Question 162 of 365: When does a voice hold us close?

Kurt Vonnegut is the first author that I ever truly loved. It started with Hocus Pocus and Slaughter House Five, but it really matured when I read his short stories in Welcome to the Monkey House. In each one of his longer works I could see him building the characters and the twisted plots over an entire book. In his shorter works, he had to do all of his development and cleverness so quickly. It was wonderful reading each short story for the first time and being surprised with each one that the last line would draw me in and make me question my assumptions.

I recently purchased an audio version of Welcome to the Monkey House, and I have been listening to them diligently as NPR is on a pledge week. Each turn of phrase that I admired is back in front of me. I never get tired of hearing about The Handicapper General in Harrison Burgeron or becoming Amphibious in Not Ready to Wear. Each character comes back me as clear as the first time I knew that they existed.

The erodes themselves are unnerving in their ease at creating something old and encouraging within me. It is as if these people reading the stories were the original ones in my head and I am just now hearing them outside for the first time. I am entranced. I hear those words and I am transported back to a time without responsibilities and nothing but free time. Vonnegut always had just enough satire and just enough punch lines to keep me conjuring up new images and metaphors that he could call at a monpment’s notice.

And so I think about what makes the words so special and my first instinct is to call upon nostalgia as the full answer. But in reality, it is simple bending of my body’s will to fulfill what my mind wants. You see, I am perfectly still when I am listening to these stories, at least so long as my gross motor movements are concerned. My body can’t get in the way of the words and neither can anything else. I listen and I obsorb. I wonder how often we let that happen?

The key to letting a voice affect you (and the things that the voice was saying, I sup lose) is to simply stop moving the rest of you long enough to let the voice bring you in. While the story should be good enough to hold your attention, it is all in the act of not moving that will translate from something that is good to something that changes lives. Putting my body in a vulnerable position(we are all vulnerable when we are still) let’s my ears and my mind become receptive.

It is in this spirit that I would like to sit with you. No questions asked and no unnecessary movements.

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Question 109 of 365: What is your field?

A man that I trust and respect once told me that we always go from specific to general in our heads, but we want to go from the general to the specific in our lives. He was speaking about the process of creating something new, but I think it applies to nearly everything I do. In my head, I tell stories, make specific connections and relate to the minutiae of a situation. In my working life, I seem to want to generalize about everything and then iron out the details later. I speak in absolutes and generalities but the only things that have ever really meant anything to me are the details. I do not remember a general good feeling about my achievements, rather my mind focuses on specific moments within those achievements that seem to represent those good feelings.

My wedding itself I can speak about in platitudes of good fortune, but I remember the way my little brother in law jumped from flower pedal to flower pedal down the isle with our rings bouncing around on the pillow the whole way. I can convey the fact that I love my children, but if I really want them to know what I mean, I have to retell the story of my daughter sitting with my wife and relating just how she believes that cells work according to their pictures in my wife’s textbook. I have to relate to someone else on the specific level, the one that brings about a passionate reaction. It is in the specifics of how many times I got up with my son on a nightly basis to put him back to bed that I am able to connect to other people. It is in the recounting of the time I  put away dishes in our first home while my sick (pregnant) wife kept me company on a palette of sofa cushions on the kitchen floor.

The specifics matter.

And that is why it is getting harder and harder for me to tell people that I have a particular field of interest. It is why I have a harder time prescribing to the general ideals of a particular organization or job. It is why my passions don’t run toward keywords that you can punch into Google. And yet, all of our outward facing experiences, the kind that are required for introductions and business meetings are based upon this ability to generalize and synthesize. It is based upon whether or not we can pitch experiences as sound bytes rather than for the character-driven developments that they are. So, what should I do in situations that require the impossible: the general standing in for the specific?

What I hope to tell people in the future is that my field of expertise is and always will be in stories. It is in the drilling down to find a single image to capture the imagination. It is in finding a single argument that an entire program or course can be based upon. It is in crafting an experience for an individual so that they can know what it is like to speak with urgency and conviction, to create conversations that continue as long as they are valuable. It is doing one thing well and then telling that story until the next thing that needs to be done reveals itself.

And that is how I think that we can get beyond ego. It is how we can move into a place where everyone is capable of confident discourse and respectable work. It is the way that we will all become sticky and relevant. If we were all storytellers (and admitted to being so when asked), we would never have to justify our passions and our accomplishments. We would never have to prove our overreaching generalized purposes. We could be who we are with one another and create businesses and schools that edify the specific.

So, here is what I propose:

• Rather than beliefs on the walls of corporations, let’s put up stories or situations that demonstrate those beliefs. Let’s tell each other just how we accomplish what is that we seem to value. Let’s figure out what our one word codes really are based upon, going from specific to general.
• Rather than letting students choose a major, let’s have them write the stories of what they would like to achieve. Let’s have them revise this story over time and see how it shifts and transforms. This way we won’t have anyone who needs to change their major just to fit their current passions; they will be able to represent their entire selves within every edition of their story.
• Rather than doing 5 year plans that include virtuous goals, let’s outline the stories of how people will interact with us and our products throughout those 5 years. Let’s not set goals that are measurable, let’s write stories that are relatable. If we can take those stories from fiction to non-fiction, we have achieved our goals.

If we go from the specific to the general, we won’t have to worry about who is doing the small stuff and who is going to see to the details. We will all see to the details and nothing will get left behind. And the end of the day it is about this: I want my kids to tell me a story about their day. I want my boss to tell me a story about how he thinks I could improve. I want my wife to tell me a story about her dying mother. This matters. that is why I am going into the field of storytelling, not in the abstract English teacher sense, but in the concrete and human sense that we are all born storytellers. It is only the abstractions of life that take us away from this.

So, tell me a story.

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The Ripe Environment: The Markers

The “I know it when I see it” form of collaboration is no longer valid.

We need new ways to tell if learning is happening through group contribution. We need to be able to assess collaboration, but we can’t do it the same way that we assess writing or proficiency. Those skills are much easier to boil down to a continuum or rubric. Others have tried, and we have been for the most part satisfied with their traditional, enigmatic, and mostly non-educational continuums for collaboration.

These forms, however, are not worthy of our cause. They provide us with a way to see things in an abstract sense, showing a fictional path to collaboration that is just as hopeless as using the term as a buzzword to show that change is occurring.

Instead, I would like to outline the types of collaboration that occur in The Ripe Environment. These are the markers that we should be striving for and looking for:

1. Learning objects to be used by multiple learners, created by multiple learners. (This does not include one person writing or creating and the others supplying their input. True collaboration means that everyone has their fingerprints on the potting wheel.)
2. Collaborative asynchronous lists. (Never underestimate the power of listing. And yet, the power is not in the listing. It is in the reordering, reorganizing, and reconstituting a list. Think of wiki collaboration here.)
3. A followable thread of discussion (This can be through linking, commenting, or something like voicethread)
4. Shared Space with over 10 revisions (Any object or space that has been edited or revised more than ten times by multiple authors can be considered a respectable work of collaboration).
5. A mash-up or remix of anything (This type of collaboration marker is the halmark of true collaboration. The best examples are when the masher doesn’t know the mashee. That is when the unintended (but most amazing) concequences of sharing and collaboration kick in.)

Obviously this is not an exhaustive list. What are the other markers of collaboration in The Ripe Environment?

Imagery in Blogging (and Cell phones in the Classroom)

As my students work more and more in the non-fiction realm due to their new found niches, they have a tendency to lose sight of just how descriptive and beautiful their writing can be. As a blogger, I have found that some of my greatest pleasure is derived from my ability to string together an image or a particularly well described passage.

A blog is informative, but stylistically so. The ability to craft a unique image within the information is a virtue that we should all be striving for. So, in an attempt to put these words into practice, here is what I am talking about.

Topic: Cell phones and iPods in the classroom

With his two fingers pushed together, carefully spreading them outward across the screen, one of my students was doing something that I had never thought of a couple of years ago. He was blogging from his iPod. Immediately, we gathered around the gadget, pondering its significance. It was distracting and powerful: the ability to blog about anything at any time. Just think if twitter wasn’t blocked at school.

I still can’t quite wrap my head around cell phones being used for things other than voice. I have been saying for quite a while that we need more laptops in the classroom, as many as there are laps. But can’t we get done most of what we need with our plans from verizon and AT&T? Watching the mini-safari browser spin into action leads me to believe that we aren’t far off from this reality.

I want my students to be thinking about how they can utilize their cell phones in my classroom not how they can sneak a look at what time it is on the display when I am not looking. Their cell phones are bejeweled with authenticity. In many cases, their cell phones are so representative of their lives that given the choice of losing a cell phone or a limb would cause them to pause to think.

Where is the research that says cell phones are great for the classroom. Well, mostly it doesn’t exist yet, at least not that I know of. If anyone has seen any great studies or has done some great work with non-laptop ITC, please share. All I have right now is anecdotal evidence from my classroom and the presentation from K12 Online 2007. Surely there is more to it than that.

I have italicized (for my students) the moments where I intentionally added imagery or description in order to make a potentially boring subject interesting (at least to me). My hope is that blogging moves closer to this style and further away from the dense writing of academic papers. Let me know what you think about either idea.

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