Taking Literacies Back to Experience

   Each week in our Good Stories course we engage a favorite tale of mine with the selection determined by my sense of which one promises to advance our effort to compose destinies that promote peace and justice.  An early theme develops the “water of life” as the source of vitality and renewal needed for this quest.  The search for the renewal of life takes us to the dangerous ground suggested by our primary text, Brian Boyd’s On the Origin of Stories.   His subtitle points to three troublesome critters along this journey: Evolution, Cognition, & Fiction.  The question directing our path asks: How can the stories we tell and produce advance consciousness so that our inner and outer worlds increase peace & justice?

   Persons who dare approach the edge of consciousness best go prepared.  This week’s Good Story tells of Arthur, the King, entering the deep woods at that edge and being confronted by the ugliest creature even seen.  That’s what ebbs out of the unconscious, the primeval swamp where new meaning evolves shape-shifting, grotesque yet potentially gorgeous. 

   Surprise, surprise—Guess what?  This isn’t pretty to the hegemonic powers that be.  Today I travel to Tucson for my professional development and the university questions my choice.  Having considered the options of going to the traditional annual meetings of professional organizations, I decided instead that Zen Mind, Zen Horse has more to offer toward my teaching and research.  Knowing Arthur’s tale, why should I be surprised that the workplace questions my choice?  The Good Stories have warned me over and over: expect to be challenged when you venture to the edge.

   After an initial exasperation, I realized the challenge is good because it invites pulling the elephant out of the closet for persons who can’t yet smell it.  Think of the elephant as concrete experience and the room as symbolic representation.  School rooms too often act as if representations (e.g., literacy or letter-making) exist apart from the real world.  For example, classes study dystopian literature without first and repeatedly claiming the primacy of authentic real-world constructions that are growing within the individuals and their communities.  Another example that bothers me: teachers model and students are allowed to grab Google images for their digital media productions instead of constructing their own representations. To strangle literacies from experiences is an act of violence, harshly disrespectful of each person’s right to author and voice.

           

      

I choose Zen Mind, Zen Horse because it returns literacy to authenticity through hands-on engagement with horses, coached by persons (including a neurosurgeon horseman and a doctor in psychology) who recognize that “our left hemisphere, armed with its overwhelming power of speech, remains wary of its reticent, emotive, and mute counterpart on the right [hemisphere of the brain]” and that “the horse also shows us the joy that comes from living with the bare truth of our selves” (pp. 6, 287 in Allan Hamilton’s Zen Mind, Zen Horse).

    
  Good Stories is part of the University’s I-Series program where tending to Big Questions are prominent.  Our course connects literacy with meaningful personal and social change.  To do this, students learn to work with stories across four levels of explanation.  Brian Boyd develops these as universal, local, personal, and particular.  We elaborate the universal level by finding resonance with archetypes in traditional tales (cf. Marie Louise von Franz, Interpretation of Fairy Tales).  As indicated in the subtitle of our course, Teaching Narratives for Peace & Justice, the construct of power takes center stage.  Across time and literature, the horse best provides the source for understanding the archetype of power, as evident in the term, horsepower. 

   My research informs the fundamental connection of literacy with meaningful pro-social personal and significant organization change (that is, peace & justice), and it comes in expanding my experience with horses and in the subsequent articulation of those experiences into courses like the Good Stories class and programs like Reins of Power that I have provided for teachers on several occasions. 

   That’s a brief on how the Zen Mind, Zen Horse program informs my work in literacy education, and it suggests the direction I think professional development needs to head.  While I don’t expect many educators will find their way to a living horse, I’m encouraged with the emphasis given to the Maker Movement and how it’s infused into prototype opportunities such as the Connected Learning MOOC featured by the National Writing Project this past summer.

Happy trails, y’all.

Saturday Morning Live

butterfly fluttering at edge of visibility

So I just spent my early morning, not as planned & more compulsively than I want to acknowledge.  I was really bothered because comments that my #CLMOOC friends said they’d added weren’t showing up! My nice-guy attempts to find them, to fix settings were not working.  Grrr.

That’s just not right!  #Connected Learning means connecting, right?  I think +Elyse Eidman-Aadahl even replaced the C in MOOC to stand for “connecting” or “collaboration” instead of “course,” and I like that. 

And I really wanted to see those specific comments.  One new connection (and I hope collaboration) I’d made by participating in the MOOC was +Terry Elliott, and his note in the Google+ Community said he’d commented in my blog.  To boot, an “old” friend, +Kevin Hodgson, @dogtrax, my model of reckless productivity, said he had too. So I was almost at toothgnashing about missing comments. 

Prior to #CLMOOC, no comments was blog-norm.  I’m basically ok with writing for myself and throwing it into the ocean, but a bit of response was certainly delicious.

So today I was relatively determined to suss it out.  I googled for help, followed the directions as best I could: Nada.  Well, no joy immediately; but I mucked about.  The “messing around” of HOMAGO doesn’t quite fit me since I’m not on track to geekdom. I can’t even manage remixing off of +Chad Sansing & friends' terrific mozilla thimbles.  Maybe another new CLMOO-Collaborator +Sheri Edwards will help me out since she’s doing it beautifully.

Anyway, the muck of it was that I lost my background image.  The beautiful sunset scene got zapped completely from my blog.  Double Grr--that had probably been my favorite part of the blog other than the hope that somebody might one day comment. 

So I backed up another step and tried risked re-making with a completely different design from Blogger’s options.  Voilà!  I was also able to piddle around rearranging the gadgets that I’d tried unsuccessfully to add before, and the new design page let's me do that too.  I got the background image up again & now I see the long-lost comments.  Thanks, guys!

Lesson of the day:  Muck on, John Donne!

Why write? Because you love to.

Why Write?

Because you love to.

At heart, that’s the only reason to do anything.  (Of course, we might have to continue to penetrate the meaning of love.  But, back on-topic--)

If you’re not so sure that you love to write, please let me continue.

1) Humans “write” because it is our distinctive character.  Kenneth Burke, called the most important rhetorician of the 20th century, distinguishes humans as the “the symbol-using, symbol-making, and symbol-misusing animal” (Language as Symbolic Action).  If your symbolic action doesn’t correspond with “writing,” consider expanding the field of composition.

2) If you have difficulty claiming that you love to write, explore options.  Troy Hicks uses the acronym MMAPS to guide teaching of comp, digital or otherwise.  Look at the mode, media, audience, purpose, and situation that you use and play with them.  I discovered joy in composing as I played with digital media.  I got into DMP in ought-to mode; but as I tried out production programs that matched up with my disposition, I connected the photography I love with words, found ease of precise editing, and focused on a topic of passion (riding horses). I’ve continued to grow in love with Digital Media Production, but it’s still hard work.  (on DMP, check this.)

3) Let writing go to edge of consciousness.  That’s where vitality comes in.  Like dressage masters, we should always keep in mind that if, at the end of the lesson, the writer is not happier and healthier, then something needs attending.  If we don’t write until we find this for ourselves, how can we expect it in our classroom?

3+) If you can’t do it for yourself, do it for the kids.  Sorry about pulling that card, but we know that good teachers of writing write, like good teachers of reading read.  And we know that the best teachers teach what they love: enthusiasm motivates intrinsic, authentic, life-long learning like nothing else.  Check the process-product research; or better yet, check out your own self-directed drive.

4 or 5) Can’t find time?  No easy solution here, but try buying yourself out.  Explore paying someone to do something you’d rather not do (house cleaning, food prep, walking the dog) or even doing without x (a meal, a TV show, a graded assignment).  You might be surprised how hard it is to prioritize what we love, especially the kind of passion that takes time and tending.

Text & Context Frame in Wonder

       The joy of composing often dances in the way a sense of light guides the focal point until awe half releases breath and holds, filling the frame so that the centerpiece arranges like a hummingbird poised, counterbalanced by the invisible scent of nectar.  The rule of thirds handily reassures the steady pressure needed to claim a capture of beauty, and then the kept breath escapes.  But the texture and grace has been brought closer by presuming to enter the flow of light, to still the falling petals, to treasure the residue of storm clouds.  And having entered this, the delicate exchange of finding the center of focus flows, a half-step from the midpoint for the harmony with a slightly blurred background, a bow to mystery, the unknown, longing, calling.

       When one holds peace, we compose: as a rider knows about how balance in the riding trot cannot be fixed but continuously moves to complement a mythical perfection, or how the poet circled the tower as a falcon or a moon marking the magnetic field.

       When I entered the gravity of “What’s the Most Beautiful Thing About a Horse,” my being suspended into the question.  It’s a field of joy, wonder, in the power, amid beauty.  So when I assembled the array of images and words, the forced separation of work and play evaporates like the disappearing dew, the magic of mist; and we dance with the feel of this and then this, and ah, hmm, and . . .  One gift comes in the distilled glance at contents in a flexible frame so that tentative words offer inadequate names.

       When I look back at the composition, I look for my response to the invitation, and I see or, better yet, feel the smile of a stranger-no-more (see ~2:04 in What’s the Most Beautiful Thing About ).  

On either flank of the horse float the two sides of the globe, making words but much more.  It’s the weaving of peace, the soothing of mistrust, moving closer to power, the dissolve of difference.

The CLMOOC Flood

Perhaps MOOC should be added to the list of synonyms for “flood.”  If you haven’t had the sensation recently of treading your way amidst a massive flow of tweets, that rush rhizomatic & not organized like a school of fish, or if you still want to catch a riptide of more tantalizing things-to-try than a too-brief-summer can hold, just tune in to the final week of the Connected Learning MOOC or even scan the Make Bank. (Also, see Kevin’s blog on the Make Bank.)

Flooding offers the rare attribute of discerning what comes to the top.  The test includes being able to hold my breath while an amazing display passes by with a forced opportunity of sensing the “right” ones.  Which of the treasures most resonate with my own being and particular context?  The strain might not be worth it except for my fascination with the quantum concept of timespacematter/ing and due to the exigence of affirming “local knowing/learning.”

Whether a MOOC can attune to the local gets featured in an exchange between Clay Shirky and Patrick Deneen.  Deneen casts a dim view of MOOCs, calling them the “Wal-Mart of higher education” in contrast with his preference for the farmers’ market that favors local knowledge and unique, situated identity.  Shirky also recognizes potential problems with MOOCs but concludes: “what happens now is largely in the hands of the people experimenting with the new tools, rather than defending themselves from them.”  I believe that the Connected Learning MOOC has made a bold exploration into the positive potential within our new address of www.

In my lurking (trolling? treading? sifting?) of the CLMOOC waters, I caught or was caught by (probably both) the popcorn remix.  It was like a gar, as I recall those boyhood days, exciting but on the scary side.  I’ve developed a caution when Chad puts up something as if it’s going to be easy to remix.  Apparently, I have an allergic reaction to coding.  So I resisted trying it out until +Scott Glass put up a compelling mix of music, art, and text.

Perhaps in a rhizomatic way this remix invitation collided with an intention to make a book trailer.  I’d seen both beginning teachers and fourth-graders produce quality work with iPad’s iMovie template. (For a 5 min intro, see: How to create trailers with iMovie on the iPad.)  About the same time, the postman delivered a long-awaited book.  My own production process, while stimulated by popcorn and the iMovie template, led me into the use of Camtasia, but I don’t think I would have made What’s the Most Beautiful Thing About without the #CLMOOC flood.

Diffracting as well as Reflecting

        

     I’m re-mixing a variety of items on "diffraction."  So don’t expect scientific accuracy.  I gather that some persons think physics should not generate metaphorical thought or imagination; I don’t see it that way, and I’m not a physicist.  To me, all language is metaphor and I’m no longer looking for an objective reality.  My intention includes not getting stuck; instead, I want vitality, that and to lean toward social justice, toward increased consciousness, and to ride.

     Diffraction has my attention because I sense that educators are being restricted; if not stuck, we're at least slowed or distracted by “reflection."  Maybe tossing in “diffraction” might loosen the restrictions on thinking and doing.  In my playful read of physics, diffraction (or diffraction grating) goes with rainbows while reflections make reverse images.  Or as one commenter noted: “What we call reflection really isn't. It's absorption and re-emission.”  Those things are valuable but don’t we want more?  Look at these Google images on “diffraction and prisms.” 

Diffraction and Prisms

     Let’s let Feynman (1965 Nobel Prize for Physics on Quantum Electrodynamics; see PBS NOVA bio: Best Mind Since Einstein) loosen our minds from the hold of reflection.  Here are some notes and quotes from a 15 minute video clip of his 1979 QED lecture on “Reflection and Transmission.”

* Because shadow was very sharp, Newton made a mistake on his theory of light as particle.

* Transmission is opposite of reflection.

* Wave theory was used as explanation (but the mystery remained).

* Rules (for behavior of energy related to reflection & transmission) are empty of modeling, that is, empty of a model of the type you are expecting. (14:20 into the video)

This connects with what I'm reading in Jung's Red Book, p. 231 & note 25: “If you live according to an example, you thus live the life of that example, but who should live your own life if not yourself?  So live yourselves.  This is not a law, but notice of the fact that the time of example and law, and of the straight line drawn in advance has become overripe.”  Reflection is too tied to a done deal, even if the example is from our own personal history. 

Let’s do reflection and make sure we go further.  #CLMOOC invested not only in web tech but in making.  Check out the variety of makes, especially in cycle 2 and 3, and imagine how this might open our classrooms to let light diffract, to spin patterns beyond.  Karen Fasimpaur gives a lovely example; she plans a Mini-maker day for kids with “unique consideration #1: there will be no computers” and activities including “make a mask, yoga for kids, make jewelry, make a snack, cardboard challenge, and make a puppet.”  Love it.

I have to balance my computer screen time with hands-on horsemanship.  I’m in my mind this morning but yesterday Leg’cy was sound enough for us to move into mounted work/play.  Embodiment makes more complete being/doing.  We move into Rumi’s mystery “out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing . . . even the phrase ‘each other’ doesn’t make any sense.”

Reflections/Diffractions on NWP's Making Learning Connected

Very surprisingly, CLMOOC (National Writing Project’s on-line Making Learning Connected) is carrying to me the tone of NWP in-person events; the tone that vibrates a certain voltage of the small-retreat quality, signaling community and the kind that I seek out and prefer over other gatherings.  The NWP-tone has provided me with a balm in a profession that forces isolation because working at the edge of consciousness drives one into an inarticulate zone where easy conversation has the luke-warmness that Revelation 3:16 despises. 

In the hot/cold tumultuous shoreline, I have to bumble about.  And while I’d rather be alone than banal or criticized for using fragments, yet I yearn for professional intimacy. And, more importantly, I’m certain that acting toward social justice depends on collaboration right here at the shoreline, not in the calm waters where words have high clarity and formulaic reactions that have already been tried, found failing, and harnessed by powers-that-be, rendered lukewarm.

How many years did I endure large professional conferences and their excruciating publications because I didn’t even know that there was an option to sharing and extending scholarship.  Finally along came in-person NWP.  And now, this summer, I’m getting the NWP-tone even in the bumptious choppy fragmatic tweetchat (Storify summary forthcoming).  How surprising is that!

The special resonance hums in like-mindedness; perhaps the word “soul” could even be used; it’s a dangerous term that needs to be reserved for times when we trust its special meaning to be shared.  The vibration that I value has to penetrate into the inarticulate, like Van Morrison’s “Into the Mystic,” and so often association with persons who flaunt the term leads into disappointment, possibly on into deeper isolation and alienation, even despair.  It’s better to be alone than to be false.

This calls to mind the Rilke poem, “Too Alone,” translated by Robert Bly in Selected Poems of Rainer Maria Rilke

     I want my own will, and I want simply to be with my will,

     as it goes toward action,

     and in the silent, sometimes hardly moving times

     when something is coming near,

     I want to be with those who know secret things

     or else alone.

Passion such as this has the distinctive quality of demanding action because it “contains” suffering, not so much personal but toward compassion for injustice in the world.  To choose the passionate life calls one toward companionship and to service or stewardship that tends the “soul of the world” (elusive meaning but more toward Carl Jung than Google’s top responses: Coelho’s Alchemist).   

I’m hesitant to sound the name anima mundi because it draws us toward the out-of-control and reminds me of that bar where Luke Skywalker found so many weird creatures.  But to traffic with passion means going where it takes you.  In last night’s tweetchat, the conversation around “access” and “equity” and then “collaboration/co-labor” carried the kind of tingling in my skin that said “yes.”  Isn’t it time to venture ahead trusting in the NWP-tone and a few reckless adventurers?

Credo & Digital Media Production

“Midway in our life's journey, I went astray
from the straight road and woke to find myself in a dark wood.”

           So begins, Dante’s Divine Comedy as translated by Anthony Esolen. 

And here we are about midway through the #CLMOOC with our own invitation into composing a credo with particular application to the principles of Connected Learning.  Here's a video on mine and a few production notes:

Credo July 9 2013 (the link)

 I find this an imposing task, even slightly frightening, and yet much appreciate the opportunity and the models that have been offered.  I’m increasingly aware of the importance of making access, a topic that Terry Elliott rightly emphasizes.  The first weeks’ focus on comic-style avatars and re-mixing toys probably paved the road, opened gates, or lowered barriers, in Terry’s metaphor.  The early stage of HOMAGO (Ito, etal.) suggests that our design efforts with digital media, with connected learning, should consider how to allow and encourage “hanging out.”  It’s not only a foundation for the apprenticeship of observation, it builds the trust needed to go into the dark wood. 

So after checking out a variety of takes on credos, I returned to some of my treasures, favorite photos I’ve taken and depths of living I’ve tasted.  I thought I might try some of those apps (like Haiku Deck or Story Creator, both added to my iPad from the MOOC), but I chose to work with my medium of choice.  Not exactly, because I thought I’d be using Camtasia as I favor some of its editing capacity; but it didn’t want to import images I’d mixed on Power Point.  I find it easier to play with text fonts, shaping and sizing photos, etc., in PPT than in the production programs I use.  Then it’s easy to do screen captures of the slides and import.  I found it easier to bring them into iMovie than to Camtasia, and I want to keep working with iMovie because it’s more and more the program of choice and use by my college students.  I prefer other programs for adjusting visuals, mixing audio tracks, but . . .

My sound track came from a mix I’d composed on Ujam.com.  I’d recorded our front porch chimes (key of C) and birdsongs in our woods.  I mixed that with a jazz option, I think.  I wish I had more knowledge and skill with music, but I’m determined that digital media production should be as authentic as possible.  So I “make” as much of it as I can. 

The script for voice over came through early morning musing, travel to tend my horse (not able to ride due to a lameness issue so I’m currently soaking her front hooves in Epsom salts instead of riding), reading other credos, and dialoging with favorite images. 

I’m thinking making credos might be a good activity for professional development with teachers.  Choice is so important and I’ve seen terrific variety in the apps and other presentational formats that have used for presenting credos in the MOOC.  I also like this focus because the content is anything but superficial; and this depth, therefore, counterbalances the capacity of technology to go glitzy.  I remember far back in rhetoric classes when I first heard, “Style is the man.”  The split of style from substance costs dearly.  Integrity must be key.  Authenticity.  Meaning.  However we make literacy, let’s walk the talk.  And let’s make a path toward someplace worth going.

Literacies, Essential Questions, & Inalienable Rights

 The demand for one strikes at the core.  When educators use terms like “essential” (e.g., “Using Technology to Make Essential Questions . . .” & “On Genuine vs. Bogus Inquiry—Using EQs Properly”) and related terms such as “authentic” and “driving,” the intent may be good but the danger is great.  The source of what’s genuine, authentic, essential drives one over the edge of knowledge into a falling that can only be held by acceptance of not-knowing, of living in longing, of the hole in the cup that flows back to the source (see David Wilcox, “Break in the Cup”).

When a teacher initiates an EQ (or a driving question in PBL), the inalienable right of an individual has already been threatened, and an awake person’s inner knowing automatically bars the door.  Gnosis, the direct access to ultimate knowledge, opens from the inner heart and sniffs out surely the wolf in lamb’s clothing even when the beast lacks self-knowledge or acts out of the unconscious, assuming that the professional garb authorizes external control.  Teachers who have been dominated by external controls throughout their education and have been trained to post the objective, the EQ, and to enforce the code of conduct are subject to semi-conscious presumption of control.

The path toward authenticity plummets into multiplicity.  Neil Gaiman gives a quantum diffraction of multiplicity in a conversation between Shadow and Sam in American Gods:

“It’s not easy to believe.”

“I,” she told him, “can believe anything. You have no idea what I can believe.”

“Really?”

“I can believe things that are true and I can believe things that aren’t true and I can believe things where nobody knows if they’re true or not . . . that light is a wave and a particle, that there’s a cat in a box somewhere who’s alive and dead at the same time (although if they don’t ever open the box to feed it it’ll eventually just be two different kinds of dead), and that there are stars in the universe billions of years older than the universe itself. I believe in a personal god who cares about me and worries and oversees everything I do. I believe in an impersonal god who set the universe in motion and went off to hang with her girlfriends and doesn’t even know that I’m alive. I believe in an empty and godless universe of causal chaos, background noise and sheer blind luck”  (American Gods: The Tenth Anniversary Edition: A Novel, HarperCollins. Kindle Edition, pp. 348-9). 

The ability to hold multiplicity does not mean a person cannot choose a better action among alternatives in a specific contextual situation (e.g., Forms of Ethical and Intellectual Development).

Essential questions are not to be answered, certainly not corralled in objective tests, and yet they are to be explored and the primary guide for that comes from the inner heart.  Exploring essential questions stirs the heart of education; many are reaching toward such education as in Connected Learning and MakerFaire.  I believe they’re at the heart of our UMCP I-Series courses, including the one I love to teach.  The way we search in Good Stories—Teaching Narratives for Peace & Justice comes in developing resonance in archetypal stories (e.g., “Illumination,”  “Main Idea on Auto-Pilot Makes Nonsense”).

What we should expect from our search for essence is not answers and not even happiness, certainly not fame or fortune.  As stressed by Elyse and others in the #CLMOOC, it’s more toward passion (e.g., “Writing as Making/Making as Writing).  Again, let’s not get fixated on bliss, for passion is as distinguished by suffering as by happiness.  I tend to choose the term vitality as a distinctive quality of approaching essence.

For those of us who play and work in story land (that is, in literature, rhetoric, and broader composings), capacity to explore for essences, thus for resonance and for vitality, can be expressed in the term “literacies.”  Literacies can be conceived as a capacity to work/play along the edge of consciousness in order to resource vitality, to enhance relationships (including building community), and to strive toward peace and justice.  Such a perspective on literacies affirms the need to go deeper than the surface, to engage technologies into play—yes, because play releases the imagination and persistence and the escape from fear of failure that are needed to reach toward justice that allows individuality.  Play also erases cognitive fences that cut literacy off from intuition, flow, and other forms of knowing.

And that’s a good place to take the invitation.  Go play.  Like in #CLMOOC. 

The Revolution of PD, Avatars, & MOOCs

Collage of pages from CLMOOC

Avatar.  The entry of that term into my lexicon remains hazy, but it probably traces back ~15 years to a dystopian maze of overheard snippets between two teenagers about videogames and RPGs.  Even when given admission to the cyberworld, I didn’t get it.  The computer screen filled with violent action and multiple lives while the human's eyes transfixed, his body contorted, inert except for thumbs jabbing a little black box with red and yellow buttons, maybe a white one.  The controller might have been jammed into my hands briefly just as some alien form zapped up the “avatar?”  All this orchestrated with electronic screaming.  It was like an underwater nightmare with me, avatarish, almost imploding, starved for air.

My inarticulate prayer then must have been: Please transport me to a real-life riding arena with a close-contact saddle on a spirited warmblood, where two interconnected one-lives depend on concentrated subtle communion, even with sensuous embodiment down to the earthy horseshit on boots and hooves.

So when the #CLMOOC featured avatar-making in its opening week, I felt immediately banished to the sidelines, or perhaps more like peeping through the knothole into a game that’s called football but uses a round object instead of the more familiar spiraled oval.  Still more so like watching a 3-D version of snitches whizzing around in cyberspace, not knowing the rules, and not caring much.


I probably would have abandoned the CLMOOC blog site except that I was instructor of record for a class titled “The Profession of Teaching”

and having been thoroughly impressed with a 1-1 iPad elementary school, especially the ~100% engagement in high-quality work of learners, I’d launched our course into The Revolution of Professional Development.  The CLMOOC appeared as a godsend, maybe.  

Just a year earlier I’d taught this course without the aid of a single app, with little awareness of iPads, and minimal felt need to be developing PLNs as a part of the capstone for sending new teachers into the profession.  But my year with the 1-1 iPad collaboration and with personally trying HOMAGO (mostly involving my blog and digital media production) had convinced me that vitality in professional development in teaching must be tied to PLN development that is integrated with social media, instructional technology, and learning management systems; in short, the domain that the Connected Learning Massive Open On-line Course was exploring.

Just a year earlier I’d taught this course without the aid of a single app, with little awareness of iPads, and minimal felt need to be developing PLNs as a part of the capstone for sending new teachers into the profession.  But my year with the 1-1 iPad collaboration and with personally trying HOMAGO (mostly involving my blog and digital media production) had convinced me that vitality in professional development in teaching must be tied to PLN development that is integrated with social media, instructional technology, and learning management systems; in short, the domain that the Connected Learning Massive Open On-line Course was exploring.

But what if these young teachers had already got it?  In preparation for the Spring 2013 course, I’d considered that this cohort of 18 interns, looking to be in the app-generation, ages about 25-35, had already acquired sufficient techno-capacity either from their year’s internship, related courses, or from living on the net.  To find out, I sent them to SurveyMonkey and found that none claimed to have a PLN, only 1 blogged, none had used the popular iPad app EduCreation, about half used Twitter, and only about 22% had been on Google+ hangout.  All used laptops and half claimed familiarity with either MovieMaker or iMovie.  

I’d already learned that my college students were much more consumers of YouTube than producers.  Directing our University of Maryland Writing Project had shown me that professional use of social media among teachers could not be assumed and that experience with PD seldom featured interactive technology.  Teachers were somehow expected to get learners to be makers without being makers themselves—and PD was in collusion: let’s hire a somebody to tell us how to do it.

The year I'd just spent collaborating with the 1-1 iPad school convinced me that the infusion of technology works, that it offers the best answer to the dominant concern for classroom management as well as for differentiation, and that effective implementation demands a revolution in professional development for teachers.  In order for teachers to flow in the current of ever-changing apps, teachers must experience engagement with them; in other words, “making” must take dominance over reading about and hearing lectures on STEM, TED talks, and other guru-guided formulas.  The PD must also be distinguished by active participation in a community of professionals who are makers.  Teachers have to transform into risk-takers, re-mixers, and collaborators.

That much was and is very clear.  Then along comes Avatar.  Why should that throw me?

First of all, while I wasn’t drawn to making myself a superhero or a figure out of South Park or Mad Men (having watched neither of the shows), my students jumped in.  I was thrilled to see their avatars popping into the CLMOOC (see collage at the top); our Twitter hashtag spashed with clever images.  If nothing else, the device of making avatars propelled the new professionals into public space; and more slowly, but still surely, I began to see them taking the risk of publishing their thoughtful blogs.  By the end of our 5 week course, one-third of them had gone public (on edublog, blogspot, & wordpress).  And most of the others were making blogs in word or google docs that included photos and other graphics, and thus promised entry into the profession as participatory PLN-ers.  Also, all had completed a PD-worthy digital media production connected to best practice that they observed at the 1-1 iPad school.

Having submitted grades for the course, I’m now returning to the conundrum around Avatar.  While I share some of the skepticism over Wikipedia, I felt it might be just the source for my exploration.  My alienation from Avatar was initially confirmed because I recognized none of the 50 avatar illustrations from films, TV, games, books & print media, music, and other uses (including an American racehorse).  While these “disambiguations” failed to clarify meaning, superpower help came in Wikipedia’s discussion of avatar’s origin:
In Hinduism, an avatar /ˈævətɑr/ (Hindustani: [əʋt̪aːr], from Sanskrit अवतार avatāra "descent") is a deliberate descent of a deity to Earth, or a descent of the Supreme Being 
(i.e., Vishnu for Vaishnavites), and is mostly translated into English as "incarnation", but more accurately as "appearance" or "manifestation."
http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=9129551066165115330

That helps because it links me back to my initial resistance to what I experienced as gratuitous violence connected with a human body that’s reduced to thumb-jabbing and whatever mindgames go on in videogames & RPGs.  For reasons not to be elaborated here, I have strong convictions that incarnation connects with whole body and with nonviolence.  This avatar issue also connects with a concern that implementation of technology risks contributing to classrooms stuck in flash-boom.  In stark contrast, education worth having develops mind-body-spirit, empowering agency and collaboration that advance peace and justice.  I know that’s a big statement that wants elaborating, but I’m eager to go get on my horse.  For now, I’ll just add one teaser: I’m finally reading Gaiman’s American Gods and wondering at the confluence of ideas there and ones presented in this blog.  Stay tuned.