateur stargazer.  There are few sabermetricians who are less avid baseball fans than the RBI-junkie.  Few musicians, composers, and even music critics are not violently passionate about music, despite, and indeed because of, their knowledge.**

**OK, total tangent on this one.  Have you ever noticed that "despite" can usually be substituted for "because of," even though the two are, in principal, opposites?  It is an interesting quality of the narratives we build about success and failure that the two are so often interchangeable.  For example, "despite his speech impediment, the child grew up to be a successful politician."  Perhaps true, but "because of" fits well, too, because it is often the case, in such stories, that overcoming the speech impediment is what gave the child the confidence and drive to become a politician in the first place.  At the very least, the "victory despite impossible odds" story gets told because of the impossible odds.  Which is perhaps more to the point; that "despite" is the reason the story exists in the first place, and thus, while it may not be that success owes to the thing being overcome, that success is noteworthy at all is.

Phew, where were we?

All of which brings me to the project: learning to listen to and talk about classical music.  Now, I have already begun that process - a process which inspired my thesis, and which was a significant factor in my decision to apply to UCSD's Communications program (with the aim of studying the learning and cultural acquisition of music) for my PhD - but I am no expert.  I am, I would argue, an expert learner, however, and that means that maybe, just maybe, I can drag someone somewhere along with me.  Or, at the very least - and more precisely, in any case - I can chronicle my learning so that it is traceable.  The project, then, is to listen, and in listening, to learn to listen, to Beethoven's 3rd.  If all goes well, then we can launch into the 9th and Tristan und Isolde, and perhaps other pieces as well (indeed, I have already done this with other posts on Bizet's Farandole and Brahms's Variations on a Theme by Haydn, and even Sacris Solemnis, a setting of Beethoven's 7th, but not as well as I would have liked).

Now this is not a one post project, or even a five post project.*  The Eroica's first movement, alone, might take a half dozen posts.  Nor will these posts be continuous.  You can still expect political wranglings, game reviews and observations, philosophical or literary musings, and of course, now that the season is coming, baseball analysis in this space.  Some might say that's a weakness of this blog: it lacks focus.  But I consider it a strength: it is vast, it contains multitudes.

*Indeed, the secret goal, here, is to write a book.  Perhaps a book no one would read, or - more importantly in our commerical age - no one would publish, but a book nonetheless.  Ambitious?  Perhaps, but you have to start somewhere, and whereas aspiring writers used to toil in anonymity for years before having their writing rejected by publishers, modern writers at least have the benefit of toiling publically.

Regardless of the number of posts, or the amount of time, however, we'll be forming a narrative.  Perhaps not a perfectly linear one, and perhaps not a perfectally literary one.  Rather, I'm hoping to build - for myself and for my readers - a mythology of music, a philosophy of music, and, most importantly, a deeper understanding not only of how music works, but why it works, and why, above all, it matters.  That's no small goal, I realize, but it is a goal I believe in, and a goal that I think we forget too easily in a world where music is everywhere, and largely unexamined.  Let us examine it, friends, that we might more joy in it that way.

Astronomy, Astrology, and the Natal Chart

Astrology is an interest I picked up as a Sophomore at St. John's College.  There was something about reading Ptolemy's Almagest, tracing his mathematical and mythological argument for how the planets move around the Earth according to circular paths that was alluring.  Of course, Ptolemy is wrong about the construction of the solar system - indeed, he would never even call it a solar system - but he was not really that off on the appearances.  That is, the conceptual framework for his system may have been incorrect, but the math more or less wasn't.

More important than the question of right or wrong, to me, was the project itself.  As my roommate and I would sit on our balcony and gaze at the stars during one of his smoke breaks (my second-hand smoke breaks, I guess), we would ruminate on college-y things like how mind-bogglingly vast the universe is.  But, at least as Sophomores, we'd also think and talk about Ptolemy, about how much dedication and effort it must have taken to build his model.

The thing is, Ptolemy worked well before even telescopes had been invented.  His evidence that Mercury even existed was scant, and his complex formulae describing the motions of the other planets like Mars and Venus were built upon the kind of inexact measurements that mere eyesight and some fingers held up to the horizon provide.  In short, his was a Herculean task, impossibly detailed, completely lacking the equipment to do it, and without even a solid theoretical backdrop (for example, a theory of gravity) to do it from.

The mythos not only of the planets and their namesakes, but also the man who first described with a degree of accuracy the paths of those planets is a powerful one.  My own interest in astrology may surprise - does surprise - people who know me as a scientific kind of thinker.  I would argue, however, that while I do not know how or why the planets seem to be so relevant to my life and my understanding of the world, I do know that mythology is a much more powerful force than we like to give it credit for.  Human energy poured into any project - especially one as ancient and alternately revered and persecuted as astrology is liable to produce results we simply do not yet have the capacity to understand.

As a person interested in mythos, there is no question that astrology is fascinating to me.  Each planet, each sign, each aspect and house has its own story, its own anthropological and anthropomorphic being.  Whether those elements of astrological calculation are causes for us or we for them is irrelevant; they tell a story, they are an organized and orderly system in a chaotic world, a lens through which we can filter the nonsensical noise of life and end up with a meaning.  And what, after all, is a myth?  Is it not a story, a moral or ethical parable that provides way of divining meaning from chaos?  And what, after all, is science?  Isn't it the same thing?

The other key piece of Ptolemy's story is what happened to his work afterwards.  Sure, his model of the universe was co-opted by the Catholic church and turned into a dogma used to persecute scientists - the first astronomers in particular.  But the church had little use for astrology either, seeing its practitioners as just as dangerous as their more scientific brethren.  Indeed, in many cases those people were one in the same.  Astrology and astronomy may be worlds apart in our modern age, just as alchemy and chemistry are, but there was a time when those words meant essentially the same thing.

Think about the Greek roots for a minute.  Astronomy means, simple "laws of the stars," while Astrology means either "study of the stars," "logic of the stars," or, as I prefer, "story of the stars."  The difference is minimal, really.  Astronomy is, in some ways, a mere subset of astrology, a piece of the bigger picture.  Astronomy delineates the rules - hence Ptolemy as astronomer - but astrology tells the story.

All of which leads me to the actual practice of astrology.  My interest was piqued by Ptolemy, reinforced by gazing at the night sky, informed by my grandmother - who was a professional astrologer - and refined as I studied more and more, eventually taking an online course (which I heartily recommend) from the Astrology Career Institute and Samuel Reynolds.  I have learned a lot of specific skills along the way, but because I'm a meta-learner, too, I've also thought a lot about how different people both do and teach astrology differently.  My grandma, for example, has a number of opinions about how retrogrades work that differ from Sam's.  Some of the books I've read characterize certain aspects as bad and good, while others see them as "hard" and "soft."  In short - and this is no surprise - in this mythological, anthropological, psycho-social, linguistic field there's no shortage of debate and disagreement about everything from meaning to process to the nuts and bolts of which method of calculating houses is best.

All of which, I think, speaks in astrology's favor.  It's a robust world, an ancient study that has more to do with interactions and relationships than it does with solitary absolutes.  There is no greater misunderstanding of astrology than the notion that you are your sun sign, leading to the off-hand, "But I'm nothing like what the paper says a Virgo is like!"  Of course you aren't, I say, because astrology is about the way that Virgo sun you have interacts with your other planets.  But more than that, it's also about how the astrologer you're with right now reads your chart, and how that reading differs from the one a different astrologer would give.  The point is, both of those astrologers, though they might interpret every single piece of your chart differently, might both be right nonetheless.  The point is, astrology isn't about reducing your life or your person into a single sentence or a single word ("Leo!"), but rather it's about expanding it and complicating your picture of yourself.  It's about providing you a lens to discover your heart and soul and grow in ways you never previously imagined.

For those of you who don't know anything about astrology, then (and I'm impressed that you're still reading), I want to show you what a chart looks like.  I usually use openastro.org to run my charts, but since I'm too lazy to boot to Linux and create one right now, I'm just plopping my own birth info into alabe.com, a free chart service online.  Take a look and see what you think about it.  As a teacher who prefers inquiry-based learning, I'm going to let the thing stew for a couple days before I write another post getting into more of the details here, explaining how I read a chart.

My Natal Chart

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 Blank Page

This is a poem I wrote in college.  I used to write poetry, poorly.  Looking back, this is the one of the few decent ones.  Far from perfect, but more metrically and structurally intricate than most of what I wrote.  I also still appreciate the sentiment.  I hope you like it, too.

What hope do I have against a blank page?
Line upon empty line that should say so much,
Yet it will not, but once in an age, when the touch
Of true genius resounds.

Foolish me, to spoil boundless hope such,
To try to speak of the profound and the true
When I cannot, no matter the crutch, for to woo
True genius is impossible.

But continue I must, quibbling with the mere hue
Of my words, not the inevitable shortcomings therein,
The forgotten genius that ever imbues nothing I begin,
For I am but a spectator.

A witness to Whitman, transitory and simple tin
To gold.  When Yeats or Donne speaks, I hope to hear,
To read true words and listen, to rejoice in Lear
At tragic beauty alone, but beautiful.

I resign to the Fool, only so I may lack the fear
And shame to stay my hand, so I may pretend the sage,
All the while a simple seer, ever with soul enraged
At passing ink on the once blank page.

Comparing Discussion to Brainstorming

One of the most important parts of a design process is good brainstorming.  It is impossible to end up with good prototypes - that is, prototypes that result in meaningful feedback - without being unafraid to engage in the kind of intensive, creative, and often bizarre brainstorming that is at the heart of companies like IDEO or programs like Stanford's dschool.  But what makes for a good brainstorm?

I have both participated in and facilitated (and often both at the same time) brainstorms with my peers, with teachers and administrators, and with students.  In that experience, I have found that good brainstorms essentially follow the rules I was taught at the dschool.  But I have also found that those good brainstorms - those rules for brainstorming - are nothing all that revolutionary.  It strikes me that a good brainstorm is a lot like a good conversation, only with a whiteboard and more post-it notes.

What do I mean?  Consider the dschool's "rules for brainstorming:"
1) Defer judgment
2) Go for volume (that is, quantity, not noise)
3) One conversation at a time
4) Be visual
5) Headline
6) Build on the ideas of others
7) Stay on topic
8) Encourage wild ideas

Obviously a number of these rules complement each other.  One conversation at a time, build on the ideas of others, and stay on topic are mutually reinforcing rules.  Likewise, going for volume and encouraging wild ideas work together.  The more wild the ideas, the more likely the brainstormers will produce more of them.

For my own part, I find facilitating a brainstorm fascinating, because the role the facilitator has to play is one of empowerment.  That is, you have to empower people to follow the rules.  Sometimes that comes in the form of yelling "One at a time!" or "Headline!" when appropriate.  More often, however, a teacher of brainstorming has to offer the wildest and craziest ideas that everyone else is afraid to mention.  For example, during our recent NALU 102 session, when the students were brainstorming experimental questions to investigate at Waimanalo Beach Park, I offered the classic "how many grains of sand are there on the beach?"  Why?  Not because I thought it was feasible or even all that interesting, but because I wanted to demonstrate that there's no reason to only ask questions that you can answer easily.

The same can be said of brainstorming for product development.  It's a waste of time to suggest only ideas that are easy to do.  I doubt that the people at Nintendo, for example, were having a sedate and measured conversation about feasibility when they first came up with the Wii.  No, that was a wild idea that turned into an industry force principally because it was a wild idea.  Similarly, I don't think the Google folks held back when offering the idea of getting street-view pictures of every road and intersection in the country to include with GoogleMaps.  Wild ideas - even the ones that don't lead anywhere - are essential to coming up with something that is actually innovative.

Anyway, the point here is not to discuss brainstorming, but to talk about how brainstorming is similar to a good, dialogic conversation.  As a graduate of St. John's College I have some strong opinions as to what makes a good conversation, but fortunately I don't have to articulate those myself.  Stringfellow Barr, one of the founders of the Great Books program at the college, wrote a wonderful piece called Notes on Dialogue that does the job for me.

There's less "headlining" than in the dschool list, granted, but I want to call out what I understand to be Barr's "rules for a good conversation:"
1) Be brief
2) Suggest crazy ideas
3) Ask for clarification
4) Practice prevents bedlam
5) Listen to each other
6) Try to reach an agreement
7) Follow the argument wherever it goes
8) Don't use hand-raising as a crutch
9) Listen to each other (again) and be friends
10) Don't take things too seriously

Now these rules are not identical to the brainstorming rules, but I see some overlap.  Consider Barr's demand for brevity in dialogue.  That matches quite well with the brainstorming maxim of headlining, as well as the desire to promote quantity of ideas.  Both the dschool and Barr agree, also, about the importance of wild ideas.  Moreover, the brainstorming triumvirate of "one at a time," "stay on topic," and "build on each other" are intimately related to Barr's ideals of listening to each other and following the argument where it leads.  I would also associate not taking things too seriously with deferring judgment.

What Barr does that the dschool does not do is address some of the "how," instead of just the what.  Barr advocates what goes without saying in brainstorming: practice makes perfect.  In dialogue, in particular, this is important, because as Barr points out, engaging in a non-hands-raising, authentic dialogue is extremely frustrating and often highly ineffective with beginners.  Of course, the same is true in brainstorming, where too many beginners are liable to talk over each other, to judge each other's ideas, and to be afraid to sound too crazy.

I also think that - and have experienced that - asking for clarification is sometimes essential in a brainstorm.  "Headline" can be translated as "be brief," but it can also mean, "ask someone to clarify or simplify."  Often when someone is facilitating a brainstorm (or when experienced brainstormers are working without a facilitator), the shout of "headline!" means exactly that: simplify, clarify, explain.

Perhaps the only substantive difference between the two lists is in the brainstorming preference for visual representation.  Because dialogue is a purely auditory and oral event, there is little opportunity to draw on the board (though of course, as Barr says, doodling is permissible and even encouraged).  It is true, at St. John's anyway, that good conversations in math or science classes often find a student or tutor at the board drawing mental models or working with equations, but that is a far cry from the design ideal of representing every idea - or as many ideas as possible - with pictures instead of words.

This difference is a fascinating cultural disparity between a past that was much more bookish than we are today.  For good reason we do better encouraging the visual in our modern conversations.  Nevertheless, the heart of a good conversation remains the same: listen, be brief, and don't be afraid to offer a wild idea.  It strikes me that two places so different as Stanford - at the cutting edge of design and technology and science - and St. John's - employing a Great Books and dialogic model that is over a century old - could be so close together not in what they do, but in how they do it.  To me that is an affirmation that good thinking, good collaboration, and good conversations, whether for the sake of building something, for the sake of understanding something, or just for fun, have some fundamental building blocks that are the same in almost any environment.

Ode to the Ptolemaic Venus

This is an assignment from back in (undergraduate) college.  We were asked to write a 3 to 5 page essay about Ptolemy's treatment of the planet Venus, so of course I wrote an essay in verse.  It probably took me 10 times longer than the assignment should have, but I'm still happy with the result.  It occurred to me this morning that I hadn't posted this, so here it is.

Of planets fair and fairer still ‘tis Venus that’s most bright
Before sunrise or after set when Moon conceives the night.
Described by motion circular, the learned Ptolemy claims
Through Almagest, in which for wisdom he enshrined his name
In tomes of history, the planets move about the earth
In just such way divinity would give the sky its birth.
And yet a question plagues his work (that long was held as True):
What of the equant, we must ask, that gives appearance due
Measure against the doubt that our observance fuels with sight,
When Venus struts across the sun in variable flight,
That circles lone cannot describe except with forced constraint
Of center offset that a line to epicycle paints,
Describing thus by motion circular about a path
Itself circular? It is here we later find the wrath
Astronomers to come will hold, and doubt ourselves whether
Ptolemy can be justified in sending this tether
To bind the motion of our star (the brightest and most fair).
If circles can only describe the heavens with repair
By inconsistent equant, then it seems simplicity
(Which is a gauge of truth and, more, this task’s felicity)
Is lost, with both epicycle and eccentricity.

Our author asks if we can judge by earth’s shallow standard
What is ‘simple’ to heaven high, or if instead it’s slandered
By our unwitting questions, thus in Book Thirteen he writes:
“We should not judge the simple by what nature’s spirit frights
To changeability, for we forever move and change
And find ‘simplicity’ of constant motion out of range
Of human possibility.” Therefore we must rethink
Whether objections on these grounds must surely start to sink
Beneath other concerns, or if instead we will challenge
The bold proclaiming Ptolemy and for ourselves avenge
Our first complaint. Defense, it seems, is possible on grounds
That, while eternal, motion such as this is hardly bound
By laws divine, for though we cannot know the mind of God,
We can ask whether “constant motion” is but a facade
For Ptolemy through which his physics he can then imbue
Without having to worry whether ultimately True
His universe remains. For his concern, I think, is not
For Truth complete, but rather what he passionately sought
Was explication of mathematics pure, and what we see
In starry night that seems to us to move with constancy,
And more, still left in this is something true, we may decree.

To Venus, then, we must direct our literary gaze,
For in the star of love our enterprise may yet be razed.

If from appearance first our author asks us to derive
The motion of a planet that a theory can describe
By means of observation first, then reason soon applied,
Allowing first predictive sight, and then to physics tied,
Then we are blessed with math divine that morning star abides.

If from a misconception, though, of earth-bound universe,
Accepting as a truth assumptions now found as perverse,
And then applying oft sought visage to a path rehearsed
By circles impiously from their very source reversed,
And put in hands of man, then sadly we are cursed.

Returning to the open of astronomy’s great work
Confronts us with a disparate opinion which to shirk:
That Ptolemy, a charlatan, has hidden us from truth
(Despite his claims that to do so would be a bit uncouth),
Or else that he may be aware of centric point besides
The earth. It hinges on a phrase, a clause he leaves aside,
Which some translate as “simple” where we may have “simplistic,”
And this is where suggestions of heaven heliocentric
Are born. If Venus, to rephrase the thought, moves by mean sun,
Which Ptolemy himself admits, it seems with only one
Small step we can deduce that circles epicyclic move
About the sun itself, and we with bright planet of love.

Regardless of translation we approach a reason odd
For why this cannot be the case, that, if we still must prod
Into the nature of the heavens, it will soon be clear
That nothing could exist on earth (letting alone the air)
If quick about the sun we twirled. In this there is complaint
That gravity and Newton fix, but now ‘tis still a feint,
Avoiding possibilities this system strong implies,
But undermining eloquence, and thus we cast aside
The whole affair, rather to face a truth left incomplete
Than ‘knowledge’ false. Such quick restraint an admirable feat
It is for our learnèd astronomer, who did not shroud
In propositions ostentatious falsehood far more loud;
For in philosophy there is no room to hold the proud.

Questions of equant left and doubts of insincerity,
In Venus we find questions still of what the point may be.
Why Almagest was written, so much time and effort spent
On tracking nightly skies with inaccurate equipment
If only to arrive at a confusion unresolved
By equant line, a paltry thing, that neigh the problem solves?
Alas that problems physical which plague this work divine
Could come from planet Venus, causing questions unrefined!

Before an answer I propose to why we read this book
I first ask that we contemplate the task that undertook
Great Ptolemy when every night he gazed on spinning sky,
Imagining and measuring where in the heavens lie
The Beauty that first Euclid gazed upon so well.
And in this task he found there was a story still to tell
Of Euclid’s pure geometry in heaven ably mirrored,
That now he too, toward realms of gods, had fortunately peered.
He did not see a universe that spun around a pole
Impaled in sun, but rather saw the spinning human soul
And heard the music that only the goddess, Venus, sings
When morning comes, or evening falls, and love through cosmos rings,
For that is where humanity must find its hidden wings.

My answer, then, I fear I have precluded with too much
A hint. My reader likely has proposed to guess that such
A world as our astronomer unfolds we ought to see
Because in his great work he shows us true divinity.
Not Truth as we would have it in our ultimate repose,
But truth as best we can perceive, with senses so imposed
Upon our reason, that only in math do we see pure
An abstract world that, free from us, provides our wonder cure,
Proclaiming Truth as Ptolemy, who saw Venus as we,
And knew that in his human sight could only hope to see
Its motion through the heavens from his humble place on ground,
While it, so perfect in its light, about the stars was wound
Like justice, or a true account, or Plato’s fleeting forms
That hide themselves and so withstand the ever-blowing storms
Of false impression. In such way soft Venus moves the mind
To Beauty, and in Beauty’s hearth we may at long last find
A Truth that only Beauty’s breath could e’er hope to unwind.