I have been spinning up a big binary in my own thinking. And it involves Maria Popova and Mike Caulfield. I cannot guarantee that this makes sense but just that I am trying to think out loud and make some sense out loud.
I have been exploring what I have vaguely referred to as “course in a blog post”. Maria Popova’s weekly newsletter for her polymathic website, Brainpickings, is one such course. It is layered full of more hyperlinked goodness than you can possibly work your way through in a week.
Right now I am doing just that, working my way through one of her newsletters. I use the Chrome extension, LinkGrabber, to strip off all the links on a page. (I am sure there are better tools out there, but I just stopped looking when I found one that did the job for 90% of the links on a page.) Then I store them in a collaborative space like Hackpad or Etherpad in order to curate them, to generate signal to share.
Popova’s newsletter this week started out with 71 or so links. After eliminating some of them (navigation, social media, repetitions) I am left with 54. Unfortunately, those 54 lead to hyperlink rich environments of their own. I have outlined this difficulty in previous posts and noted the problem of negotiating a useful signal and a need to devise ways to curate that signal.
What we are given by Popova is a taxonomy, a hierarchical direction from the top down. In other words our author has curated a scaffold and lots of content to be followed in a particular order. You might ask, “Isn’t that what rhetoric and composition is? Purpose and organization for an audience?” Exactly. It is colonialism. The writer is trying to colonize your mind. It is a power grab, an epistemological attempted coup.
I overstate the case for writing as a top down Trojan Horse, but by how much? We don’t have to open the doors for the damned wooden thing, do we? No. That’s why I call it a negotiated signal that gets curated by the receiver. The problem with these massively ‘palimpsested’ posts that are full of hyperlink wormholes is that they make sense because of the surface tension of meaning imposed upon them by the author. In other words they have a rhetorical structure to them, but the problem is that because there are so many links they also have a rhetorical substructure as well. Why include the links if they are not meant to be a part of the whole. Aye, there’s the rub. What is the meaning to be gleaned and how are we to curate that sub-signal and how does that relate to the surface signal?
Uggggghhh.
I can show you how I am trying to renegotiate this signal using Popova’s newsletter links via LinkGrabber and Hackpad as an expanding ‘accordion’ space.
I started in the middle with the section “The Color of the Wind”. I have lots of responses there in the form of more wormholes. The “feldgang” links in the Hackpad are my interactions with Popova’s links. Part of my renegotiation is coming to terms with all of this new information by adding some of my own, elaborating and understanding what and why Popova has included it. Part of the renegotiation is pure play as in transforming Helen Keller’s letter to the New York Philharmonic into a poem. Part of my renegotiation is in transmedia translation of “Ode to Joy” with a “Pinball Wizard” with Helen Keller as the bridge. What is my alternative? Just following each link down and noting what is in there, rocketing down the infinite bobsled track until you just must hit the brakes? I cannot accept that.
If you open the gates for the Trojan Horse, then you have to honor it all the way down in ways that you might never have considered: play, creation, mashup culture, collaboration, and more. In other words for a certain type of writer and a certain type of writing like Popova’s we need to honor the work, follow their thinking, and celebrate it with play and creation of our own.
This not SOP. This is not even ‘close reading’ standard operating procedure. This is not like the autodidact’s independent study. This is renegotiated, translated, recreated, amplified and dampened learning. Messy. Very messy. And uncertain. And honorable.
That brings me to the part two of this binary–Mike Caulfield. I think of his post, “New Directions in Open Education,” as the opposite of Popova’s. His is the folksonomy. It has the feel of an idea that has grown out of the commons, rising up from the loam. The post is long, peripatetic, and reminiscent of the random farm walks I take several times a week on my little bit of ground.
It is interesting that his post relies very little on the substructure of links. It is more of a standalone piece, one that gives you all you need right inside of it’s narrative. I gotta say I was sorry to see it end. It was so worth reading.
What has me spinning is not only the post itself, but the kind of bottom-up learning culture it advocates.
Here are some of Caulfield’s principles as I understand them
- One size never fit all. The fact that any of us ever thought it could is a testimony to the blindspots inherent in pedagogy.
- Content without consideration of ‘belonging’ is inert content.
- Write to relevance. (I use this principle in my freshman composition research inquiry. I beg them to ask a question that is personally meaningful. It is the greatest sadness of my teaching life that I fail to convince many of my students that I mean what I say. They respond, “Just tell me how to get an “A”.)
- We are diverse so bring diverse. The tools we use and the learning ecosystems we share have to acknowledge and encourage this. Otherwise go back to number one above and rethink.
I love the discussion of ‘classroom exhaust’ because it fits with what I am writing about Maria Popova’s newsletter (or anybody’s newsletter). When we think of learning as a noun we get the cruft of the course- a syllabus, a shell course on an LMS. The leftovers of actions done–the exhaust. Unless…you create belonging, value folks differences and similarities, allow users to customize, and empower passion and practice.
And where does that lead us? Choral explanation and, inevitably, smallest federated wikis or, as Caulfield has developed, Wikity. I consider this post a long and needed preamble toward justifying a completely new pedagogy but more importantly a new paradigm for learning. Not Popova and the top-down tango alone, but Caulfield and the folksonomic bugaloo, too.
And to answer Caulfield’s question, “Are you my audience?” Well, yes, but that is like asking the question of air and water, “Are you my water?” True, but limited. Our audiences, like our air and water, are everywhere, we just don’t realize how ubiquitously distributed they can be. That is the road we make as we walk. It is why federated wikis and Caulfield’s Wikity are the ecosystems we need to tap into in order to create open, communal, diverse, and relevant audiences.
We don’t have to give up renegotiating with Popova, but we damned sure better adopt Caulfield, too. Now.