Category Archives: connectedcourses

The Quandary of Connection and Attention

connectedcourseobservations, connectedcourses, Responding, Story

allworkandnoplay

 

Jennifer England put up this webinar as a Soundcloud file.  One of the real value added features of Soundcloud is the ability to annotate the sound file and to comment on others’ annotations.  Beautiful tool.  I put up three responses to seed it. Crickets.  Hmmm.

I put up a Vialogue of the same webinar, thinking perhaps that it was the video that folks needed to engage with.  I made a few comments and included a table of contents in case folks wanted to skip around and only comment  on a portion of the video.  More crickets.  Double hmmmmmm.

I organized a film evening using the easy video IRC tool Synchtu.be.  I knew when I put up The Internet’s Own Boy to watch that the time I chose might not be suitable for our European and points east folk to watch.  Mira Vogel and Susan Watson both came.  The ability to watch and comment synchronously was a revelation for me.  I thought more folks would come although the ones who did gave a tremendous gift to me.  I am grateful.   Not crickets, but perhaps ‘golf clap’ might be the phrase I am looking for.

I also created a Hackpad for folks to add educational movies/documentaries/shorts/etc. so that we might find a way to find more content for the Synchtu.be Channel. I sometimes just turn on Synchtu.be and let it cycle through the playlist of videos already there. It would be nice for folks to be able to randomly dip in and watch what they wished as they wished. How nice to be able to add others’ choices to the playlist.

Not even crickets.  I look in the void

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and the void sounds back.

I am left mostly confused by the week.  What is happening here?  Some tentative conclusions:

1. I am not good at marketing. My marketing channels are not working.  No surprise there.  Like many teachers, getting attention tends to be a local skill-in the classroom, with your tribe on Twitter, your Facebook friends.  I always feel uncomfortable even pimping my own posts. I will feel uncomfortable tweeting this post out. Likely, I will not even place this on the #Ccourses blog  And if folks don’t respond then it means they are not buying what I am selling. Or it simply didn’t get through their attention filter.

2. Others in my various circles are not attending.  Some are busy and say so.  That is one’s absolute imperative.  I have no problems. The others who are in my Google+ circles, my Twitter feeds, my Facebook friends–there has to be a reason for no uptake.  Of course, I am not blaming them. Jeez, you can’t have it all.  Where would you put it? I think it is the same problem I have in attending.  There is too much and time and attention are too thin.

3. In the end we have to decide for ourselves what to do and where to go online.  But we also have to decide what to make and who to engage with.  I am thinking that for those of us who have not reached and (at least for my case) are unlikely at this point to ever reach the tipping point where one’s channel is already peopled enough to give one sufficient attention bandwidth, this becomes a true quandary.  What is worth my connection time?  What has been proven to ‘not connect’ and should I continue activities like Vialogues, Soundcloud, Synchtu.be, Hackpad?  Life is an infinite game, but its length is a zero sum one. What to do?  Should I keep throwing manna on the water in the hope of connection?  Isn’t that the definition of mental illness, doing the same thing over and over but expecting a different result?  Should I pull in the boundaries of connections to the tribe however one defines that.  A G+ circle, a twitter hashtag, the blessed 150 of Dunbar’s Number?  Or will that just be happy echo chamber?   I could live with that if it actually existed.

I am reminded of one of the wisest of David Sedaris stories, “Laugh, Kookabura”.  In it, Sedaris is in the middle of a hilarious Australian travel piece when he quotes his Ozzie friend,Pat, as they pass by a billboard with four stove burners pictured.  Pat remarks

“One burner represents your family, one is your friends, the third is your health, and the fourth is your work.” The gist, she said, was that in order to be successful you have to cut off one of your burners. And in order to be really successful you have to cut off two.

The hypothetical game that happens in the piece asks the questions: how successful do you want to be and which burners will you cut off in order to be so?

4BURNERS

I played this game with a student the other day in a conference about her research paper on workaholism.  She resisted.  Wanted to change the rules.  Finally, she decided what was really important in her life.  She decided that she really wasn’t a workaholic, just someone who needed to work to pay for school.

When I have a week like this I have to ask myself which burners?  I have characterized what I do here on #CCourses as one of these elements.  It isn’t the health burner (unless you are burning the candle at both ends in order to stay ‘connected’).  It isn’t the family burner unless you have decided that someone online is your family. It’s either work or friends.  So…if you want to be successful online and you characterize this as work,  then you have to give up one of the other burners.  If you want to be really successful then you have to shut down two of them. This is the quandary of connection.  What price will I pay for the attention needed to actually connect online?

I know some will immediately say that they don’t buy the premise. I can only argue that it’s a thought experiment. You have to buy the premise to play the game.  It’s like Monopoly,. You don’t have to be a blood sucking  derivatives trader to play.  You just have to hold your other rules and assumptions in abeyance in order to consider another stance.  (Peter Elbow called it the believing game.)  For me, I decided about Thursday of last week that the connection game as I was playing it wasn’t worth the burner  I lit in order to play it.  I dropped the work of connection and turned up my friends and my family and my health. Today I return to connection to ask you what you might do or what you might have done to balance these burners.  (It certainly is a funny question considering the little attention that these posts engender. )

Personally, I am not thinking of the four burners as a thought experiment anymore. I  have seen its wisdom over and over in my own life so often that this week may have been the tipping point. It is now my credo for wise action.  Like most credos, it is a personal one usually arrived at through the idiosyncratic process Nikos Kazantzakis  calls the “full catastrophe”, life. Your mileage, as always, may vary.

This means that while my flame isn’t going to flickr and die, my connection burner is going to go way down.  Just as I think multitasking is a chimera,  there can only be one priority at a time in my life.  Let’s just leave it that my #CCourses Food Truck hours are going to be drastically reduced.

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Update:  I posted this on my other blog, Impedagogy, on Saturday.  Nothing.  I tweeted out the post without hashtags. Nope.  No blame here.  Just observation.  Sometimes if you are broadcasting and no one is attending then maybe you are needed elsewhere. Cut your losses to a manageable trickle and move on to where you are needed.  I am definitely needed elsewhere.  Until very recently the noun “priority” had no plural.  I am reviving that older definition.

Complexity in Connected Courses: “Tis a Simple Gift”

connectedcourseobservations, connectedcourses, Holy Multimodal Roundings, Responding, Story, Tools

Here we begin our course.  Initial conditions set.  Some string is longer than others. Some have different guages.  Equity? As much as can be accounted for.

I am a proprioceptric kind of person. I love embodied learning. When I saw these videos my body started to sway in sync to them and I began to wonder if there was something analogous to our work together in #ccourses. I put these out there with minimal text and invite you to watch and respond as you see fit. I find the whole process mesmerizing especially with the Shaker hymn in the background.

The initial conditions for connecting are set up. Sync up!

Initial Conditions Growing Out of Sync Back Into Sync Counter Back Out of Sync Back Into Sync Again

‘Tis the gift to be simple, ’tis the gift to be free
‘Tis the gift to come down where we ought to be,
And when we find ourselves in the place just right,
‘Twill be in the valley of love and delight.
When true simplicity is gained,
To bow and to bend we shan’t be ashamed,
To turn, turn will be our delight,
Till by turning, turning we come ’round right.

What Are the Essential Connections? You Choose.

connectedcourseobservations, connectedcourses, Holy Multimodal Roundings, Responding, Story, Tools, ,

The very short YouTube below was done using the neat new app PostIt Plus and the neat old app Explain Everything. My point here (and please forgive the crappy audio sandwich between my comments) is to strip down from the deep chaos I have been experiencing as I have tried to reach out, create, do in multiple spheres of action (home, farm, school, online). So I seek as a strategy in order to catch my breath to back off and focus on what I decide is the essential connection. We need to be able to control the flow or at least we need to give our minds that illusion. Or to quote Mary Oliver:

TELL ME WHAT IT IS...3

Connecting: The Grand Narrative

connectedcourseobservations, connectedcourses, Holy Multimodal Roundings, Responding, Story,

Simon Ensor has been laying down some mean tracks on his blog, touches of sense… especially this one, “Zootopia” where he asks the shimmering question, “Whatever happened to grand narrative?”

I started out by responding  via the Diigo Group Annotations for #CCourses that we have set up (totally open to join here), but as happens so often for me the annotations got longer and longer until they grew into a quasi/semi/pseudo/crypto post.  Hence the spillover here. Besides, how was I going to get my snake pix in here otherwise.  Yes, this blog now involves snakes so that makes this officially akin to the snakes on a plane–without the cussin’.

After beginning his grand narrative, Simon begins to draw the truth from the parable of the zoo.  He writes, “I would like to imagine that in the future our children will look at the enclosures in which past generations were kept as absurd anachronism.”  I recall the first time I used blogs in the secondary high school in 2002 it felt like I was not only opening up the cages, but also knocking holes in the walls so that no one could ever use them as cages again.  At least for the students who I was working with, I think this was true. Once they tasted that freedom there was no going back.

Then he gets to the big question: whatever happened to grand narrative?

Well…maybe it’s all grand narrative all the way down.  For example,  I had a grand day outside.  Frost was expected so we had to dig our peanuts and check out the sweet potatoes to see if they were ready to dig (tradition here is to dig them after a frost).

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CC BY Terry Elliott

I think we are going to get about a five to one return on the peanuts (yield per pound planted) and God knows on the sweet taters.  That is a grand narrative isn’t it?  One of the grandest narratives.  Agriculture.  (And it is one that is not without its…dark side.)

I was introduced to a grander narrative only a short while after we had battened down the garden to save the tomatoes and peppers and flowers from frost.  My wife discovered a corn snake trapped in bird netting.

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Copyright Elaine Digges, Permission to use

Corn snakes are the glory of the constrictors round these parts.  Bright orange with diamonds patterns and black and white bellies.  Astonishing.  If you catch sight of of one in the wild you cannot believe that such a creature could hide from anything.  Too bright.  Too shiny.  Yet…I have seen them slither away and disappear like the Cheshire Cat.  We cut the netting away from her.  Took her away from where the chickens might do her harm (chickens are notorious snake enemies) and released her.

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Copyright Elaine Digges, Permission to use

She immediately serpentined about in a threatening “s” to let us know that she was not to be anthropomorphized. Three feet of grand narrative, millions of years old, with a legacy that lives on in one of the parts of our triune brain.  I was unconsciously sweating the whole time I was cutting her away from the netting with scissors. I could not help it.

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Copyright Elaine Digges, Permission to use

That narrative is a potent legacy, not to be thrown off by a rational self that told me over and over that there was no danger.  That is a grand narrative that leads me to a question– is anyone an island entire unto herself?  Should we not consider the unveiling of connection to be the great new story that Thomas Berry speaks of in his book , The Dream of the Earth ? Is the corn snake another revealed link just like reading and annotating Simon’s post and all of it part of a larger scheme?

Simon notes how appalled he felt as he observes how his young friends “appeared to have their lives mapped out” much like the animals of Zootopia. I don’t think that there is anything inherently wrong with those maps into the future.  The danger is in thinking that any cartographer could draw one for us.  We are not alone in the struggle to map out our own territory, but perhaps Simon is suggesting that we need to be more like Daniel Boone when it comes to blazing our own trail.  Any other map just might be the wrong one pulled from someone else’s cosmic junk drawer, the Procrustean one that will make us fit, a  soul’s death by a thousand cuts

Or as Simon put it fast forwarding decades into the future,  his ‘mapped out’ friends had become too dependent on their own comfort, their own faith in the map. I was reminded of  a paradoxical phrase “risks may be our safeties in disguise” that I thought might have come from a John Berryman sonnet.  Uncertain of the origin,  the phrase sent me on a Google search. Instead, I was taken to a post I had written in Blogger in 2001.  In it I am looking for a map that was calling out to be blazed:

My eyes are shot. I have been sketching approaches to on-line classes all day when I realized that what I want is a website that will supplement what I am doing in the classroom. I want projects, resources, and information that my students can use outside of class to make their learning richer. I want interaction. But I also want something a home-bound student or a home-schooled student could pick up and go with. All the web development sites and resources tell me that is the wrong way to go about building a web site. But a big, sprawling site feels right to me. I am thinking about an old bookstore I used to haunt in downtown Louisville, Zimmermans. His books were sometimes stacked neatly, sometimes in boxes, sometimes in great tall stacks with their spines turned so that you had to unstack them. That’s how I feel about this prefab notion of building a learning environment. I would prefer to grow a learning tree. Some parts die, some parts grow. Sometimes a storm blows the whole freaking mama to the ground.

That brings me to change. Part of me is appalled by the philosophy of constant change. Why the hell should I, for example, concern myself with an article about e-books. It’s a crappy technology that is nearly stillborn. Yet… I know some version of electronic portability will be born and grow. And so it means climbing the learning curve every day with no guarantee that the hard-won knowledge won’t be lost like some Sysyphean stone that crushes the life out of you. That is real teaching… the opportunity to constantly regale your friends with the depth and breadth of your foolishness. Teachers must be early adopters, they must struggle with new ways of learning no matter how feeble because they might just grow from a palsied childhood to greatness. It takes real courage to say to yourself that nothing you do will ever be good enough. But I hate change… I think John Berryman once said in a sonnet that risks may be our safeties in disguise. I put my hope in that paradox. I put my heart in the safety of change.

So… Simon, is this the grand narrative? Do we un-write the old story and spin a new one from partly old thread and partly new?  I think maybe E.M.Forster’s admonition in Howard’s End might hint at the new fabric we need,

Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon.
Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted,
And human love will be seen at its height.
Live in fragments no longer.
Only connect…

xrayenso

Connecting with Simon Ensor, Always Connect

connectedcourseobservations, connectedcourses, Holy Multimodal Roundings

I have been messing about with a longer form zeega based upon a translation of Simon Ensor’s prose poem and post here. It was a very difficult job trying to do it’s sweet structure justice. I had originally laid down Dan le Sac vs Scroobius Pip “Thou Shalt always Kill” up until the last frame when it just wasn’t right.  Great strong song, but not rich enough to catch the symphonic feel of Simon’s post.  I chose John Adams’ “Short Ride in a Fast Machine” with that furious driven wooden block, pistons beating like a heart.  It fit perfectly to my heart.

I hope you like it.

Breadcrumbs for a Collaborative Poem->Daily Connected Blog->Twitter->TitanPad->Timeline->SnagIt->YouTube->VideoGif->and Parts Unknown.

connectedcourseobservations, connectedcourses, Holy Multimodal Roundings, Responding, Tools

Kevin suggested in a tweet that we create a collaborative poem.

He originally posted this from the daily connected blog.

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Thence to TitanPad

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Timeline on TitanPad recorded on SnagIt and uploaded to YouTube and downloaded by Firefox extension “Download Flash and Video”

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And lastly into a gif with VideoGif for use in future Zeegas/multimodal works.

 

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Have a Little Faith in Thee and Me

connectedcourseobservations, connectedcourses, Holy Multimodal Roundings, Responding

Susan Watson’s dark-backgrounded blog has more light in it than a magnesium road flare. Her latest incendiary has ignited some tinder in my memory, Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows. Especially Chapter Seven–“The Piper at the Gates of Dawn”. That is why I have music at the beginning and end of this post. Music succeeds as a way beyond words and toward connecting better than almost anything else I know. So John Hiatt (at the beginning) and Dr. John (at the end)are my pipers as I write into the dawn.

roadflaresintothedawn

The connection I made with Susan’s post, “Needle in a Haystack”, was through the mediation of my best friend in annotation, Diigo. I have used Diigo since 2006, but rarely have I found a convivial crowd to play with the group annotation function. And by rare I mean never. There is just enough ‘friction’ in using it for folks to say, “It’s fine as a social bookmarker, but I just don’t know about annotating as a group. Too damned messy.” Aye, I admit, ’tis messy. And sometimes folks erase your good works. And it can be a bit ‘hincty’ to use (in the idiom of my Kentucky comperes), yet it remains the best of what for most part is a bad lot–at least in a convivial sense. I started reading Susan’s post with an eye toward a group annotation much like we recently did with Mimi Ito’s sweetly vulnerable post about the terror of real connection on the net. And then it took a turn. Or rather my memory took a turn with her text. All of the sudden I was with Ratty and Mole floating down the river in a johnboat looking for old Otter’s doted upon youngest child, Portly.

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Susan mentions inspiration and its word origins especially their connection to the gods. (My annotations are in italics.)

I am thinking of Pan here.  You know…the panpipes.  i have such wonderful associations with this word because of The Wind in the Willows. The very title of Grahame’s book is a reference to Pan and the gods of otters and water rats and moles and badgers and toads. I read this book over and over to my children growing up.  I want Chapter Seven to be read aloud to me as I die. It is titled “The Piper at the Gates of Dawn” –Pan, the source of all inspiration, speaking to use through the wind in the willows at the gates of dawn.

I am inspired here to suggest that your blog like every loved thing or space has a genius loci, a Pan of its own living within like the little island in the middle of the weir in The Wind in the Willows.  Your work is to give it room to breathe out that inspiration, to be another’s wind in the willows.  There really are undiscovered connections everywhere.  Holy digital spaces that we believe in because others do and because we do.  Inspiring, breathing in, like the zephyr at dawn. Sweet and wild and impossible to word.

She goes on the hint rather loudly “the fact that something bigger than “us” is at play here.”

Yes, in teaching I yearn for these moments where the artifice fades away, the planning drops off, the dross of the past is slagged off and a new presence is born.  We become the pipers at the gates of dawn if only for a few moments and the seeming chaos of improvisation, of taking our lead from the pipedreams in the ayre, becomes impossibly logical, a transcendent logic.  And no wonder we are called ‘touched’ because we damned well are.  And the world in these times makes abject sense, abject in the sense that wonder and awe always cast off sense.

She remarks on Simon Ensor’s utterly remarkable (and readable, so hie you to them) posts on the hidden and accessible better angels of our nature here and here and here. And in a throw away phrase at the end she asserts that after you read Simon you will “get the idea”–a kind of “the rest of the exercise is left to the student” moment for me.

We get the idea because it is a river that passes through this familiar yet undiscovered country.  We all come to it through teaching for whatever reason. Teaching flips the switch that allows us to see the light that “grows and grows” in Wind in the Willows.

“Mimi’s post was added to the Diigo group so we could all jump in and annotate.” In the light of dawn and with my friends Ratty and Mole and Susan and Simon I respond:

Mimi’s post is just a little rowboat, a place to put the hamper as we search for Old Otter beloved youngest child along the river banks.  (Please read Chapter Seven of Wind in the Willows here. ).  Not to put too hyperbolic a point on it–we really are  rescuing children from the leg traps and snares of the world when instead we should be taking them to meet the pipers at the gates of dawn.

Mimi’s post resonated with Susan -made her laugh. I resonate, too.

If you love words, you’ll love ‘resonate’–I think it is directly analogous to the word recursion. Where recursion is tied to vision, resonation is tied to the ear. It is not an old word at all according to the OED.  it is a science word. Many disciplines use it. To re-sound, to be a re-sounding board, to echo back and forth.  It is like the empathy of mirror neurons.  It is memory and the experience of shared discipline and questions and ranging out into the world.  We are all looking for someone’s lost child.  We have all found Pan at the Gates of Dawn.  Hence, the resonating chord stretched between us and only felt as it vibrates, akin.

She sluices down the word ‘amalgamation’ to try to explain the apparent ubiquity, even multiplicity of her connected friends.  (Personally, I am thinking Robert Johnson at a crossroads making a pact with Old Scratch, but that is just idle and envious speculation on my part.)

I think that we skirt around the issue of how we go beyond an “amalgamation” when we lower our gates and release the bloody-minded wards of routine. We really are Kevin and Mimi and Maha and Alan (well, maybe not Alan 😉 ).  I think they are our fractal selves. Is that nuts? Is that perhaps lowering the prison walls a bit too much?  None of us is free.  We are all tied to each other.  If one goes down, the rest of us will be pulled down the mountain. Do I really believe that as more than a damned abstraction?  Sometimes.  At the best of times.  All the time? I just gotta keep working that garden.

Susan’s  is a post no one can say they didn’t read because it was too long.  Nor is Diigo so hard that you cannot get back your investment of  time and energy in no time flat. It is all about play.  My post is written in play at the dawn of a new Sunday.  We are all afloat in the same boat and on the same river and at play.    I feel alive to Kenneth Graham’s words in the mouth of the oh so wise Water Rat who is hearing Pan’s tune in the willows.

“‘Now it passes on and I begin to lose it,’ he said presently. ‘O Mole! the beauty of it! The merry bubble and joy, the thin, clear, happy call of the distant piping! Such music I never dreamed of, and the call in it is stronger even than the music is sweet! Row on, Mole, row! For the music and the call must be for us.’

For whom does the piper pipe? He pipes for thee. Let Dr. John pipe us into that new dawn.

 

Connecting by Default

connectedcourseobservations, connectedcourses, Holy Multimodal Roundings

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The image above is one I made using the very simple Google Photo editor, Aviary, available in Chrome. The idea was from ds106’s Daily Create. Connect by default.

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Hummingbird vine and tomato vine in embrace only broken by the frost. Connected by default.

September 25, 2014 at 1247PM (1)

A tuft of wool shaved from the neck of our lost little bellwether. All that is left. Always connected.

A buggish web. Connect by default.

justinscoop.it

Justin connects by default by collecting and writing on Scoop.it.

Frost said it best:  We dance round in a ring and suppose, But the Secret sits in the middle and knows.

And the secret is out.  We are already connected.  Webbed. Netted. Noded. Distributed. Now. And here.

Iconoclasty 101: Outsiders in Academe

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I freely admit that this is a mess of post. Some might view it as wail for attention. Feel free to ignore the whining if you wish. Feel free to wander away and pick your nose. Feel free to check your various personal learning networks, but …wander back please.

I wanted to write a post/article about outsiderism, the idea that the best ideas, the best reform, the best chance for legitimate change comes from outside the discipline or, failing that, from those on the margins within a discipline.

Question: are the facilitators and leaders and participants here outsiders or are they ‘rearrangers’? Are we cozy web makers or are we punks? Fuse lit.

My idea of the consummate outsider is architect, Christopher Alexander. Alexander has long been a gadfly to the architecture community. Since the beginning of his career and throughout the creation of his multi-volume works (starting with A Pattern Language) his emphasis has been upon local, humane, sustainable, and intelligent design. In his latest book he really takes on the role of outsider, pariah even, when he blames those in his own profession for the death march that is modern architecture and design.

 

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I feel the same issues with the materials of modern university life, online and face-to-face. They (the insiders) are killing the good that universities do for learners. Perhaps Jim Groom’s abandonment of edupunk and Alan Levine’s disdain for the word “lurker” are part of a growing outsider movement. Perhaps Howard Rhinegold has always been on the outside looking in. Yet I have to ask: are they (including Mike Wesch, Cathy Davidson, and Randy Bass) enough outside to pull the center to the margin? I really don’t know.

Alexander’s critique is that humans design systems, but they are not currently at the center of the system. In his latest book, The Battle for the Life and Beauty of the Earth, Alexander divides all of architecture into two, prosaic camps: System A and System B. System B is all about efficiency and hierarchy. It is about power and control and productivity. All of which is well and good within its proper context. I want the centralized control systems built into the flying and landing and taking off of airplanes. I don’t want it nearly so much in the ‘ergonomic’ fascism of bathroom design or of learning management systems.

(Aside: anyone who has read Iain McGilchrist’s The Master and His Emissary will note some spooky similarities here.)

System A is all about integrity and health and the folk not as nodes in a machine, but as a growing, adapting, distributed and living whole. It is the difference between a neighborhood and a housing development.

Each of these systems is, in Alexander’s mind, generative. System A is open, sustainable, regenerative, and feels good. System B is oppressive, closed, degenerative, and exhausting. Take your pick. And lest you counter that this is a false dichotomy, you need only look in architecture and higher education for System A generated spaces. There are not that many. Alexander notes that the two systems entail a zero sum game: for one to thrive the other needs to diminish much like predators trying to occupy the same niche in the food chain.

I have a lot of questions about whether any of the web-based tools we are using actually fit the mold of System A. I don’t often feel those spaces as convivial and natural. Behind the artifice of interface lay the reality of code. Is that structure humane? Is it open, sustainable, and regenerative? Does it feel good? Does the whole idea behind code generate System A or System B? I really don’t know.

What I do know is that I get the very distinct feeling that certain systems I use are not convivial. Google+, Facebook, WordPress, Twitter while full of humans, feel closed, feel like templates to be filled in not spaces to be lived in. Hence, the need for outsiders more than ever to raise the question especially in this week of connected courses where we are talking about the why of why.

I am an outsider as many of you are. I came to teaching late after fifteen years of farming and running a couple of businesses (taxes and chimney sweeping). I came to teaching through substitute teaching. WTF. I started teaching at age 39 in a rural setting of intense poverty and dying culture. The culture that was dying was agri-culture. My wife and I unschooled our kids in a time when that was the perceived province of the crank and the zealot. Whatever. I am an iconoclast in a job that values lockstep. I loved the vicious, soul crushing little bastards who I was charged with graduating. Little more was asked of me. I am an outsider who thought that perhaps I could lay a set of parallel sidetracks next to the well-worn ones of System B, an underground railway designed to lift up, carry forward, and sustain those fleeing the plight of System B.

I am still an outsider running an underground railway and I am needing folks to guide me: is this connectedcourses System A or a well-disguised System B. I know how badly that system can abrade, chew up,and spit out its conductors. This paranoia has some pretty deep roots that don’t actually entail black helicopters and the Bilderberg.

So…will the tools we are using and advocating generate System A or System B spaces? Is it even possible to have a System A that arises from our own or other’s codings? How will we know that we have not deluded ourselves, that we are so invested in the time and energy and pride of creation that we fall into the sinkhole of bias and blindspot? I am older than most of you. I don’t have time for this if it’s just another System B in disguise. I have been down that road and it wasn’t of my own making and it doesn’t have a fork in it suitable for a commencement address. (BTW, Robert Frost was not a sweet grandfatherly old gent in that poem. Not very really.)

Recent Floods in Perry County KY

Alexander’s story in his latest book is one the extends from 80’s to the present day. He continues to fight against the architectural forces that value the modular over the adaptive, the global over the local. His project, the Eishin School, continues to be under fire by the powers-that-be in Japan. He continues to fight back. He is still the consummate outside. He believes in design from the folk up. I will use that yardstick to measure everything I will be trying from this course and in my courses. Is everything I do designed from the folk up? Is everything you do designed from the folk up? Is it humane and regenerative and sustaining, and alive? Or does it just serve the status quo ante bellum?

Thanks for letting me take this feldgang. A feldgang is what farmers do all the time. Fieldwalks. On my farm I see the hope of a rainy August. I see all kinds of forbs for my sheep to eat. Deep rooted docks and Queen Anne’s lace, plaintain weed and hop clover and red clover and white clover. Fescue and chicory. It is a meadow fit for a ruminant. Usually it is pith dry. Sometimes the fallen and broken branches get trampled further by our sheep and as they walk through they sound like marimbas being janked around by a hyperactive eight year old. Yes, this August is rare. I hope that #ccourses is a rainy August. Many feldgangs await. I have been accused of being hyperbolic and of wildly inflating conditions on the ground. I really do call them like I see them. I just need help seeing what I observe. Help me see.

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