“Once Knecht confessed to his teacher that he wished to learn enough to be able to incorporate the system of I Ching into the Glass Bead Game.  Elder Brother laughed.  ‘Go ahead and try,’ he exclaimed. ‘You’ll see how it turns out. Anyone can create a pretty little bamboo garden in the world.  But I doubt that the gardener would succeed in incorporating the world in his bamboo grove.’ ”

Hermann Hesse- The Glass Bead Game

A long hiatus often indicates a formal life change; such is here the case.  I have a new job: Director of Learning Environments and Media Production; a potentially unfortunate acronym though perhaps accurate.  We’ll see how things develop.  I’ve been at it (formally) for about 3 weeks and not surprisingly things have been a little rough.  Again not surprisingly, most of the difficulty stemmed from underestimating from and change.  In other words I spent the first 2.8 weeks acting like a manager rather than a director, and it turns out that there’s an order of magnitude difference.  To resort to a military metaphor, it’s the difference between the classes of NCO and Officer (in the Navy there’s an odd concatenation: Warrant Officer, which may point semantically to a significant difference between the Navy and the Army). Managers (NCO’s) are responsible for getting things done; Directors, CIO’s, and the like are responsible for deciding what things need to get done, when they need to be done, and more than occasionally how they need to get done.  It’s the last that’s tricky.  There’s a fine line between “getting things done” and “doing things”, particularly when you realize that the common tools in both cases are people who report to you.  Gathering firewood is easy; getting others to gather firewood is a bit more difficult; knowing when there’s enough firewood for the entire camp is a responsibility; making sure there’s the right enough, not too much, firewood to go around is a full time occupation.

This is not a pipe. It is a reproduction of "The Treachery of Images," René Magritte’s 1928–29 painting, which is also not a pipe.

Which relates, somehow, to an upcoming discussion of social media, or at least: That makes me think of…

One of the things that we’re likely to hear is that, “Social Media is not new, or perhaps News; humans, being mammals, have always been ‘social beings.” Which is certainly true and probably a good antidote for the bandwagon virus.  It does, however, leave out the factors of time and scale.  Radio and telegraph are, in the same sense, only shouting, and the internet only television writ generally producible.  If the fact that you can send a message from Europe to America in seconds rather than months seems to you not to matter, then saying that there’s no news to social media is no doubt profound.  Profound or not, it’s undoubtedly important, because when you do factor in scale and immediacy you get sea-change.

In the late ’90s you heard a lot of ed-tech conversations about whether instructional technology improved learning.  Nowadays there doesn’t seem to be much point to that discussion; technology educational and otherwise is water.  It’s not good or bad; neither useful nor a waste of time.  It’s what we do, and you do or don’t participate at your own risk. Either way you’re making the culture, the world; you always have been, nothing new there. But if you think about it, it gets confusing:

The development of electronic media blurs the line between map and territory by allowing for the simulation of ideas as encoded in electronic signals, as Baudrillard argues inSimulacra & Simulation:

“Today abstraction is no longer that of the map, the double, the mirror, or the concept. Simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being or substance. It is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: A hyperreal. The territory no longer precedes the map, nor does it survive it. It is nevertheless the map that precedes the territory – precession of simulacra – that engenders the territory.”  (Baudrillard, 1994, p. 1)

Neil Gaiman makes it a little more human:

One describes a tale best by telling the tale. You see? The way one describes a story, to oneself or the world, is by telling the story. It is a balancing act and it is a dream. The more accurate the map, the more it resembles the territory. The most accurate map possible would be the territory, and thus would be perfectly accurate and perfectly useless. The tale is the map that is the territory.

1.10  The pronoun is important here, not “we” as in “part of a team whose mission is space exploration,” but rather the naïve “I”  that assumes that in terms of the enterprise sweeping the floor is as important as rocket science. Not simply that we each have a part to play, but that in some important sense all parts are equal.

2.00  The core mission of educational institutions is creating citizens.

2.10  What exactly we mean by citizen becomes the question; “Americans” doesn’t really clarify much.  In fact that’s part of the job; deciding what our country should look like, believe, and do.

2.11  We can debate the specific but not the general.

3.00 Currently higher education is spending a lot of energy discussing  ePortfolios a central component of witch is the concept of Reflective Learning.

3.10  Reflective Learning means that you think about why you’re learning a thing, how you learn it, and the learning has and will affect your life and world.

3.20  A direct result of growth of interest in ePortfolios and Reflective Learning is  the development of individual Personal Learning Environments.

4.00  I’d like to propose a variation of the PLE; let’s call it the Personal Work Environment.

4.10  The provided PWE engine is WordPress Multi-User which can function as anything from a simple blog to a fairly robust CMS.

4.11  The provided community is the current  Answers Service Center Staff including the student staff.

4.20 What each of us does with these provisions is where the personal  comes in.

4.21  There is no right way to proceed; so far there aren’t even any real methods or best practices.

4.22  Perhaps there never will be.

5.00  Is this a requirement of continued employment?

5.01  Not exactly; at least not at the moment, but probably something like it sooner or later.

5.10  What is going to be required is Personal and Professional growth and learning, and an Active Participation in the Work Community.  At the very least this means keeping up with the evolution of technology and its potential uses, and sharing what you have learned and thought.

A Tool to Deceive and Slaughter (2009)

My own current form is suffering serious time constraints, which in part explains the lack of activity here, but hopefully things will pickup. Spring’s on the way which should mean some new image work, and there’s a new web-experiment in the works.it’s still in cloak mode at the moment, but should surface sometime in the next couple of weeks.

At any rate, LA is going to take a little different track for a bit. Blogging for me is always a little like thinking out loud, but with an audience; talking to yourself and not knowing who’s listening. Right at the moment though, I’m going to be expecting my new staff to be paying attention. This isn’t purely an ego trip, it’s partly a way of getting them used to a new technology format, and letting them a little bit inside my head. And yes, for those of you on staff, there will be tests (though not for a week or two) and I will expect that you keep up on a fairly regular basis. For those who haven’t been following along, let’s start with a little history and context: I like to say that everything I know about labor relations and management, I learned working with horses and mule’s. To be fair though, I also picked up a few tricks working as a field construction Boilermaker in Coalstrip Montana. That’s where I figured out that life was a good deal more serious than I had normally paid attention to, and a bit more complicated, because building a coal-fired generating plant in the middle of Paradise made you kind of wonder what you were up to and why. Here’s my old friend Wally McRae with kind of a reminder:

If you’re on staff, you’re probably wondering what this has to do with where we’re headed. Don’t worry, be happy, all will be revealed, but the revelation is going to take a little work on your part. Next post will introduce OODA loops and The Theory of Constraints; saddle up and stay tuned.

Because something is happening here
But you don’t know what it is
Do you, Mister Jones?

I think when most of us started to listen to Bob Dylan we assumed that we were part of some community that shared a certain hipness denied to the rest of society. Maybe so, but it kind of missed the point. The point, if I may be permitted, was that we didn’t know, but we knew that we didn’t know, and were trying to deal with the implication of our ignorance.

One of the unforeseen effect’s of the current information overload is that we’ve lost comfort with not knowing. We tend to be, along with our previous president, “deciders”; after a couple of seconds of examination, we either understand something or we assume that it doesn’t have enough significance to warrant the time and energy to try to figure it out. YouTube is a great example; we’re not really ready to deal with the mystery. Probably the best demonstration of our ignorance can be experienced by trying to get a handle on the Ipower social network. It’s hard to know where to start; the AtheneWins channel began October 11, 2007, it’s currently the 13th most subscribed YouTube channel, and the 23rd most viewed. This is particularly impressive when you consider that most of the competition is record companies and media production giants. Still, the real curiosity is the content; start here: Best Paladin of The World pwning nubs on My Heart Will Go On from Celine Dion (ATHENE #1).  From there it gets really strange, bringing new definition to phrases like tasteless and sexist. How to get a horny bitch (ATHENE #12). In an apparent effort to leave no group un-offended they rapidly move on to Tom Cruise, Scientology, and most of Asia: Hot Girl & Crazy Gamer on Tom Cruise from scientology (ATHENE #19). Before proceeding any further we need to take a brief detour with Marina Orlova 28-year-old philologist who is HotForWords so that we have a good understanding of “irony”. It turns out that the folks at AtheneWins, which has now branched out into the Ipower channel, Tania Uncensored, etc. are actually a group of Belgium political/net activists. This raises questions like , “Do they know what they’re doing; are they serious, and if so when so; are they a positive force for social change, or simply another example of the degeneration of youth and society; why are several thousand people watching them on a daily basis (on any given day one or more of the Ipower productions finds itself in the top 20 most viewed videos on YouTube), and my personal fave, ‘What is identity?’” Perhaps more to the point, it raises the question- do we/can we have any idea what’s happening on YouTube? Wittgenstein ended the Tractatus with position seven: “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.” Good advice; if we could follow it, we just might learn something.

What shall I wear?

My Sexy Countdown Blog

Identity increasingly operates like information; for many of us identity is not just physical. Who you are is a function of who you know, what you know and how effectively you can use that knowledge. You can be Steve Jobs or you can be the Fake Steve Jobs; either will work, you get to choose, but you have to deliver. At today’s count there are 203 Shakespeares registered on MySpace. It’s easy stake a claim but writing the next Hamlet or even Troylus and Cressida may prove a little more challenging. The key phrase is ‘the next’ because ‘identity’ is different than ‘reputation’. Reputation like resume is situated in the past, a history of supposed successes and failures. Identity lives in the now, and increasingly in the future, it is a measure of capacity and comletence, of what are doing and can do.

Creating and maintaining an identity when you become a artist.

Writing Students and Professors Fight to Keep Theses From Being Freely Available Online from The Chronicle of Higher Education

Brad Wheeler In Search of Certitude

A month or so ago I changed web hosts and didn’t bother to migrate the Learning Aesthetics Blog . Whether this was sheer sloth or a form of auto critique remains questionable. However, anything profound was lost forever, unless some idea has enough merit to resurface here. It’s a new year and that seems a good moment to begin anew; which would mean something different. Think of last year’s effort as my intro to blogging, and this year as I guess “…so what now?”

Last season’s major accomplishment was attracting a comment from clocke of Rage Boy fame. This year I’d like to experiment with some advice from the I Ching :

“If Evil is branded, it thinks of weapons. If we do it the favor of fighting against it blow for blow, we lose in the end because thus we, ourselves get entangled in hatred and passion…. The best way to fight Evil is to make energetic progress in the Good.”

and no I have no particular idea where to start or where we’ll wind up; write me up as just tired of complaining. I’ve also noticed a general drop off in blogging perhaps it’s the holidays, or perhaps I’m not the only one who’s feeling the need for something more that a megaphone in a field so crowded that the general loneliness is a bit overwhelming.