When we moved to Macomb, I was dehydrated for two weeks. The first winter, my eyes burned for weeks. Living for 30 years in Florida makes for a water-loving body. I still laugh when I hear people complaining about how humid it is in Illinois. But this takes the cake: Florida is such a sweatbox, a tropical storm can strengthen over land. Dang.

I’m glad Fay isn’t expected to exceed 80mph, ’cause this three day forecast basically takes her from my brother’s backyard to visit Erin’s family in Jax, just north of the grandparents and Gainesville, then toward my friends in the panhandle. Though I imagine everybody’s got the batteries and plywood already, since hurricanes come annually or more often in the Sunshine State now.

Professing Mama wonders what I'm doing with Henry while she's hanging out with/blogging about her baby boy, Chico. Chico was born one day after Henry, but Henry was a couple of weeks early and Chico was a couple of weeks late. So Chico is technically about a month older than Henry, if that makes any sense. I'd expect Chico to be a little developmentally ahead of Henry.

Here are some cute facts about Henry:

1. He loves to "stand" on my and Jonathan's laps. We hold him up under his arms (just barely, only for balance), and he sort of surfs. I mean, he loves putting weight on his legs. Sometimes he'll be fussing and standing him up will calm him. I think he might be figuring balance out a little too, as he has started holding his arms straight out.

2. He doesn't have to be held quite so much anymore. He can sit for short periods in the Bumbo seat and observe what we're doing.

3. He still doesn't like tummy time. His upper body strength is getting a little better, but it doesn't compare to his lower body.

4. He can roll from his back to his side, then back to his back.

5. He's reaching for things. Toys still aren't that interesting to him, though.

6. We're making slow progress with the sleep training. Last night he barely fussed, and only for five minutes, when I put him in the crib. He's sleeping for very long stretches, and I'm working on getting him on a consistent nap schedule. He reliably gets sleepy two hours after waking, but the afternoon naps are harder to come by. Yesterday he took two 30-40 minute afternoon naps, which was good. I think that's why he didn't fuss so much last night; he wasn't overtired.

7. I put bibs on him to catch spit-up, and he somehow turns them around so that they're going down his back like superhero capes. You can see this in the video that follows.

8. Finally, he makes the cutest noises. Here's a sample:

He did it. Awesome.

Certainly according to Richard Florida's definition of the "creative class" it is, and I think most teachers would agree (though they might simultaneously remark on how their creativity is limited by standards, testing, budgetary constraints, bureaucracy, etc.). When we think of great teachers, when we see representations of great teachers in popular media, creativity is a common trait, along with a commitment to education that goes far beyond thinking of it as a "job." And perhaps there is a connection there: when we invest our creativity into an activity, our feelings about it change.

Despite that, we don't think of schools as being creative places overall. People like Sir Ken Robinson identify a crisis in creativity perpetuated by our educational system. Schools are places where creativity goes to die. Students get creativity taught out of them, time and again, in a systematic fashion.

And when we look at teachers overall, do we see creative people in the way we see creativity among writers, musicians, graphic designers, game designers? Or even if we think of creativity in a less "artsy" way as in the creativity of researchers, architects, software designers, engineers: do we think of teachers as a profession that reflects that kind of creativity?

I think most anyone who teaches college can tell you that majors will tend to reflect certain personality types (with exceptions of course). But you can tell the art students from the phys ed students from the engineers from the accountants from the English majors and so on. At Cortland (again.. 9th largest producer of teachers in the nation), there are qualities common to education majors. I would think you could ask any Cortland prof and they could tell you the same thing. Now Cortland is essentially a college of high school B students from non-urban areas of NY state. So they've got a fair amount in common to begin with. But I wouldn't be surprised if the common traits of our education majors were common traits for education majors nationally. What are they?

• They are polite
• Fairly studious
• Well-organized
• Well-intentioned
• Socially conservative (relative to other college students)
• Excellent at following specific directions

My experience is that if you give our education majors a specific assignment, they will do as they have been asked and complete the assignment on time. This is not the way I'd describe our professional writing majors. However, our education majors are not particularly strong creative thinkers. I'll set aside the question of developing their creativity, but it's just not their apparent strength as a cohort. On the flip side, our prof writing students are quite creative, and not just in the "creative writing" sense.

Now personally I'd be fairly surprised if most people who'd been through public education in the US would list many of their teachers among the creative people they'd encountered: maybe an art or music teacher; maybe that one special teacher.

Maybe education ought to be a creative profession, but in reality it tends to fall on the management side of the economy. Teachers are trained first and foremost to be classroom managers. Their personalities reflect managerial dispositions.

To a large extent, teachers have been mid-level managers. In addition they are child care and perhaps creative professionals. My guess is that the days of teachers as mid-level managers are short-lived. Mid-level management has long ago been squeezed out of most corporate cultures. I don't see why it can't be squeezed out of the education industry. That leaves child care, which is a necessary but deskilled function, and creative-professional activities.

You could argue that this is the central problem of the educational system. Yes you can point to testing and standards, and I agree with you. But hypothetically if you swept those away, what would our teachers do? Are they prepared to move forward as creative professionals? Testing and standards are constraints. There are many constraints. But creative professionals are always working within constraints; creativity is often defined by the constraints in which it transpires.

If teaching is a creative profession how do we develop the creativity of our future teachers? How do we attract students disposed to creativity to enter the field ? I think about this for my department's own programs preparing high school English teachers. When and where, if ever, do these students come to recognize themselves as creative professionals? How do we develop creativity?   

I'm teaching our "advanced creative writing" course this semester. It's a new course that adds another layer onto our "creative writing" curriculum. As I've noted in the past, the majority of students come to our professional writing program with a primary interest in writing fiction or poetry or screenplays. There are many reasons for this. First, besides the academic writing they are required to do, these genres are the ones they encounter as writing. That is, they obviously encounter other writing, at least in textbooks, but no one makes mention of it as writing. So when they think of writers, they think of those genres. Second, they buy into the mainstream cultural romanticism of this writing. They wish to participate affectively and ideologically in that identity and experience.

I also wanted to write stories and poems when I was an undergrad. I was in a garage band writing music. Hell, I produced a collection of poetry for my MA thesis. So, I get it.

As a program, we want to encourage our students' creativity and support their writing practice. If they wish to pursue a life as a poet or novelist, we want to support that. We want them to know what that means, but in the end we see our program as benefiting students who choose that path. At the same time, we also want to introduce our students to a broad range of professional writing careers, and we want to help them understand how to translate their creativity into these other genres and writing situations.

There are two levels of challenge in doing so though. I think there continues in the humanities generally to be antipathy toward notions of commerce and the marketplace. We typically say that English is a great degree that can prepare you for any number of professions, but we never want to be specific about how. Talking about creativity as a marketable skill remains anathema for most, and our students pick up on that. it's like they have a kind of superstition about ruining their mojo if they turn toward the marketplace. And yet it seems hopelessly naive to imagine that our challenges with globalization, the environment, education, and so on will not be confronted in the context of the market. For example, do we really believe that even our relatively parochial concerns with teaching new media composition will be resolved through abstract, intellectual debate? Or will the outcome of that matter come about through larger market forces? Come on! But I digress...

My point is that we need creativity not only to devise solutions to these problems but to communicate those solutions to other people and create supportive communities to carry out solutions. We are entering an era where a facility for creative communication on a global scale will be highly prized. The humanities, English in particular, is a good place for students to move toward this, but only if we can give out our illusion that we are floating in the clouds.

The second challenge is no easier. It has to do with figuring out exactly how you might make this translation. How do you adapt your creativity as a poet to creativity in communicating a more purposeful or rhetorical message? Let's say you want to help a group of local, organic farmers by convincing local school boards to purchase local produce for school lunches. How do you take your creative skill with metaphor and image and produce a convincing letter or brochure or presentation?

In other words what does the use of the word creative in "creative writing" and "creative economy" share?

My first impulse is to turn to Richard Gabriel's notion of an MFA in Software where software design occurs in a workshop environment. That is, there could be some shared social-cultural practices. I think there may be some possible connections in terms of practices of invention, of moving beyond rational problem-solving strategies to techniques that involve tapping into the unconscious and affective (thinking here again about Ulmer's emer-agency). But I don't really have any answers. However I'm going to try to focus on some of these questions this semester in my courses.

So I've been catching up on some blogs and slowly plugging away at my article for On the Horizon on web 2.0 integration into education technology. Anyway, I caught up with this post on edumorphology on "education 3.0." Though Michael Staton, creator of the Courses Facebook app among other things, is certainly coming from a different perspective than I, I think we are seeing some similar things.

Basically my take on emerging media networks and higher education is the following:

1. Most faculty (and when I say most I mean 80-90%) don't have a clue.
2. Students may be getting increasingly familiar with this tech in a social context, but they are wholly inexperienced in using these tools to learn or engage in academic work.
3. As large, bureaucratic institutions, colleges and universities are not well-designed to take advantage of the possibilities of social media (as Shirky explains in his book).
4. Corporate interests in educational technology (e.g. Blackboard) operate on in an institutional marketplace, offering management solutions to institutions. In this context, the risk-taking involved in social media pedagogy with emerging media networks hardly makes sense. Besides, most faculty are uninterested.

Staton expands on this last perspective, picking up the theme of the semantic web I mentioned in the previous post. He envisions the collection of personal data about students and faculty that will be interoperable, that means passing along history, preferences, relationships, and so on from one application to another, thus making it easier for institutions and faculty to add new features.

Think of something like the iTunes App store for iPhone or even just software written for a particular OS. The college as an enterprise-level OS if you will that holds all the user data securely. Then you can have any number of developers who produce applications for use within that OS and even to communicate with the larger web, just as you might have a desktop app for Twitter, for example.

Sure, that sounds fine. You get access to variety and hopefully a wide range of innovative contributors. I suppose one question might be how open the system can be. So for example I might be able to choose between some different blogging and wiki applications to use in my class. The students would log in once for the system. I would be able to track them through the main system. We would then be able to make granular decisions about posts and wiki pages that we wanted to make public. Students would have their own accounts also with granular controls so that they could create public perspective, internal personal pages, and course-specific portfolios.

But here's your problem, and it's not really a technological problem, though the technology feeds into it. Traditionally we talk about how knowledge learned in one class builds into another, but we don't really mean it, at least not literally. And when we do mean it, we mean it in a very specific and controlled way. Social media invites users to learn in a different way. Now I suppose you could have a wiki where users are not allowed to contribute material without approval from an editor, but that undermines some of the specific advantage of the wiki. My point is that you need to combine social media with a pedagogy and epistemology. Otherwise it's just more of the same. Sure, it would be cool to have thorough metadata and tags to do faceted searches of lectures, presentations, and such, but it's still the banking pedagogy. That's the tough problem.

Kevin Kelly (founder of Wired, among other things) speaks here at the EG conference on the next 5,000 days of the Internet

One of the interesting remarks he makes here is about privacy. Kelly sees that over the next decade or so we will increasingly come to view the Internet as a single (albeit distributed/networked) device that we accessible through a variety of means. In order to make best use of that device, we will need to share a great deal of information with it. If you can imagine a world of ubiquitous computing where nearly everything is tagged, you are also looking at a world where the granular elements of your personal information are tagged and shared with the web.

Admittedly it seems a little creepy, right? And yet we need to recognize that our notions of privacy are cultural and historical. If you lived in a small rural town or area in the 18th century (or earlier), as nearly everyone did, your "world" was pretty small, and it's likely that everyone in your world knew your business. There's a kind of evolutionary thing here, I think, where we are social animals and our success comes from knowing things about our community. On the other hand, I think about my life today. I live in a home where my kids have private bedrooms. I have a separate room for my office. I have friendly but fairly distant relations with all my neighbors. They don't know my business. I have a private office at work.

I go online in search of communities. I write this blog to connect.

My point is that I believe the experience of privacy that might typify middle-class American life is an anomaly in general human experience. Sure this is the first period in human history where you could look into your webcam and make confessions to a billion people. Yes we are increasingly sharing our preferences, even our unconscious ones with the computing cloud. Picture tying together your buying habits (via online accounts and swipes of your shopper cards) with television viewing and search habits and data mined from your social networking sites. You'll share this "private" information for the same reason we watch commercials on television: putting up with the commercials means getting free/cheaper entertainment. In this case you get free online services. And I put "private" in scare quotes here b/c I think the notion of what is private is relative.

But there's more to it than that. Sharing information online will allow us to connect in more powerful and granular ways than we have in the past. This is the point that Kelly makes. In the past we shared pages, linking page to page, in the future we will link on a more semantic level, word to word, meme to meme. Of course there are privacy issues here! Who will be able to do what with your information? And I'd be more concerned about governments or corporations than shady individuals. These are issues that we'll have to deal with, and not resolve once and for all, but continually revisit. Nevertheless this would appear to the direction of the next 5,000 days.

So that brings me to pedagogy, specifically public, online pedagogy. I appreciate the concern faculty have with the idea of students learning and communciating in public spaces. There are legitimate concerns. I also know that faculty are very good at raising problems about practices that they don't want to do themselves. I do think that those who worry about what students write in an online class probably haven't spent a lot of time watching YouTube videos or reading Facebook. If Kelly is right, then we are headed toward a time when we will all have extensive networked identities. The parts of those identities that we actively compose will be our best, subjective opportunity to engage in that process.

Not a lot of blogging since Erin and Madelyn got back. Been workin’ on a few things:

Got accepted to CPTSC 2008, for “Teaching standards in technical communication programs.” Good. I’m looking forward to that conference, which I’ve missed the past few years because of prior commitments and/or childbirth. The format is right up my alley: “Each presentation is limited to a 5-minute position statement on a programmatic issue in order to allow for discussion [...] Presentation software and slides are not used. Please do not bring a PowerPoint presentation, but feel free to bring a handout of any length.” Time to make a wiki page and start writing.

Early this week Erin made a pork pot pie with sweet corn, peppers, and beans. I came to the table and found she’d opened a 2002 Echelon Merlot to go with. Both delicious; the pie was a summery mix of crisp, sweet, and savory, and the Echelon was outstanding, deep and rich and smooth. Yesterday Erin took her mom to the airport then did some shopping, returning with (among other things) a sixpack of New Belgium Mothership Wit. I’m impressed. It pours perfectly—golden with a frothy white head—and tastes lovely. One of my favorite styles, to be sure, and a very good effort from New Belgium.

Outside, we’ve worked pretty hard towards reclaiming the “back forty,” where our yard meets our neighbors. Unfortunately, we haven’t done very well keeping up this summer. So we cleaned out a whole bunch of weeds, uncovering some peonies nearly choked out of existence. I put down newspaper then mulch in the hopes of keeping the weeds out and started thinning the black raspberries our neighbor planted (and pretty much abandoned). There’s more work to do on the raspberries. Then Erin is going to transplant some volunteers from our front and side yard–coneflower, columbine, lilies, and the like–to the back, and I’ll continue the mulching (more trips to the yard waste site to get free mulch and wood chips). Slowly, we’ll get this part of the yard looking good.

Our squashes are going nuts, and we still have good chard, cabbages, and kale, but our tomatoes are looking mediocre, and our peppers are even worse. We blame the cool start to summer; maybe things will pick up now that it’s been warmer. Last week Erin thinned and weeded all over the place, producing a mountain of green stuff, so I folded it into our compost piles, which needed a complete turnover and remix anyway.

I look at server stats every month or so, particularly error reports, in the hopes of correcting bad links, etc. It seems my mention of a certain software package prompted the bots and skript kidd13s into action; I found numerous failed requests which correspond to this vulnerability. The would-be leet tried all the obvious places and a few more at random. Sorry, guys: (1) you’re looking on the wrong server; (2) my installation is patched; (3) I’m not running a vulnerable PHP configuration.

In the past two weeks, I’ve exercised a bit less since I’ve spent large chunks of time working outside. In particular, I’ve made it to the Y for swimming only three times in nearly two months. Twice I’ve gone to the pool but been able to get a lane. Ugh. I’ve still made my three times a week commitment, but I need to do a better job spreading out my workouts. Swim today, run tomorrow.

Madelyn has gone to bed by herself three nights in a row. w00t!

Now back to polyurethaning (the kitchen trim) and working on my fall syllabus between coats.

I've written about crowdsourcing a few times here, but not in a while. Jeff Howe at crowdsourcing.com has written about it for Wired, was a lead figure in their Assignment Zero project, and now has a book coming out later this month. Here's a little video about it.

In the past when I wrote about crowdsourcing, the main response was how it was/is an exploitative labor practice. Essentially, what was once highly-paid, expert labor becomes deskilled work that is done either cheaply or for free. Howe often uses the example of iStockphoto. 10 years ago it was probably unthinkable that you could get good stock photography for a couple bucks. Few people had use for stock photography and many who might have (e.g. small business owners) couldn't afford it. Now I use iStockphoto for images in slide presentations. Recently Getty Images, who owns iStockphoto, made a deal to license Flickr images as well.

Is this bad news for professional photographers? Yes and no. It certainly changes the nature of their profession. You can get professional grade images using prosumer digital slr cameras and photo editing software, but you still need to know what you are doing to produce consistently.

It used to be, and probably still is, unthinkable that college curriculum could be crowdsourced. But look at something like Supercool School. Yeah sure it's not accredited or anything, but how do you think colleges got started? The earliest classes at my alma mater, Rutgers, were held in a tavern. That Facebook app is hardly a model for a college course but it does demonstrate the idea that users can propose courses, find a volunteer willing to teach the course, and deliver a curriculum.

Obviously there are important differences here. If you like a photo on iStockphoto is doesn't really matter who took it. It doesn't matter if it was a lucky shot and the only good pic that photographer will ever take. Teaching, however, requires expertise, mainly b/c as a student you are signing up for something that hasn't happened yet rather than buying an existing product. As a non-expert you probably aren't qualified to look at a syllabus and know for certain if the course is appropriate, and even then a syllabus only tells you so much. So you really need to go on reputation. Traditionally we've addressed reputation with qualifications and institutional review. A crowdsourced program though might try to address reputation through other social media means.

That said, I could envision creating a crowdsourcing site where prospective teachers sign up and maybe even pay a modest fee to have their bona fides checked. Then you set them free to propose and design any course they want. You can establish a pricing structure with different levels for those who want to audit and those who want significant feedback, evaluation, or perhaps even a grade. Teachers would get a cut of the collected tuition.

Now there's an obvious problem. Assuming you couldn't get accredited as a college doing this, you might say that you'd need to be able to make these courses transferable for credit at such an institution. Why? Because the only reason people take classes is to get credit in order to get a degree.

But maybe that isn't true.

Maybe people would take classes if they thought they were worthwhile for them professionally or personally, AND they didn't cost a ton of money AND they didn't require participating in the whole college culture business and time and psychic energy required of it.

Maybe they'd even take writing courses! Imagine that you're a thirty-something mid-level manager and your bosses are continually underwhelmed by your reports and your presentations. Maybe your corporation has recently started using a wiki or blogs and you just don't get it. Maybe your company is doing a lot of business with China, and you don't know a damn thing about China. Maybe you want to change careers. Maybe you've always wanted to write a novel or a memoir.

I realize that we think of higher education as something more "serious" than that. And I agree that for many traditional professions there are significant bodies of knowledge to be learned. I also look at many of the jobs out there in Central NY and I wonder why people go to college to do those jobs. What I mean is that it doesn't seem like there's a specific body of expert/disciplinary knowledge required to do some of these jobs.

There's another point here too. In higher education we expend a great deal of energy on underprepared students. We also spend a lot of time giving lectures and making sure students have read textbooks. Maybe there is a more cost-effective way to do these things through crowdsourcing.

I realize there's a lot of worry about the future of higher education and our profession. But the reality is that we aren't going to get anywhere trying to hold back the tide. As a professional photographer you can complain all you want about iStockphoto and such things. And maybe you have valid complaints! But that still won't change the fact that your industry has been transformed. Like the music industry has. Like cottage industries in the 18th century were. And so on and so forth.

However, just because an industry changes that doesn't mean that there won't be new opportunities, new markets, new practices and so on. Higher education is big business! There's plenty of money out there and careers for creative professionals. I think a quality education will always be valued, in the future more than ever as the cognitive demands placed on us are not likely to relent. And in simple economic terms, a quality and valuable education will be one that separates you from others. It won't be the one that you can get for free or on the cheap.

...is very sad. I finally got to a point where co-sleeping, a.k.a. sleep sharing, a.k.a. letting a thrashing baby sleep next to me while I lay awake for hours and hours because of the thrashing, wasn't working anymore. This is night 5. When we started this, Henry wouldn't even let us put him down in his crib for one full minute without screaming.

From a 1992 edition of Dr. Spock's Baby and Child Care, regarding babies who put up a fuss when being put in the crib to sleep (p. 259):

The habit is usually easy to break once the parents realize that it is as bad for the baby as it is for them. The cure is simple: Put the baby to bed at a reasonable hour, say good night affectionately but firmly, walk out of the room, and don't go back. Most babies who have developed this pattern cry furiously for 20 or 30 minutes the first night, and then when they see that nothing happens, they suddenly fall asleep! The second night the crying is apt to last only 10 minutes. The third night there usually isn't any at all.

Usually? 20 or 30? 10 the next night? NO. That's all I'll say about that. Before you say anything, my pediatrician has said that no, Henry is not too young for this, and yes, he does weigh enough. My mom's parenting books from the 70s instruct parents to sleep train starting at two weeks old, actually. I may get flamed anyway, but oh well. I need sleep, and so does Henry. If I shifted to get comfortable in the bed while he was next to me, he'd wake up, so I was disturbing him. While he isn't sleeping through the night yet -- not even as the doctors define it, 12 a.m. to 5 a.m. -- he is sleeping for longer periods than he has been.

And my goals are modest: I just want him to sleep for most of the night in his crib. If he needs to sleep for thirty minutes next to me after a feeding before going back to the crib, that's fine. I'm also fine with rocking/nursing him to sleep.

And with that, I'll watch the opening ceremonies and hope that Henry stays asleep as he has been for the past 30 minutes.