Meditation on "Artisan"

June 5 Reflection

Meditation on key words – used Inspiration to map

Artisan – Twenty-first Century Artisan



An Artisan is someone who crafts, creates, builds, makes, plows a field, throws a pot, hammers a nail, sews, weaves, spins. Their work has a tradition and history which the novice learns by apprenticeship or acquisition, by spending time with an “old-timer” someone who has experience and who teaches not just the technique but the stories and the way of being. An Artisan belongs to a group of Artisans who share tools, knowledge, history, practice, attitudes. There is ownership in the tools and the techniques. Each individual gives the work their own stamp. Each product is unique. The products are useful, important, daily. The Artisan crafts for herself, her family, her community and may trade the craft for other things she, her family, or her community need. There is ownership but there is also letting go. The products may be used in someone else’s home. But each product bears the stamp of the individual who made it and is unique. Each product is a part of the self now out in the world. This is the beauty and pleasure in the craft of the artisan. It may be useful but it is distinct and distinctly human.




A 21st century Artisan will use different tools or technology. The products they craft with these tools also have function. Increasingly the products may have information or communication as function. The tradition or history of the craft may not seem as obvious because the tools are new and undergoing rapid change. In the past individuals also adapted and changed tools and practice but it was slower, generational. Now tools may be adapted and individualized on the spot. The craft and the beauty may be as much in the tools as in the products. Authorship/authority/ownership are immediate but perhaps more fleeting. Ownership and letting go happen almost simultaneously? Whereas in the past the Artisan might find herself surrounded by her products: asleep under the blanket she spun and wove, or drinking from a cup she made; now our products may not have a physical presence in our lives. Perhaps just as the tools are changing so is the toolmaker. Now the work of the Artisan changes not only the environment but the self and thus the relation of the self to the environment. If the products are informational or communicative then they are held in the mind but Gee would say not in the mind, but in the social practice. In the Discourse. An Artisan is someone who belongs to a Discourse, who understands the tools and stories of that Discourse but in enacting the Discourse simultaneously changes the tools, the stories, the Discourse, the self. The tools, the practice, the community, the self are liquid. Shape, form, function are ever-changing. Beauty is found where one decides to take a stand, to reflect, to see the patterns. Uniqueness is in everything but nothing bears the stamp of a single artisan, because no artisan works alone. Everything is a remix.

Wide Awake Dreaming

Liquid Architecture in Cyberspace, by Marcos Novak.

Novak, M. (1995). Liquid architecture in cyberspace. In: Cyberspace: First steps. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

What strikes me first about this chapter, is that it is one of the best descriptions of virtual reality that I have ever read. And then, I have to stop to think that 15 pages of black and white print actually transported me, engaged all my senses, suspended my disbelief, and offered a reality beyond reality. And the media was simply print. This author knows how to use language, indeed poetry, to thoroughly captivate and move the reader. So as a reader, I understand what it means to enter another space, to imagine another world, even to imagine simultaneous worlds. To be in my body and in my chair, and yet not be there. So everything he offers to us in cyberspace… do we have it in print?

I guess I find myself pondering two responses to that question. First, not everyone will respond or comprehend this text as I have. So access to this space is limited definitely to people who can read… but I suspect not as well to readers whose taste or experiences differ from mine. Some will not enjoy this text as I have. It simply will not have the emotional resonance for them.

The other difference I find is the ability in cyberspace to actually connect with other minds. Reading is more solitary and usually asynchronous. But the ability to construct a self, a space, and to meet other invited and constructed selves within that space and together to create a storyline, a new space, and even as he suggests to reproduce is a fantastic vision and clear possibility.

I’ve made notes where he talks about information, “Cyberspace involves a reversal of the current mode of interaction with computerized information. At present such information is external to us. The idea of cyberspace subverts that relation; we are now within information,” p.225.

This selection reminded me of what I’ve been reading in Kuhlthau about information users: that information is no longer a matter of finding the right answer but building connections for the user to construct personal meaning from. Another way of saying that may be that information is no longer separate from us but we are a part of it.

“The ‘reality’ that remains seems to be the reality of fiction. This is the reality of what can be expressed, of how meaning emerges,” (p.227).

Since meaning is an important focus for me, I am intrigued with the many suggestions I am finding everywhere that it is through the construction of a narrative or storyline that we make meaning. And of course, Gee and others would say that narrative is socially constructed.

I also want to continue to think about authors/authority as the new literacy. Technology empowers different voices to be authorities and authors.

Novak emphasizes the facility of poetry and I am also struck with the need for metaphor and other language to express my understandings, and maybe as well for author/authority to find expression.

Interesting mention of a duende “a spirit, a demon, invoked to make comprehensible a ‘poetic fact,’ an ‘hecho poetico,” (p.228). Novak is referencing Lorca (1989) Poet in New York. He goes on to talk about “the freeing of language from one-to-one correspondence,” which made me wonder about our discussions about reading comprehension – isn’t this liberation what happens when a reader moves beyond decoding to re-encoding what was read? Would the ‘duende’ be a good metaphor to use and think about in our understanding of reading comprehension – is there not something magical, spirit-like in the ability to read?

“Metaphor moves mountains,” p.228.

“Poetry is liquid language,” p.229.

“I follow the scent of a quality through sand dunes of information. Hints of an attribute attach themselves to my sensors and guide me past the irrelevant, into the company of the important; or I choose to browse the unfamiliar and tumble through volumes and volumes of knowledge still in the making,” (p.230).

As we travel through cyberspace do we create indices, sensory and intellectual that guide us? I have some sense that the new literacy is more sensual and sensory –personalized to our physical and emotional selves not just intellectual. Indexed by scent or taste.

“There are no hallways in cyberspace, only chambers, small or vast,” (p.231).

And here a tantalizing description of collaboration:

“I sense the presence of others. I see the traces of passage, the flares of trajectories of other searches. Those who share my interests visit the spaces around me often enough for me to recognize the signature of their search sequences, the outlines of their icons. I open channels and request communication. They blossom into identities that flow in liquid metamorphosis. Layers of armor are dropped to reveal more intimate selves; otherwise, more and more colorful and terrifying personifications are build up in defense; but true danger is gray.

The world opens and others flood in. Now there is congestion and noise, interference, but also excitement, risk and challenge. I travel with the constellation of my possessions and barter and trade information. I can scan the horizon and avoid what is busy, enjoy what is free,” (p.233).

Novak talks about “minimal restriction” and “maximal binding” – wouldn’t that be a great framework for schools and learning??? Here’s what he means by “maximal binding,”

“In addition, maximal binding implies in cyberspace anything can be combined with anything and made to ‘adhere,’ and that it is the responsibility of the user to discern what the implications of the combination are for any given circumstance. Of course, defaults are given to get things started, but the full wealth of opportunity will only be harvested by those willing and able to customize their universe. Cyberspace is thus a user-driven, self-organizing system,” (p.234).

I like to think of this as the future of education: user driven & self-organized. What should those defaults look like for our students? Then does literacy become the ability to harvest and customize? Is literacy the ability to discern?

“Information is pattern perceived in the data,” p.234 and later “Higher ‘intelligence’ can detect and operate upon patterns more deeply nested, while simpler ‘intelligence is restricted to surface patterns,” (p.238).

I know I have seen this suggestion several other places: that what we should be teaching students is to recognize patterns – it’s certainly part of the mathematics curriculum.

And maybe here he is talking about media:

“If a body of data seen one way conveys different information that the same body of data seen another way, what is the additional information provided by one form that is not provided by the other? Clearly the answer is pattern, that is, perceived structure,” p.235. He goes on to talk about two types of ‘emergent information’: intrarepresentational and interrepresentational. One is the differences between two representations and the other is the information gained from comparing the two.

Affordances --- good term to remember.

And this information literacy:

“Each user must therefore develop inference rules and a knowledge base with which to scan the environment and extract from it those objects that are pertinent to the task at hand,” (p.237).

As well as a great agenda for schools.

Choose Your Own Adventure

Does anyone remember these books? They anticipated the web in that the reader could determine the "plot" of a story by making choices - do you want to enter this cave? yes, turn to page 64; no, turn to page 33.

Choose your own adventure: information literacy, media literacy, twenty-first century literacy, or just plain literacy. This past week I read Gee’s The Social Mind in which he lays out the theory that what we consider “mental” is actually social including memory, belief, and knowledge. While I’m tackling the stack of books I checked out last week from Jackson, Bob has been posting another deluge of readings that I have barely been able to sample. I did listen to the powerpoint (no more Mr. Ed, please!) and find myself most drawn to the Novak (1995) – liquid architecture – and fiction/poetry as the language/approach needed to deal with cyberspace. I’m not sure I agree with Bob that we should abandon the political or aesthetic branches of philosophy just yet. I think my interest in Gee and Lauren’s interest in critical information literacy both lean in a socio-political direction. How can we read Novak and disregard the aesthetic? (Bob, have you abandoned the aesthetic in your powerpoints as well?)

I’m finding a thread emphasizing story or narrative in both Novak and Gee. Gee suggests that what makes humans unique is our ability to deceive and in particular to deceive ourselves. We of all the other animals can pretend to be someone else (shades of Turkle?). In a sense what Gee is saying is that much of what we think of as existing in individual minds such as knowledge or memory are really stories that we construct using the Discourses of which we are a part. Our brains contain networks and processing tools we use to create these narratives that we call memories, beliefs, or knowledge.

I’ve felt a strong need to move beyond the defining and philosophy for now to the field of librarianship – one of the major Discourse of which I hope to be a part and so I have started reading Carol Kuhlthau’s book appropriately entitled: Seeking Meaning. I’m wondering if there is a sense in which information/self is one of those false dualisms that the new literacy challenges. No longer is information seeking a matter of finding a right answer somewhere “out there” rather the technology allows us to navigate through all sorts of answers and construct new narratives using the self to create transformation and in the process transform the self.

If there is really no dualism, then how can there be a medium? Or is it all a medium? Is encoding and decoding a fluid dynamic that cannot be divided? Is the code (in de-code or en-code) the medium? And can meaning ever be separated from that code or medium? I take in the world through my senses and that world is the fluid/liquid architecture of Being embodied in the objects, texts, people that make up the world. What about the media of bird song or sunset? (Kimmel meditation – maybe I haven’t really left behind the defining and philosophizing).

Chinese Encyclopedia

Maybe the point of the Chinese Encyclopedia whether it is fiction or not is to make us realize that there are classification schemes different than our own that may seem irrational to us. And as we are in relationships with other minds, it is important to remember that each of us, of course, operates from a unique classification scheme and that is both the challenge and reward of relationships. Reward in that we do manage to communicate and reach at least some partial understanding of others.

What strikes me about the Chinese Encyclopedia classification is that each of the categories taken alone makes sense to me; it's their juxtaposition and the seeming contradictions, overlaps, and failures to capture many distinctions that seem foreign and nonsensical. Yet, don't you have to love this classification: "that from a long way off look like flies," or "drawn with a very fine camelhair brush," and the images, sensations, and nuances that they capture.

And how perfect to have included as one category of the classification, "included in the present classification," because to me this captures the imperfection of any attempts at classification -- the recognition that there must also be this category, "not included in the present classification." So what I take from these readings is the realization that any understanding I have is only partial. Here I have used words to attempt to express some understanding. The words are only part. Your reading of these words is only part.

And I am reminded of a dinner conversation I had with my father when I was very young. "What's the biggest number," I asked. "There is no biggest number," he answers. "How can that be?" I wonder. Name the biggest number you can think of, he suggests... then add one... then add one.... then add one.... And there I think I realized my mind was both large enough to glimpse infinity yet would never be able to grasp it. Here was understanding built on part, and on what was not. Infinity is not the biggest number you can think of, not the biggest number plus one, not the biggest number multiplied by itself, or raised to that power.... not the number of grains of sand on this beach... not even all the beaches in the world... nor all the stars in the sky...

A Place to Stand

Choose a place to stand. My mind swirls with all I have learned this spring and I struggle to say what was ID, what was Qualitative Research, what was one of the other tangents I chose to pursue. And wasn’t it funny, which ever way I went, I always ended up braided back into the same cord. Choose a place to stand within the chaos and just observe. So where do I start and where do I always end up? Let me stand here at the core of my self to reflect perhaps on the questions: what have I learned and how have I brought my self, my being into the process?

Instructional Design. I love the idea of design and I like where we started for this course: thinking of ourselves as designers. Aesthetics have always been important to me (even math problems had to have beautiful solutions) and design implies an eye for balance and beauty. Design should be something pleasing, planned but not forced - inviting not demanding. But design implies a designer doesn’t it? A mind and hands. And tools at hand.

Tools, Pea said were ways to reify and distribute intelligence. Many tools were offered throughout this semester as well as an ID algorithm that attempts to capture a part of the intelligent design of our brains. I know when I first heard about Instructional Design, I thought it was a natural fit with a research process or many problem solving models. It made sense. But it’s funny here at the end of the course, I find myself least interested in the algorithm. Which isn’t to say I don’t agree with it or think it’s not valid. I’m just not sure it’s really what interests me. It’s too neat. From my experience, learning is messy, the steps in the algorithm bleed into each other, and form patterns that are far from linear.
So maybe our brains are just organs in our bodies - hard wired - and definitely hard wired for learning. But I guess I think there’s something else that has as much substance. It may be something like the water in the swimming pool or fields of energy that connect us. Something happens between teacher and student that has the power to transform each. And what tools have I found this semester to help me capture and understand that mystery?

First, there were all the front end tools: the digging, the framing and re-framing, and the mapping. What’s going on here? It’s a great qualitative question that asks us both to pull back to see the big picture or context and to zoom into the unique particulars. It’s all a cloud and all connected and the connections tell a story -- a unique story. Setting, characters, plot, mood, theme - all the elements of story belong to this design. We are asked to become the reader and join our imaginations with the authors’. What are they telling us? But we are also authors - not just observers but participants. And perhaps in very subtle ways our observations and questions begin to stretch, shape, and fit the fabric. Draw a map and find your bearings there. Dig but dig deeper and the questions are about you, the designer. Can you pull this out of your self? What is your knowing? Where do you belong in the story and what can you offer?

Then a needs assessment. What a lovely aha! to discover that the mission statement should live and breathe here. Communities form around a shared purpose. Meanings are negotiated and language crafted to say this is who we are and what we believe. With the mission statement we name the field that energizes and animates us: lifelong learning, community, citizenship and we honor that spirit within us and within each other. But we need to be reminded to pull it out, out of the dusty drawer and out of ourselves, and out of each other. This is perhaps the loftiest goal of ID: to infuse each goal and objective with these intentions. And here I think we are all learners trying to decide what it looks like in our lessons and dealings with each other.

When it comes to task analysis, goals and objectives, I begin to feel the need to re-frame. I understand the purpose and value of behavioral objectives and the focus on cognitive goals but it just wasn’t enough for me. I think the disconnect was between these and the mission statement with it’s lofty language, its origin in community, and its inclusive focus. I like the idea from task analysis of using a job incumbent -- but I think maybe it is the focus just on tasks that aggravates me. I want to use the job incumbent as a living breathing model - not just this is how I do it, but this is what it feels like, this is what it means to me, here is where I struggle, here is where I make judgments --------this is my story!!!!!!! I am a human being just like you, not a robot to be programmed. And I think this is where the teaching and the learning truly happen. So in a sense I think I would morph the task analysis tool to identify a job incumbent who was more than a model but a mentor. A mentor who provides the student with an entree to the trajectory of the mission statement in all its human messiness.

Rather than goals and objectives that lay instruction out in a linear, step by step fashion I like the idea of a stochastic filter. In many ways I feel like this involves establishing the simple initial conditions as in chaos theory and then finding a place to stand - carefully observing/assessing and looking for certain criterion or fractal patterning. My design for learning includes not just the cognitive but the aesthetic, the affective, and the environmental domains. The boundaries between teacher and student become permeable allowing teaching and learning to move both ways. Learning is an exchange of gifts, a sharing of knowing and meaning about the lofty mission goals. Gift exchange transforms both the giver and receiver. The exchange itself happens somewhere in the energy field connecting us as a ripple, a drop, a wave, or a flood. And so the observer needs to look not just at the individual characters, setting or moments in time but the field around them to discern the pattern.

A Wrinkle

Last week I just had to capture the passage below from A Wrinkle in Time. I have been reading the book with a small group of fourth graders and was really struck when I read this passage to them. It made me think of my struggle to fit my design philosophy and my design into the Power Train. We're given the form - but within that we (the poets) have complete freedom to do with it what we want. I love this passage on so many levels, not the least of which is the idea that we can "write" the story of our own lives. Stories, both in the literal sense like using a piece of literature such as Wrinkle, and in the sense of authoring our own lives have become important components of my design and philosophy.

Sonnet

"Can't she see what's going to happen?" Calvin asked.

"Oh, not in this kind of thing." Mrs. Whatsit sounded surprised at his question. "If we knew ahead of time what was going to happen we'd be -- we'd be like the people on Camazotz, with no lives of our own, with everything all planned and done for us. How can I explain it to you? Oh, I know. In your language you have a form of poetry called the sonnet."

"Yes, yes," Calvin said impatiently. "What's that got to do with the Happy Medium?"

"Kindly pay me the courtesy of listening to me." Mrs. Whatsit's voice was stern, and for a moment Calvin stopped pawing the ground like a nervous colt. "It is a very strict form of poetry, is it not?"

"Yes."

"There are fourteen lines, I believe, all in iambic pentameter. That's a very strict rhythm or meter, yes?"

"Yes." Calvin nodded.

"And each line has to end with a rigid rhyme pattern. And if the poet does not do it exactly this way, it is not a sonnet, is it?"

"No."

"But within this strict form the poet has complete freedom to say whatever he wants, doesn't he?"

"Yes." Calvin nodded again.

"So," Mrs. Whatsit said.

"So what?"

"Oh, do not be stupid, boy!" Mrs. Whatsit scolded. "You know perfectly well what I am driving at!"

"You mean you're comparing our lives to a sonnet? A strict form, but with freedom within it?"

"Yes," Mrs. Whatsit said. "You're given the form, but you have to write the sonnet yourself. What you say is completely up to you."

L'Engle, Madeleine (1962). A Wrinkle in time. New York: Laurel-Leaf. p. 185-6.

Deep Water

This morning I am preparing to take a plunge - into the deep end of the swimming pool so to speak. I won't be in Moo-Ville tonight. I am headed to the coast with 20 fourth grade students. For many of these kids this will be their first experience with the beach. Last night in Qualitative Research we learned about ethnography and as an ethnography I think this cultural scene is especially rich: accompanying our students out of their environment and into a strange, new setting. It's the type of learning experience I love to be a part of: to open my heart and eyes to really see and feel some of what they are experiencing.

Last night I dreamt again about my own school work and research interests and woke to recall one of our readings about meditation: addicted to thinking. Every morning I try to meditate and recently it has been difficult to break from that constant analysis and thought. So this morning my prayer is to be present in the experience of the next few days with my companions, to listen outside myself, and if I must take a researcher's role: to be a true observer participant both in the moment and aware of the moment. As we leave the school and classroom behind, how does that free us to really learn together?

Isn't it interesting that outside school and the classroom is where I find my vision of education as the swimming pool: fluid, deep, immersion, connection, ripples and waves?