Elrond, the elf master of the Last Homely House, in The Hobbit, reads a mysterious treasure map made by dwarves, at first using the light of the room and then moonlight, letting the beams shine through from the back of the map. Along with the runish letters visible to anyone there are moon-letters, which can only be read by the light of the same shape moon and in the same season as when the letters were first written. (On 53 in the Del Rey paperback.)
The best scripters could easily create a blog whose posts were only available in the same stage of moon as when they were written. That would make a curious web site, something like waiting for some rare flower to bloom, as it does, once a decade for one hour in the dead of night.
In a sense the deep archive of an old site like Scripting News is a collection of moon-letters -- the old messages vanish (in part because of their large number and in part because their context is lost) and all we see are the posts visible to the naked eye, today's or this week's. True, there is a search engine, but there are thousands of messages you will never find because you don't know how to call them up, unless you are the sort of scholar who gives up his life to run his fingers over the traces of someone else's life.
Blogs, then, as dwarvish cryptography, with no masterful Elrond waiting at the Last Homely House to read the words, to replenish the saddlebags with food, to fill us with hope and good wishes, before we set out on a dark quest. That's why I think some bloggers should mine their archives and write a book. [Source]
I sent this note via the online course software to my undergraduate class just now. If you see a way to improve on this approach, I'd be pleased to hear.
Class members, this is a quick reminder that we will sometimes have a reading quiz at the start of class. You know from past experience how much better a course is when people have done the reading ahead of time and given it some thought, and that is what a quiz might ask you about: basic details that a careful reader will have noticed, along with an opportunity to show that you have thought about the reading--maybe connected it in your mind to previous readings, previous class conversations, or things you know from other classes and readings or from life experience. All of those are great ways to prepare to contribute well to class discussion.
Because that kind of serious homework preparation hugely changes the quality of a college course, I ask you to do it. In my experience, the conversations are deeper and many more people speak up, and both of those things are great to see. If you have suggestions about other ways to strengthen the preparation for class and the class discussions themselves, please let me know. I look forward to our conversations.
I also usually ask undergraduates to evaluate their preparation and participation from time to time during the semester.
The book group had been meeting every other Tuesday for several weeks, and many good ideas about the campus came up for discussion along the way. But I sat up and took note when a colleague said this:
I connected this sentence immediately to another thought I had been carrying around for a few weeks, something spoken by a teacher to a group of students:
Seen together, the two sentences help teachers remember why students aspire to be the center of their own learning. It's respectful for us to help them do so, and important, too, since they become the users of the knowledge that is passed down and reshaped for new times and invented wholesale along the way. And between the respect and the potency of knowledge that they get to work with, students become energized as learners. You remember whenever you've witnessed such a thing in your own school.
Too often, however, we behave as though we know down deep that we must eventually pass along the cultural heritage, the tools and habits of mind and bodies of information that is our common property, but we don't want to let it quite out of our hands just yet:
That's the move you want to make if you are at ease with your authority and judgment and see no reason to share power. One of the clearest expressions of this problem I've seen came from Celina Su (@CelinaSu) in a brief NY Times letter in 2009. Talking about school reform, she spoke of the deep knowledge held by students, who "simmered with complex analyses of the ways in which school conditions prevented them from learning." Occasionally, students rise up and demand a seat at the table when their schools are being discussed, but how often are they invited naturally, without pressure? The powerful are almost always comfortable keeping hold of the controls. Su's writing about this problem continues. My fuller reaction to her 2009 letter went this way:
Silencing the stakeholders. One way to make clear the power of social media is to identify the thing that is broken without it. Clay Shirky, I'm guessing, might speak about creating the opportunity to coordinate a group that can't easily act in concert, or to call to the microphone a group that usually can't speak on its own behalf. I noticed in a 5/11/09 letter to the NY Times from Celina Su a classic circumstance where a group is ordinarily silenced even when they are central figures in a social structure.
Su is responding to a David Books column that sets up a particular school as a model for reform. He concludes one thing about the meaning of the example the school provides, and Su asks him to slow down and reconsider a wider body of evidence. She talks about listening to the students themselves, who are in one way the most expert of anyone involved in the schools. Midway through the letter, Su says:
It’s startling that urban youth remain hypervisible symbols of the “culture of failure” but are never quoted as the ultimate stakeholders in education policy debates.
Once we get numbers [indicating success] like those Mr. Brooks trumpets, we need to ask the students themselves about the causal links. The students my colleagues and I spoke with simmered with complex analyses of the ways in which school conditions prevented them from learning.
There is the classic social structure that can be challenged by enlightened practices among bureaucrats or careful work by researchers or by grass-roots organizing or by engaging with social media: "...never quoted...the ultimate stakeholders...simmered with complex analyses of the ways in which school conditions prevented them from learning."
Silenced. Knowledge ignored. Activity toward goals thwarted. Then what? Rage? Alienation? Indifference? Cynicism? And so forth.
I recall having been invited to help review my own high school's programs when I was 16 or so, and in many ways this was the most powerful part of my education in those years. It was a chance to speak on something that mattered and that was close to my experience. It was a challenge for me to formulate useful ideas about the swirl of experience, too. It felt respectful to have been asked and to have been given a seat at the table, along with some of my classmates. It felt great, and I learned a lot. In other areas, those years were pretty standard times of alienation and waiting for life to open up.
The school's review created a structure for engagement, just as social media do now for some people. Su's letter clarifies the circumstances that mark the problem, all too common, and hint at some different kinds of solution.