Gardner Writes | Aut Inveniam, Aut Faciam

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Web Name: Gardner Writes | Aut Inveniam, Aut Faciam

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Nearly two years ago I wrote about The Odyssey Project, in a post outlining a grant proposal submitted to the MacArthur Foundation in 1997. The proposal was not funded, but the idea lived on, and became what Jim Groom would later brand A Domain of One s Own. Turns out my idea emerged even earlier than I had remembered, in fact just before I left Mary Washington for a brief sojourn at the University of Richmond.I d completely forgotten that I d described the essence of the idea in my essay Education, Information Technologies, and the Augmentation of Human Intellect (Change, The Magazine of Higher Learning, 38:5, 26-31, DOI: 10.3200/CHNG.38.5.26-31). The article appeared in the September/October 2006 issue. To the best of my recollection, I d finished the revisions by June or July of 2006, or early August at the very latest.Here s what I wrote at the end of that essay:What About an Odyssey?Do all these new opportunities add up to something greater than the sum of theparts? I believe they can. Imagine a project called “Odyssey,” named after Homer’s great epic. Upon matriculation, every student would be assigned a certain amount of Web hosting space that would act as a virtual server, containing open-source tools that would allow blogs, wikis, image galleries, content management, discussion forums, and even survey generators to be installed, maintained, customized, backed up, and uninstalled easily and quickly. (Such tools already exist at inexpensive web hosting services such as Bluehost.com.) By creating, revising, and modifying the resulting Odysseys—supported by teachers, fellow students, information-technology designers, and any expert or fellow learner with whom they come into contact—students would consider what an education is (or might be) and master the tools of its construction.Although it would include coursework, the Odyssey would take the learner, not the course, as its central organizing principle (my thanks to Martha Burtis for this idea). All of its elements would thereby pull together an otherwise fragmented, connect-the-dots education into a set of integrated experiences. The Odyssey, begun upon matriculation, would not end at graduation but would reflect the education one creates for oneself during a lifetime of learning. More than a narrowly academic exercise, this Odyssey would contain meaningful links to social networking sites such as Flickr, Facebook, or whatever the student virtual hangout du jour happens to be. And of course Odysseys will link to other Odysseys.The Odyssey could be an education’s foundation and capstone. Colleges and universities would distinguish themselves by the resources, guidance, and enriched contexts they place at the service of these Odysseys and their writers. Others could read it; the evidence of the work we do in a community of learning would be plain to see. But the learners would control access, deciding for themselves, with the guidance of advanced learners, which kinds of growth are served by sharing the narratives of process and which by proceeding privately until the curtain is ready to go up. The work students chose to display as evidence of the quality and extent of their education could be routed to potential employers or used as data for university outcomes assessments.What would be the focal point for this Odyssey, the metaassignment that would give it some overall shape and purpose? To reconceptualize the self in view of civilization and civilization in view of the self and its unique agency. That, I take it, is the implicit goal of all education and the ongoing task of civilization itself.I look back at these words from fifteen years ago and I wonder at the energy, ambition, and hopefulness they express. I remember being that person.I can also see how exuberantly wide-ranging my resources were, even then. I ve always wanted to discover, demonstrate, and use these complex connections. I ve always thought that the Web encouraged and empowered this connectivity.Most importantly, I still believe that odyssey is an apt metaphor, and that these ideas take the notion of e-portfolio (itself an archaism but I digress) and raise it to a much higher and more interesting level.The context for the Change article was a moment in which participatory culture offered a glimpse of ways in which creation, communication, reflection, and awareness might be part of the same complex web of activity, a kind of mindfulness that would gain purpose and direction from opportunities for creation and sharing. That mindfulness would not happen automatically. Participation in itself (like the term interactive ) does not necessarily lead to good outcomes. A like button increases participation; where has that led us? But participatory culture within environments rich with integrated domains and structures encouraging reflection and mindfulness can set up all sorts of lovely feedback loops, reciprocalities, and serendipitous encounters.I still think that, in spite of everything, even as my optimism continues to ebb.My heartfelt thanks to Executive Editor Dr. Margaret (Peg) Miller for the opportunity to write the essay for Change.My thanks also to André Craeyveldt, whose Internet Doorway was the lovely image that accompanied my article. (You can find the image at the article link, above.) I m grateful as well to the editorial and design staff at Change in 2006 who worked with me on the article and presented it so handsomely in the magazine.And my thanks to the dream team at Mary Washington, along with our leader Chip German, for the odyssey we shared for a little while, all those years ago. With thee conversing I forget all time,All seasons and their change, all please alike. Sweet is the breath of morn, her rising sweet,With charm of earliest Birds; pleasant the SunWhen first on this delightful Land he spreadsHis orient Beams, on herb, tree, fruit, and flow r,Glist ring with dew; fragrant the fertile earth After soft showers; and sweet the coming onOf grateful Ev ning mild, then silent NightWith this her solemn Bird and this fair Moon,And these the Gems of Heav n, her starry train:But neither breath of Morn when she ascendsWith charm of earliest Birds, nor rising SunOn this delightful land, nor herb, fruit, flow r,Glist ring with dew, nor fragrance after showers,Nor grateful Ev ning mild, nor silent NightWith this her solemn Bird, nor walk by Moon, Or glittering Star-light without thee is sweet.Paradise Lost 4.639-656I met Alice Woodworth on Tuesday, June 18, 1974 at about 8:30 p.m. on the terrace of Spencer residence hall at Mary Baldwin College (now Mary Baldwin University). About ten days ago Alice Woodworth Campbell and I took our son Ian and our daughter Genevieve (Jenny) to see that place, the very place, an original place. Their origin, eventually, though Alice Woodworth and I did not embark upon our romance until several years later.More precisely: three years, one month, and three weeks later.On that day, with the encouragement of Karen Baldwin (thank you, thank you, Karen Baldwin), Alice Woodworth appeared at the ninth reunion of that 1974 summer school. I had arrived at the reunion the night before. Then on Saturday, August 7, 1977, I drove from the place I was staying to the site of the day s festivities, parked my car, and walked to the spot where everyone had gathered.And there was Alice Woodworth, sitting beneath a tree.Alice had appeared briefly at the Richmond reunion in 1974, but not since. We had not been in contact at all during the intervening years, with the exception of a friendly postcard or two. But on this day, there she was, unexpectedly and overwhelmingly there. In that moment of surprise, I knew something had come over me, but I didn t know what that meant. All I knew was that it would be a fine thing indeed to go say hello to Alice Woodworth, and catch up with her after three years.And so our conversation began.My dear friend Steve Chu made a photograph of that beginning. It s rare to have such a document, an image of the beginning of a life together. (Thank you, thank you, Steve Chu.) It s rarer still to remember knowing, in that very moment you can see in this very image of Alice Woodworth and Gardner Campbell well into their third or fourth hour of conversation on August 7, 1977, that something had happened. But I did know it, right then, and I knew it on April 22, 1978, when I asked Alice if she would marry me, and I knew it on July 14, 1979, when my April question and her April yes became our July vows.And I still know it today: 47 years after our first meeting, 43 years after our betrothal, 42 years after our marriage.44 years after the moment documented below, an image of a moment from my first conversation with the love of my life.Happy anniversary, Alice. Today the topic is courage.My father was not the strong silent type. No Gary Cooper, he. My dad had narrow shoulders (as do I), he was a worrier (as am I), and while he would clam up about some things (when we d ask him if he d ever smoked, or if he d ever voted Republican, both of which he would deny and then stop speaking), he was not what you d call taciturn. In fact, he was sometimes pretty expansive in his talk.But I do remember being surprised, several times, by just how powerful his grip could be, and how much he could lift. In retrospect my surprise is surprising, even shocking, since my dad was a laborer pretty much all his adult life. Laborers get strong and sometimes, also, damaged along the way. But before that, strong. Callused. Burled. So I really shouldn t have been surprised that my dad was physically strong, even though he didn t look it.These days an even deeper strength comes to mind, one I didn t understand at the time and only now, as I get older myself, begin to appreciate. That s the strength you see in the photo below.That s a snapshot of a new father. My father. In one arm he holds me. I m nearly three. In the other arm he holds my brother Fred, who s not more than a few months old.This new father is 53 years old.Being a father is tricky. Being a good father is trickier still. Being a good father and starting on that path at the age of 50 is strong. Continuing on that path at 53 is stronger still.So today, I remember a father whose strength was hiding in plain sight. Whose strength is visible in his utterly joyful expression that is also, it must be said, somewhat nervous. But then, courage doesn t mean not being afraid. It means being afraid and doing it anyway. So I have learned, and so I remember as I look on the strong arms holding me here.Happy Father s Day. Paradise Lost Readathon, Spring 2021Via ZoomThe Schedule:Saturday, April 17, 9 a.m. 1 p.m. Books 1-4Sunday, April 18, 6 p.m. 10 p.m. Books 5-8Saturday, April 24, 2 p.m. 6 p.m. Books 9-12All times EDT (UTC -4)A Dr. Campbell Milton reading-aloud-together tradition since 1994. This year in three parts. All are welcome! Come when you can and leave when you want, on one or two or all three days. If you don t have a copy of the text, you can find it on the Web at the Dartmouth College Milton Reading Room: https://milton.host.dartmouth.edu/reading_room/pl/book_1/text.shtml. Note: we don t read the arguments, that is, the prose summaries at the beginning of each Book.This will be quite the experiment. Here’s how I’m thinking it’ll work.I’ll set up a recurring Zoom meeting for all of us readers. You’re welcome to come by anytime and stay for as long as you like. My only rule is that if you’re in the meeting, you must read aloud, at least a little! (And no fair ducking in and out to avoid the reading—Milton will shake his head, sadly, even in his beatitude.) I ll us one Zoom link for all three sessions. I’ll have a waiting room—Zoom requires these—so when you join, you may have to wait a little bit for me to see that you’re there and click on the little “admit” button. I will be vigilant, so the wait shouldn t be very long at all.The biggest problem with this virtual experience will be how to know when you re supposed to be reading. When we’re physically co-located, we sit in a circle and thus we know when we’re the next one to read. Each reader relies on a significant/substantial pause from the current reader as a signal that Now It’s My Turn.Clearly that won’t work very well in Zoom, unless you like Zoom collisions followed by colliding apologies followed by … nervous silence. And of course we’ll all have different “orders” before us on our screens with regard to who reads next.So we’ll do a different disruption, one that at least can become familiar and thus, I hope, less annoying as time goes on.Each reader should read somewhere between 50 and 100 lines per turn. Fewer than that and you can’t get much momentum going. More than that, and there aren’t enough opportunities for other readers.When you’re done reading, please either look up and nod or smile (if you’re on camera) or type “done” in the chat if your webcam is off. In a pinch, or if you’re on your phone, you can just give your last word a real big emphasis and then go silent—and we’ll get the message.After a reader finishes, I’ll come on just long enough to call the name of the next reader. I’ll keep order based on the order on the Participants list. So be listening for when I say your name!One more Big Ask: folks, please stop reading at a period, not just at the end of a line of verse. If the line ends with a period, that’s great. Often, though, the sentence (which ends with a period) does not end with the line, and if you stop at the end of a line and the sentence isn t over, the next reader has to pick up in the middle of a thought, and That’s Very Awkward.If you’re interested, shoot me an email (gardner.campbell AT gmail.com, with @ substituted for AT) or if you’re reading this on FB, send me a private message, and I’ll send you the Zoom link. I’d prefer not to put that link out too publicly, for reasons I won’t cite but I hope are obvious. (If not, I can explain in the email.)I always ask participants to contribute to a Readers’ Journal during these readathons. This time I’ll invite comments, responses, reflections, etc. in the chat itself. I’ll be recording the sessions so I can keep the chat and have a memorial of the event itself. I will not circulate any part of the recording without the consent of the participants involved. The only exception is any part in which I’m speaking, in which case I’ll crop out or completely obscure everyone else’s face. That’s a promise.I think that’s it. If you have questions, don t hesitate to ask.I do hope you’ll join us! Recently I couldn t help myself. I suppose that could apply to many recencies, if that s even a word. Couldn t we go to some special hotel to work on taking the long view, one with a sign outside that said No Recencies ? Ah, digressing already. Where was am I?A colleague whom I very much respect tweeted out her commitment to student-centered teaching as opposed to teaching-centered teaching. I replied with a tweet about one of what I ll call my new heresies (although they re really not new), that I myself favored the both-and. Teachers and students in the center. An interesting Twitter exchange followed, and I promised to explain myself a bit more, so here we are. No longer digressing.Over the years I have become less and less swayed by this-not-that characterizations of responsible, responsive, effective teaching. For example, we are advised to be the guide at the side rather than the sage on the stage. (This isn t exactly what my colleague meant, but I hope she ll bear with me.) I understand the dichotomy, born of the experience of grand pompous windbags reading from yellowed notes oblivious to the presence of young, disengaged, and sometimes eye-rollingly contemptuous would-be learners in the audience. Or, as one of my own former teachers said in my presence, later in life, to my dismay but not my surprise, given my experience in his class: teaching undergrads is 75% talking about your research to a captive audience.Undeniably expert, but a cartoon sage on a cartoon stage. Precisely, ugh.And yet.Why on earth would anyone pay thousands of dollars to be in the presence of anyone but a sage over fifteen weeks of demanding work on unfamiliar material? Notice that sagacity overlaps with, but is not completely synonymous with, expertise. In fact,  sage is one word with two separate meanings and two distinct origins, one of those happy accidents in language that makes a hermeneut like me playfully imagine, coincidence? I think not. Oxford English Dictionary time: a sage is a person who is wise, discreet, judicious. Sage as an adjective, as in sage advice or counsel, is characterized by profound wisdom; based on sound judgement. It s hard to imagine profound wisdom or sound judgment without specific knowledge, and lots of it. Expertise is necessary. But not sufficient. As I tell my students, if they think I am subjective in my grading, they are correct: it is my subjectivity that makes me valuable to them, as it is the seat of my judgment. There are no guarantees available about the soundness of my judgment never any guarantees about that sort of thing. What we as human beings have instead of guarantees is a great cloud of witnesses, those from whom I learned what judgment involved, and for whom I demonstrated my own partial but developing powers of judgment. That is, I have somewhere on the order of 40 or 50 teachers who have judged my work over the years. I would say that around half of them qualified as sages, maybe more. Of those sages, all were different, all brought varied temperaments and approaches to the classroom, all brought varied temperaments and approaches to the task of sharing their sagacity with me in a way that would encourage whatever latent sagacity I might have to develop to its fullest extent.This process continued, with growing intensity and deepening levels of specific expertise, as I went from elementary school, to junior high, to high school, to college, to graduate school. And the most intense contact I had with sagacity was the dissertation, the moment in which I had to wrestle most intensely with distributed sagacity (i.e., the critical conversation) in its bewildering, contradictory, repellent, and attractive forms, all the while apprenticing myself to one particular set of sages (my dissertation director, my second reader, my unofficial guide and mentor) and prepare myself to be in a formal encounter with at least two sages I had not worked with at all, during what we call the defense. Again, no guarantees. The process does not automatically generate sagacity. Profound wisdom and sound judgment are not the sorts of outcomes (even to use that word in this context is to demonstrate its risibility) that can be confidently designed for (see above). But the long series of testimonials, endorsements, encouragements, shaped by genuinely profound wisdom and sound judgment and sometimes buffeted and bruised by the limits of my teachers sagacity and the strange, unpredictable emergence of my own developing powers of judgment, finally added up to enough of a vote of confidence to bring me into the profession.That process, in turn, makes me the professor who offers courses of study within a curriculum, courses of study that students enroll in as they progress through a degree program.Sadly, too many students cannot imagine what I ve just described. Many of them have no idea that there is such a journey, or what it involves, or how it touches on the very journey they have undertaken. Many, too many, have little sense of their education as a journey. Rather, their education appears to them as a set of concurrent and sequential tasks, assigned by those who have the power of assigning tasks. There is no journey. There is only a conveyor belt. The end of the conveyor belt is the reward of oh, greater lifetime earnings? social capital? the chance to build conveyor belts for those who follow? grim thoughts, I confess, but perhaps not unwarranted.So yes, teaching is teacher-centered, and thus also student-centered. The sage demonstrates sagacity, and elicits its development in others. The sage performs sagacity, where performance means not falsity or arrogance but (so I delight to imagine) the primary meaning of the word, per the OED: to carry out. to discharge a service or duty. As an intransitive verb, again per the OED, perform means to do, carry out, execute, or accomplish what one has to do or has undertaken; to carry out one s function, to do one s part . In these senses and why not perform them? the act of performing is an act of deep service to the great cloud of witnesses that surrounds us. That surrounds me. Mrs. Wills. Miss Spraker. Mrs. Lane. Mrs. Parker. Mrs. Dixon. Mr. Barnhart. Miss Byrd. Mrs. Arnold. That s a partial list of the sages who saw me through as far as seventh grade. The list goes on, quite a ways. One of the gifts of age is also that I can see, however grudgingly (still) because of certain flaws and temperamental mismatches in both of us, that probably other teachers had sagacity that was real even if fitful or lost on me at the time. One of the other gifts of age is my own fitful but undeniably stronger powers of discovering sagacity in those who do not immediately display it.So the stage becomes the place in which the teacher s sagacity can be visible to all, and thus made present, and thus made meaningful, performed (sagacity is individual but valuable primarily in relationship). Anyone who s ever attended a great performance of a great play will know that the stage, by some weird alchemy, makes a certain distance and a certain mode of display into an occasion of profound connection, one that could not occur without that nexus of heightened reality framed and made radiant by a proscenium, or thrust into the house, or perhaps surrounded by witnesses as it centers the very space of performance, and by centering that space, empowers what for the poet John Donne characterizes the power of love itself, the power to make one little room an everywhere. I am most grateful, then, in my own journey, not for breakout rooms and report-outs (valuable as they can be), or for think-pair-shares (catalytic as they can be), or polls, or any of the myriad ways in which we rightly encourage what we sometimes confusedly call interaction. I am most grateful for those sages who performed where I could see them, and thus could mysteriously be with them, could fill myself with the savor of their sagacity and then, as Hopkins once wrote of the effect of great art, be inspired to go and do otherwise not in reaction or rebellion, but in accepting my duty, now, to perform my own profession, infused by theirs, but distinctly, for better or worse, my own.You ll see what I did there with that word savor. Sage is also a spice. Unlike the sage above, which comes from the Latin sapere, to be wise, sage-as-spice comes from the Latin salvia, a healing plant. To this day, though the OED warns the usage is Now rare, a sage can still mean A kind of herb or medicinal preparation of herbs. My sages keep saving my life. The medicinal wisdom they performed then, they perform for me still, evermore, beyond measure.As every grateful acknowledger must acknowledge, the remaining faults are my own. During Lent I blogged every day. I can t imagine I ll keep up that pace, though that may simply be a failure of imagination on my part. But I do hope the habit of blogging regularly has settled back into my working and dreaming self.I ve mentioned before that a return to blogging reawakened my sense of the network as a tool for conviviality, to borrow Illich s phrase. That s been a very good thing, as my experience of that conviviality had eroded quite a bit over the years, probably since about 2008 though the erosion was imperceptible at first. Blogging, reading, linking, commenting not branding or gathering the tribe, but conversing these are nourishing things.Eugene Eric Kim undertook a similar season of blogging last year, and his delightful blog post appeared in my revitalized network this year. My learnings are much like his. More conviviality there; thank you, Eric.I m also feeling more prepared to dive back into my work on Doug Engelbart, and hope to restart the Framework interview series over the next few weeks. I ve got some great interviews in the can, so to speak, and I have some ideas about more interviews so there will be more on the way in that area, I hope.And last but by no means least, I ve felt more connected to my earlier self, my pre-pandemic and my pre-exile self. As I work with students, I find myself googling phrases I could dimly remember like the perfume of an idea (apt meta-experience, there) and rediscovering long, thoughtful posts some Gardo fellow had cast onto the waters many years ago. Not a bad chap. He did okay. I ve even begun clicking on the algorithmically generated related posts that show up beneath my new posts, and been surprised by the connections between then and now. Surprised, and sometimes dismayed as well it s discouraging to see those places where not much has changed, aside from people become even more entrenched and loud in their various Positions.But all in all, it is good to be reacquainted: with blogging, with steady writing, with friends on the network and what they have to say. With myself.So, at the conclusion of a new beginning, greetings and felicitations! The organ loft at St. Paul s Covent Garden, London. Photo CC BY-SA-NC Gardner CampbellToday I wanted to do something special for Easter. Why not a podcast then? And for this podcast, I return to Gerard Manley Hopkins, a poet I read for the first time in the fall of 1977. It was love at first reading. Forty-four years later, my enthusiasm for his work is undimmed. As with all great work, the longer you read it, the deeper it becomes.Hopkins wrote a great Easter poem called That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire and of the comfort of the Resurrection. He called it a sonnet with two codas. (A later critic helpfully points out it has three codas.) As he did with several of his poems, especially as he became more interested in the musical quality of spoken verse, Hopkins marked particular stresses in the poem where one might not ordinarily place them when reading (the This of This Jack is a good example). He also marked what he called outrides (syllables to be hurried along) and ties (syllables to be linked together across consonants and vowels in one long arc). The marks are reproduced in the notes of the edition I m working from, The Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins (4th ed., revised and enlarged), edited by W. H. Gardner and N. H. MacKenzie.I have tried to convey Hopkins markings in my reading. My American accent works against, me, of course, but I have done the best I could. This was about the 10th attempt, I guess, and each time I found more things to attend to, more textures to try to realize in my voice. Then I had to try to remember them all in each successive reading. I ended up with what you ll hear below. Whether or not I nailed this take, I do hope I have managed to communicate the wondering, oneiric beginning, the middle section of elegy and anger, and the conclusion of renewed resolve and, then, a kind of astonished peace.I reproduce the poem below, with a recording of my reading beneath it. The vertical lines indicate caesurae, that is, deliberate pauses in the middle of each line.Happy Easter.That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire and of the comfort of the ResurrectionCloud-puffball, torn tufts, tossed pillows | flaunt forth, then chevy on an air-Built thoroughfare: heaven-roysterers, in gay-gangs | they throng; they glitter in            marches.Down roughcast, down dazzling whitewash, | wherever an elm arches,Shivelights and shadowtackle ín long | lashes lace, lance, and pair.Delightfully the bright wind boisterous | ropes, wrestles, beats earth bareOf yestertempest s creases; | in pool and rut peel parchesSquandering ooze to squeezed | dough, crust, dust; stanches, starchesSquadroned masks and manmarks | treadmire toil thereFootfretted in it. Million-fuelèd, | nature s bonfire burns on.But quench her bonniest, dearest | to her, her clearest-selvèd sparkMan, how fast his firedint, | his mark on mind, is gone!Both are in an unfathomable, all is in an enormous darkDrowned. O pity and indig | nation! Manshape, that shoneSheer off, disseveral, a star, | death blots black out; nor mark                            Is any of him at all so starkBut vastness blurs and time | beats level. Enough! the Resurrection,A heart s-clarion! Away grief s gasping, | joyless days, dejection.                            Across my foundering deck shoneA beacon, an eternal beam. | Flesh fade, and mortal trashFall to the residuary worm; | world s wildfire, leave but ash:                            In a flash, at a trumpet crash,I am all at once what Christ is, | since he was what I am, andThis Jack, joke, poor potsherd, | patch, matchwood, immortal diamond,                            Is immortal diamond. I.—OF TRUTH.What is truth? said jesting Pilate; and would not stay for an answer. Certainly, there be that delight in giddiness; and count it a bondage to fix a belief; affecting freewill in thinking as well as in acting. And though the sects of philosophers of that kind be gone, yet there remain certain discoursing wits which are of the same veins, though there be not so much blood in them as was in those of the ancients. But it is not only the difficulty and labor which men take in finding out of truth: nor again, that, when it is found, it imposeth upon men’s thoughts, that doth bring lies in favor; but a natural though corrupt love of the lie itself.The opening sentence in Bacon s essay Of Truth is justly famous. Famous, memorable, and sad: if jesting Pilate had only waited, just a while, would he have gotten his answer? Bacon continues in his weary catalog, depicting those who simply like to spin and spin, saying one thing and then another, thinking to flaunt their freedom by never believing anything, nor speaking with any conviction. Then comes an even harsher pronouncement: the problem is not that truth is hard to find, or that it overrules everything once it is found, but that all too often the lie is simply delicious, irresistible. Lovable. Given the natural though corrupt love of the lie itself, why, indeed, would one wait for an answer to so spectacularly unsophisticated a question as what is truth ? Who would even ask such a question unironically? Bacon implies that Pilate s question was contemptuous scoffing, as Brian Vickers defines jesting in the Oxford University Press edition (1996). It s easy to read the question that way, especially in the long tradition of portraying Pilate as a patsy, a buffoon, a dandy utterly unconcerned with justice who washes his hands of the whole matter.But there may be another story here.Perhaps Pilate s question is not a contemptuous question or a cynical scoff, but the evasive, desperate, and finally exhausted maneuver of a career politician facing a situation he could not have anticipated, convinced that even if there is such a thing as truth, even if he beholds before him the very man who might answer such a question, it will not, cannot matter. When has it ever mattered?I feel some sympathy for Pilate. It is hard to stay for an answer. Truth, justice, vindication, deliverance: these are so often delayed, sometimes many generations, until we fear they will never come. Tomorrow, though, is Easter Day.By Nikolai Ge http://www.picture.art-catalog.ru/picture.php?id_picture=7515, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=4267825 Polarization has eaten our brains.That s the thesis of the excellent first installment of Zeynep Tufekci s projected three-part series called The Misinformation Trifecta. Here s how part one begins: There’s been a lot of focus on misinformation over there—often focusing on the outright COVID denialism. Indeed some of that misinformation has been outright deliberate  falsehoods and lies. Some of it—the polarization around masks or the obsession with hydroxychloroquine—is complicated by events early in the pandemic. Some of it, like claims around vaccines changing your DNA or the wild rumors around 5G chips, are clearly outright false, though the former is also complicated (as it is related to the furor around genetically-modified foods as well). But then there is the misinformation over here which is also quite persistent and also wildly wrong. This misinformation has its own cast of characters, ranging from the outright grifters to the misleading alarmists to, yes, large swaths of respectable opinion leaders and even officials spreading falsehoods. A few days ago, I noticed an article that seemed to hit the trifecta, both content-wise and visually (a no less important form of misinformation). What’s the trifecta here? It’s polarization (eating our brains), bad science (causing terrible policies) and puritanism and moralizing (masquerading as public health). Bad science (causing terrible policies) and puritanism and moralizing (masquerading as public health) will be the next installments, Tufekci promises.  I eagerly look forward to those essays. And yes, Tufekci makes it clear that she s not advocating any kind of false equivalence : some falsehoods are worse than others, and at least in the United States, the damage done by the political parties to fighting the pandemic is clearly not equal. But it also seems important to understand how, and why, misinformation, bad science and policy and terrible attitudes are not just a problem over there. The entire essay is essential reading, and I m grateful for Dr. Tufekci s work, here and elsewhere.I wonder if Tufekci might also consider what I believe to be a potential fourth candidate for her list: Pundit-Trolls (masquerading as journalists). For example, look at this advice from Sifted, a technology opinion site run by Financial Times:Here’s what we’re looking for. A punchy opinion.We like starting conversations. There’s nothing better than a somewhat controversial or unusual point of view to get people talking about a subject.So, don’t pitch us an idea about why it’s a good idea to talk to your customers early on (everyone knows that!) Pitch us an idea about why customers are stupid and should be ignored at all costs. That sounds much more intriguing.I m not so sure. Hyperbole and hot takes may attract rubberneckers, motivate clicks, generate more hyperbole and more hot takes, and feed the hot spew that one encounters routinely via social media (a tag almost comically useless by now). But do they start conversations? Is the answer to banal pieties like it s a good idea to talk to your customers early on only a somewhat controversial or unusual point of view like customers are stupid and should be ignored at all costs ? Really?I think about interrogation and pushback as metaphors that foreground combat and coercion, compared to metaphors like give-and-take. When I hear punchy, I think duck or swing back or give as good as I get. I do not find myself intrigued.Just as with the virologist in the New Yorker article, and the neglect of social promotion the 2014 New York Times internal strategy report warned about, the idea seems to be grab them by the amygdala. Frontal lobe engagement is just too slow, and unpredictable.   In this respect, Sifted is a misnomer. Punched or pinched or provoked or outraged might be more apt. I sure don t think conversations get started this way. More like the conversations in an episode of the old Jerry Springer show.But this isn t a problem with Sifted alone. They at least have the cover of punditry, the land of angles and takes and provocations. Take a look at the headlines and taglines in The New York Times or The Washington Post on any given day. (The mobile version of the Post has particularly punchy taglines.) Think about how they engage your attention. Make a list, and rate them on a hot take scale. (I didn t even know what a hot take was until my students started a hot take thread in one of my class discussion forums. At least the definition here was honest and funny: Hi, I need a place to let all of my really pretentious, unpopular, and insufferable opinions into the ether. )A misinformation trifecta is bad enough. A Four Horsefolk of the Misinformation Apocalypse is worse. I know that if it bleeds, it leads. But cortisone as a business strategy masquerading as engagement is no way to empower a democracy. Michel de Montaigne s Essais begin with an address to the reader:Au LecteurC est icy un livre de bonne foy, lecteur.To the ReaderThis is a good faith book, reader.Many translators render bonne foy as honest. Florio s 1580 translation into English, the version Shakespeare likely worked from, translates the opening this way:EADER, loe here a well-meaning Booke.Nothing wrong with these translations, of course, but for my purposes, good faith with its legal and ethical connotations gets closer to the heart of the matter. Honesty can often but not always be demonstrated. I say there are five dollars there, and you could the dollars, and there are five. Honestly. But of course the currency is backed by the full faith and credit of the government issuing it, and full faith and credit isn t very far from good faith in its reliance on a willingness to undertake a calculated risk.In Montaigne s words, good faith is both a promise on the part of the speaker and a working assumption on the part of the reader, a working assumption that the promise aims to encourage. Good faith, then, is not so much a judgment as an ongoing commitment to relationship that results from a working assumption and works toward maintaining trust on both sides. Process doesn t really get at what I mean here. Marriage might, or hospitality, or a willingness to know and be known even if the objects of knowledge are sometimes difficult or elusive. Difficult and elusive are one thing, but deliberately concealed is something else, especially if one hopes to gain some advantage thereby.When I last taught the Early Modern English Literature survey at school, I decided to look at some Montaigne with my students. We spent a good deal of time on this first section, To The Reader, so we could explore the question of what it might mean to say a book is a good faith book, and likewise, what it might mean to believe a book when it says to you, this is a good faith book, reader. I asked my students which of the books they had read along the way they would call good faith books. The question sent us into a lovely period of silent meditation. I think Montaigne would have been pleased. Or was pleased. After a few moments, students offered names of books they remembered from childhood, or books they had felt especially close to in some way some of them books they had read in their high school and college classes, thankfully. Later, one of the most delightful students in that class did some digging to find other translations of Montaigne s address to the reader, and came up with this pithy statement on the difference between well-meaning and honest : Montaigne’s essay on lying makes me think that an honest promise by Montaigne to be well-meaning may very well be more honest than a well-meaning promise to be honest. That student s work was inspired, and thus inspired further thought on my part a good faith exchange that s a great delight in a sometimes frustrating vocation.To entertain the prospect of welcome, of hospitality; to open oneself to voices that are not familiar, voices that speak of things that may be puzzling or repellent or just strange; to say, I will be here for this book, because I believe it is a good faith book, or because people I trust have told me it is a good faith book: these are the adventures of an education, the ways in which teachers open doors.Today it can be harder to earn that trust than it was when I first began professing the study of English literature. Believing a statement like Montaigne s can seem naive, or damaging to the cause of unmasking deception. Writers are complex. Because they are human, they are fallible, and do not always act in good faith, even when they say or think they do. Yet readerly hospitality is still possible, and is often extended, surprisingly so. And on that assumption of good faith, a conversation can begin. Education can commence. We can go up into the library tower, just as Montaigne did, and see a little farther than before.Au LecteurC est icy un blog de bonne foy, lecteur.  Subscribe via email Enter your email address to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email. Email Address Subscribe Contact Gardner Contact me at gardner.campbell AT gmail.com (substitute @ for AT). In this blog I speak for myself only, not for my employer. Recent CommentsRob McDonald on My beloved English professor, Elizabeth PhillipsLouis Schwartz on Anniversary Documentary, 2021Elaine Metlin on Anniversary Documentary, 2021Gardo on Father s Day 2021BJ on Father s Day 2021Gardo on Paradise Lost Readathon 2021: An Epic OpportunityLarisa Kocic-Zambo on Paradise Lost Readathon 2021: An Epic OpportunityGardo on Paradise Lost Readathon 2021: An Epic OpportunityMargaret Jean Arnold on Paradise Lost Readathon 2021: An Epic OpportunitySteve Greenlaw on Meeting up with myselves Recent Jauntspoetics_whoblinkedfirst.pdfWho Blinked First?If you see this annotation, you re in the wrong place. Select our private Hypothes.is group from the drop-down menu at the top left of this sidebar.A New Company Is Formedy PatGreenway misspells the name: should be Sandy Paton with one t in surname. Apparently Sandy Patton was a jazz singer; Discogs warns against confusing the two singers.Folk Recordings Selected from the Archive of Folk Culture (American FolklifeCurrently available as digital downloads per LOC 12/15/2020: L-02 L-08 L-09 L-12 L-14 through 16 L-18 L-21 through 23 L-25 L-28 L-33 L-34 L-36 through 40 L-43 through 46 L-52 through 57 L-61 through 66 LBC-7, LBC-8 LBC-13Thought as a TechnologyThe diagram is intriguing. I d love to know more. Also, did you mean to write annotate the note instead of annotate the not ? I ask not to be facetious but because at a certain moment in subtle arguments or discourse generally I become quite uncertain about communication. That uncertainty has its uses--but also spurs my [ ]Annotation EDU Trends – Nate AngellAnd as a postscript and portal to more thought: I just realized some of the deeper concerns that underlay my initial annotation and my subsequent response. The phrases all of those good things and caught on are elements within a larger discussion of assessment. They engage all sorts of fundamental philosophical questions that in my [ ]Annotation EDU Trends – Nate AngellPerhaps I misread your question. It seemed to imply that the judgment of all of those good things would somehow be weakened by the fact annotation hasn t caught on. As you know, higher education has a sad history of ignoring or dismissing effective web-enabled affordances full of all those good things. With regard to such [ ]Annotation EDU Trends – Nate Angellif “annotation can do all of those good things […] why hasn’t it caught on?”This question strikes me as faux-naive for the sake of provoking argument, sorry. First, many good things about student learning are already blocked or discouraged by the educational systems we ve devised. Second, the list of web-enabled deeper learning strategies adopted by [ ]Archives Archives CategoriesCategories Meta Log in Entries feed Comments feed WordPress.org

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