This afternoon, the steering committee for #openlearning17, a AACU Faculty Collaboratives Experience, met to discuss what has gone well with the experience thus far and what we can do to improve.  Several of us mentioned how thought-provoking and mind-binding the Twitter discussions have been, but others have made a request: specifically, those who have been attending Twitter discussions regularly want a little time to get to know each other.

To that end, let’s carve out a little time.

One of the more interesting things about connecting with people in virtual spaces is the knowledge that they could be doing all sorts of physical things in all sorts of physical places while they are holding that conversation with you. While I take pride in the fact that my online personality is very much the same as my face-to-face personality (maybe a little more confident, but I’m working on that), I’ve hosted Twitter chats from airplanes, airports, the attic, a Lincoln Town Car, a hotel bar (while ducking to avoid a bar brawl), taxis, offices (mine and others), my car, on my phone, in my doctor’s office, at the Hair Cuttery, and on four different continents.

What I’ve come to appreciate over the years is that physical context matters to our online interactions, as much as anything that is going on in our head while we are chatting.  And knowing the physical environment of those with whom we chat helps us get to know them.  It makes them more real.  It makes us more comfortable. Therefore, I propose the following:

That’s my office desk, by the way.  I bring my lunch because I prefer simple lunches and don’t like to waste valuable time going out.  I buy a large cup of coffee (a splash of milk) as a personal incentive to leave the seat warmer in my car every morning. I love seat warmers. I have to take off my glasses when I read because I’m months away from needing bifocals, and I’m trying to keep a dish garden alive, because one would think that an adult old enough to consider bifocals might be able to maintain a plant.  Also, I am building a database and working hard to develop coding schema that make sense and are entirely sustainable (all those papers).  I’ve been on the job for a month.  It’s not like I’m applying any pressure on myself at all.

On Wednesday, February 15, 2017 at 3:00pm EST, I will be hosting a quick little Twitter activity called Connecting Spaces.  Come. Chat however feels comfortable, but it might be interesting if we share a little about our physical spaces.  Where are you?  Why are you there?  Why or why not do you like to engage in Twitter chats in this space?

Taking a picture of your space, or better yet, a quick video would be a great way to introduce yourself.

Regardless, I hope to see you there.

[Note: I’d love to include an image of the covers of Computer Lib/Dream Machines here, since they’re fascinating, and yes, images can aid understanding, especially when they represent the phenomenon under analysis.  But Nelson asserted copyright in his work, and that copyright still applies. I could probably use Wikipedia’s rationale for reproducing a low-resolution image.  But instead I’ll link to DigiBarn, which has some nice images of both the covers and some inside pages, scanned and posted with permission from Nelson. A google image search will turn up some additional (apparently unauthorized) images, including ones which show how the two covers connect, especially the intrusion of the superhero figure’s foot from the cover of Dream Machines onto the cover of Computer Lib]

In an attempt to feel a bit more caught up with the ongoing conversations in Open Learning 17, I decided to look ahead to the reading for week four (I like to think about things for a while before I write about them).  It looks like we’ll be reading excerpts (tba) of Theodor H. Nelson’s Computer Lib/Dream Machines, so I skimmed through the full(er?) version currently linked from the syllabus, trying to get a sense of the book(s) as a whole.  I found myself thinking about the information on the covers, including titles, subtitles, and illustrations.

The result, below, is some combination of a rhetorical analysis (courtesy of my current professional identity as a writing teacher), a gender analysis with particular attention to historical/cultural context and the book as an object (concerns common to my original fields of research/study), and the musings of someone who was just beginning to be culturally aware in 1974 (I was ten when the first edition of Computer Lib/Dream Machines came out).  There is also something of a trail, as I attempted to answer a research question using the affordances of the internet, a tool which, as we’ve noted, in many ways resembles the systems of knowledge-recording and building imagined by Bush, Engelbart, and Nelson himself.  So here’s the question, which came to me almost immediately on seeing the title, and the date of publication:

Why did Nelson choose Computer Lib as one of his titles? More specifically, what were the resonances of “lib” for him and his (possible/projected/ideal) reader(s)? 

My own immediate association, based on my somewhat-hazy memories of a 1974 spent living in the Northern Virginia suburbs, is with “women’s lib.”  Based on those associations, and on the androcentric perspective some of us have noted in our historical readings so far (Bush and Engelbart),  I was surprised.  Have we arrived at a reading which will display some awareness of, perhaps even sympathy for, contemporary gender struggles?  Or perhaps, thanks to age and/or location, I’m missing some other contemporary uses of “lib.”  How to answer this question?

I decided to look for other book titles from the early 1970s with “lib” in the title. This, as any librarian could have predicted, turned out to be a difficult search, since “lib” plays multiple roles, especially in databases of books: a part of many common words, an abbreviation for “book” or perhaps “volume,” and a part of the phrase “ad lib.” (which shows up in the titles of a good many music scores, among other things).  My attempts to search google books didn’t come out very well; I either came up with far too many results or far too few, with the “too few” identified as such in part by the fact that they didn’t include Nelson’s book.

WorldCat seemed to work better. Though I’m still not entirely confident of my results, it seems that most other books with the word “lib” in the title published in 1974 and indexed in WorldCat (eleven in all, that I could find) referred (positively or negatively) to the women’s liberation movement.  The two exceptions were closely related; there was one reference to “kids’ lib” and one to “gay lib” (a bit more skimming of results suggests that “gay” was the second-most-common word combined with “lib” in book titles in the early 1970s; looking back through 1970, I also found “city lib,” men’s lib,” and, most intriguingly, “mule lib,” which I didn’t explore further, lest the research trail become a rabbit trail; I do have student work to respond to today, which might explain some of my enthusiasm for this research digression).

So it seems that my memory/impression is correct: in 1974, “lib” was most often combined, in popular parlance, with “women’s.”  So why did Nelson choose to include it in one of his titles?  At least from my initial inspection, his work doesn’t seem to have an explicit gender focus, and one might even imagine that his primary imagined readers were men.    Were the cultural resonances of “lib” for him and/or his projected readers positive or attractive?  In my memory, “women’s lib” was more often than not a term of derision or dismissal, but, once again, cultural positions vary, and my memories stem from a particular time, place, and status.  Some authors who chose to include “women’s lib” in their titles clearly felt positively about the movement themselves, though some seem to have anticipated some resistance from some of their readers. Was Nelson simply looking for a shorthand term for “liberation,” and seized on one that was current in the culture, without considering its other associations?

I’m not sure of the answer, but I’ll be mulling this bit of cultural context, and its possible relevance (or not) as I take a closer look at what’s inside the book.

Similarly, I’ll be wondering about the fist: black power symbol?  anarchist symbol? general symbol of protest?

And the subtitle of Dream Machines.  The most likely referent for “minority report” seems to be a 1956 Philip K. Dick story (later made into a 2002 movie of the same name), but a quick google search on “minority report” plus each of the years between 1970 and 1974 revealed another reminder of the women’s liberation struggle: in 1972, a minority report played a role in the fight to seat more female delegates at the Democratic National Convention.

I should probably be wondering more about the superhero (Superman?) figure. For some reason, that’s the element that least engaged my attention, but it, too, certainly plays a role in constructing the immediate message of the book-as-artifact.  It seems possibly a bit at odds with the fist on the other cover (wasn’t Superman pretty establishment?), but maybe not?

Finally, I find myself wondering about the subtitle of Computer Lib, and what messages it sends to a possible/projected audience.  “You can and must understand computers NOW” is both encouraging/empowering (“can”) and prescriptivist (“must,” combined with the typographically shouted “NOW”). Some might find it inspiring, others offputting. Personally, I’m leery of gurus who not only assert that I must free myself, but also are eager to tell me exactly how to do it.  It’s a stance that seems both self-absorbed and lacking in self-awareness, and that does not inspire me with confidence that a self-appointed potential mentor has my best interests at heart, or is even much interested in me at all except as an object on which to project his own interpretations and ambitions.  In short, I don’t usually buy or read books with statements like that on the cover (except, perhaps, if I’m interested in them as historical artifacts).

A similar tension can haunt our attempts to be leaders in implementing open learning in formal teaching and learning contexts, especially for those of us who teach exclusively required classes.  Do students want their classes to be open, by whatever definition of open? If not, do we feel comfortable asserting that we know better than they do what’s best for them?  Perhaps we do, but we need to be aware that that’s what we’re doing, and of the potential contradictions involved in doing so.  Teachers have very real power in the classroom, and we can’t  give it up entirely, though many of us can to some extent choose how we use it to shape the teaching and learning contexts for which we’re responsible.

Based on Computer Lib‘s somewhat contradictory subtitle, I find myself wondering, again: to what sort of readers did Nelson think this message would appeal?  Or, alternatively, wasn’t he thinking that much about appealing to a potential audience?  This volume, at least in its external trappings, looks a bit like a manifesto, and manifestos, for all their explicit desire to persuade, are often devoted as much to expression — giving the author(s) a chance to work out ideas in writing, and to place them where others can see them — as on the sort of persuasive communication that tries to meet a reader where (s)he currently is.

The book (or at least some of Nelson’s key ideas — a somewhat separate thing) has clearly had lasting impact, or we wouldn’t be reading it.  So at some level, whatever its quirks and apparent contradictions, it succeeded.  At the same time, as we consider the idea of open education, and how and whether we promote it, and to whom, it may also be worth looking at Nelson’s covers as an example of an attempt to play the role of leader/mentor/teacher, and to ask ourselves which parts of his approach we might choose to emulate (or not), and why.

I’ve been meaning to start a blog – a blog with this title, in fact – for several years now, but haven’t done it. Part of my hesitation stems from an awareness that a blog is a public space, part of my public online presence/persona.  That awareness both evokes a healthy (I think) caution, and brings out a bit of lingering perfectionism (an impulse that still rears its head at times, despite being mostly vanquished by fifty-plus years of life, including several decades of teaching a 4/4 writing-intensive load; continuing, however slowly, my own research and writing; and doing my best to keep up with an ever-evolving list of other interests and responsibilities).

I’ve also gotten caught up in weighing many of the usual questions faced by aspiring academic bloggers: whether some degree of anonymity/pseudonymity would be wise given my lack of tenure (and lack of eligibility for same); how to balance that caution with the desire to have a public voice; how much of the rest of my life, identity, and interests to include.

In the end (or at least for the moment), as my “about” page indicates, I’ve decided on including all the identities/perspectives (or at least all the ones that currently come to mind), and trusting to academic freedom for any protection I may need (perhaps an odd decision at what feels like a particularly perilous moment, but there’s also something to be said for living out the values in which one believes, and the peril – either from increased government intolerance of dissent or from the ongoing influence of forces driving the growth of academic precarity — does not, at least at the moment, feel personal).  I will also do my best to exercise some discretion in what I write about and how, balancing that with an impulse that goes back at least as far as the perfectionism – to describe things as I see them, even if that makes others, or me, uncomfortable.

The immediate precipitating cause for my finally starting the blog is a desire to participate in Open Learning 17, a cMOOC sponsored by Virginia’s Faculty Collaboratives Steering Committee (itself a part of a larger American Association of Colleges & Universities initiative).  Behind that, there’s desire to write about the English 302 Open Educational Resources (OER) project in which I’m involved (of which I will write more anon; for the moment, there’s a brief description on the “about” page).  Since I’m late getting started on the blogging portion of Open Ed 17, my blog posts are probably going to lag a week or more behind the reading schedule, or I may skip around a bit in the interests of participating as fully as possible in the conversation.

In the longer term, I expect this will also be a space to write about a variety of topics, including teaching and learning more generally;  using digital humanities techniques in the classroom (physical or virtual);  contingency in academia; and my ongoing research, mostly into abolitionist authors Emily Clemens Pearson and Harriet Jacobs, and my attempts to convey the results of that research via both traditional publication and digital humanities methods.

Beyond that, we’ll see: Biblical exegesis and/or theological reflection?  Political reflection ?(!?).  Pictures of flowers (or flooding) from my community garden plot?  Reflection on just why I find towpaths so alluring (but don’t visit the one a mile from my apartment nearly as often as I intend)? At the moment, all possibilities are open.