In One Place

AFOOT and light-hearted, I take to the open road,
Healthy, free, the world before me,
The long brown path before me, leading wherever I choose.

Henceforth I ask not good-fortune?¢‚Ǩ‚ÄùI myself am good fortune;
Henceforth I whimper no more, postpone no more, need nothing,
Strong and content, I travel the open road.

These lines from Walt Whitman are some of my favorite. Almost a mantra, words to conjure with. Whenever I think of them, I picture the first tarot card in the major arcana. It is The Fool. He is often portrayed as a jester, his belongings tied into a scarf on the end of his staff, a small dog yipping at his side, as he walks along the road or, in some versions, off the edge of a cliff. The Fool represents beginnings, the start of the journey when we are full of hope and promise, and perhaps a little naive. The Fool does not have a number…he is not the journey, just its beginning, but his exhuberance and optimism must not be forgotten even as the road chips away at our naivte.

The rest of the 21 cards that make up the major arcana–the group of tarot cards concerned with spiritual questions and significance–trace life’s journey through learning and love, conflict and change, even death, coming, in the end, to the World. Often portrayed as a hemaphrodite, the figure on the World card represents completion, the world at peace. It symbolizes what Czicksmalhyi would call it flow, the threads coming together into a moment when we seem whole, balanced, and focused. And from this sense of authenticity, we can move forward again along the road, like Whitman’s fool, “afoot and light-hearted…leading wherever I choose.”

I begin with the tarot because working with tarot cards, a practice I started sometime ago, has provided me with a powerful way into my own thoughts and feelings, a way to think about heady issues like ontologies and epistemologies. I first picked up tarot cards at a time of turmoil and change in my life, during the 2000-2001 school year when I had made the decision to leave the classroom and start my own business. I don’t remember what drew me to tarot, but I know I wasn’t interested in using them to predict the future. Instead, I wanted a way of thinking about the past and the present, and how I might use my understanding to move into the future. The stories of the cards–Jung felt each card represented an archetype, or universal story–help me think about my own story.

They also helped me see that, for most of my life, I had been trying to live out a story largely written by others. You don’t have to know a lot of the story, but a brief narrative–that focuses mostly on the past six years or so–will provide a better understanding of the context from which my ontology, epistemology, methodology and axiology emerge.

Each day, I would draw a card. I would examine the picture then read about its interpretation. As part of the journaling practice I had started just about the same time, I would write, using the card as a springboard for thinking about my own life. What I learned from the tarot has helped clarify my deepest desires and most spiritual beliefs.

The most fundamental of those beliefs gets at my ontology. I believe we each create the world for ourselves. Reality is subjective; I cannot separate my view of the world from my biological, cultural, and personal lens. I am the product of parents with certain genetic predispositions and a community which had its own ontological and epistemological assumptions. My own personal experiences have served to help me understand my biology and examine my paradigm. This unique blend of biology, culture, and personality informs me

And it is these stories–lived forward but understood backward–that bring us into the world, weaving together our biological, cultural, and personal experiences. As we journey along, we pick up threads, then abandon them, perhaps completely, perhaps to pick up later when the time is right for that particular idea or activity.

On the surface, it seems easy to define my beliefs about the nature of reality and how we come to know. I am, at heart, a constructivist with a very liberal, relative view of the world. I fit the stereotype pretty closely For instance, I remember breathing a sigh of relief during the first class in qualitative research because after a semester of quantitative, which I found jargon-filled and dissatisfying, here was a place I felt at home, a place filled with stories, with individual voices bringing their perspective of the world, looking through the lens of their biological and cultural heritages.

I enter the world through narrative. I have been telling my own story for as long as I can remember, scribbled in binders and blank books.

I can trace the development of my oema through the progress of the 21st century. 2000 was a year of great change for me both personally and professionally: I left my job to start a consulting business with the college as my primary client and pretty quickly began to plan for graduate school. Personally, I began a practice that has become a fundamental part of my methodology: morning pages. I also began reading tarot cards.

The past five years have been an intriguing part of my life journey and they have brought me to a place where I can take shelter for a time. Ontology: what is the nature of reality? Subjective, viewed through the lens of our biological and cultural heritages; we can understand the biases and ideas that come from those heritages but it is difficult to escape them. I think we need to in order to truly be able to meet another person. As long as I see you as a category–African American, female, gay–I don’t see you as a person. It sounds trite but I have heard it voiced by others, most often on news programs when they are asked to comment on how a particular group is going to respond to an event (ie., what do women think about the trade deficit?). These commentators have balked–there is great diversity among women in terms of what they think about any issue or event, as diverse as the opinions in the larger population. While women may share certain concerns about children and the family, their ideas for how to solve those problems may be quite different: a stay-at-home mom may wish for better family leave while a working mom may wish for daycare in the workplace. And even amongst those smaller groups, there will be differences. Reality is in the eye of the beholder.

Spent some time this morning preparing for a workshop on 21st century skills and The Flat World on Thursday but then headed outside to garden. Dug up siberian irises to give away and send to the property and weeded the front garden where the zinnias are going to go. Ready to head to Ivy Run to put some plants in the ground out there and then lay in the sun and read. Just picked up Mark Kulansky’s book The Big Oyster: History on the Half Shelf, which uses the bivalve to tell the story of the city.

Bob gave me a water lily for the pond outside. I should plant basil, too. I think I’ll have time tomorrow morning before I head to lunch with Bonnie. I am trying to have a little vacation here at the end of the semester. There are lots of unknowns: did I get the job? What about my final grades for 604 and 610? I haven’t gotten an email from the 604 prof so I don’t think I have to redo the last paper. As for the job, it would be exciting and a new opportunity, but it would take up any free time I have so I’m not sure about it…or am I just compensating because I don’t think they are going to offer it to me?

Stanford also wrote a report about women in the computer sciences. Their suggestion is “Also, the department should investigate what they can do to keep women or to encourage women to pursue higher education in computer science.” All they need to do to investigate what to do to keep women in computer science is to look to feminist theorists who can help them get below the superficial ideas to a real understanding of what is going to have to change in order for women to fit in and be heard.

http://cse.stanford.edu/class/cs201/projects-00-01/women-faculty/conclusion.html

The summary of the section titled, “The Masculine Environment,” says: “These factors can cause a woman to feel out of place in a computer workplace and make it difficult for her to picture herself as a computer professional.” (The factors are evidently pinup posters, sports-dominated talk, and denegrating remarks.) Really? Is that what MIT’s computer science department is like? Or is she describing the world of the computer room in general? I’m having trouble reading it with a straight face especially since the obvious question here isn’t “How can we change the computer workplace?” Instead, she seems to ask, “How can we help women deal with this type of workplace?” where she feels like a professional because she is working with other professionals.

“Most important, with a positive attitude, women can make the most of their situation.” Ellen Spertus, Why Are There So Few Female Computer Scientists? (http://people.mills.edu/spertus/Gender/pap/pap.html)

This report, an internal study by MIT about why women avoid computer science, is the perfect starting place for my article. They recognize the problem but the solution is just beyond their grasp. The suggestions about how to attract more women to the profession make no recognition that it may be the profession that needs to change. It’s just going to be tough for women because they aren’t as good at math as men so they’re naturally going to have to work harder. The report seems to be more about harassment. It does acknowledge that women have different styles of thinking and that there should be a place for their type of programming. But that doesn’t really come out in the final recommendations. How convenient that it is written by a woman.

For my paper on integrating technology into instructional models, I want to look at three ways that technology can dovetail with strategies:

1. Technology can provide the structure for instructional models such as direct instruction, mastery learning, and simulations in the behavioral family. They can provide the structure for more student directed learning in the inductive thinking, inquiry and group investigation models.

2. Technology can provide the resources needed to support most of the models. These might be in the form of teaching materials and lesson plans for teachers (as well as additional information about the models) or in the form of research materials for the students.

3. Technology can provide particular tools to support different pieces of the syntax:

• Concept mapping tools for conceptualizing models or brainstorming
• Communication tools for exploring, discussing and publishing findings

Judi commented on my post Thinking About Rules. I asked if students would react differently to rules that were imposed from without rather than within:

“Good question. I suspect that this differs among learners ?¢‚Ǩ‚Äù that for some, having the rules imposed from outside is preferable, and for others, creating and following one?¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢s own rules is best. The ?¢‚Ǩ?ìLogo folks?¢‚Ǩ? tended to think that everyone was naturally a more self-directed learner than someone who needed structure imposed by someone else (e.g., a teacher). What we may never know is whether that?¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢s actually true about all of us, but the system of schooling has ?¢‚Ǩ?ìbeat it out?¢‚Ǩ? of us ?¢‚Ǩ‚Äù or whether this truly is an individual difference, perhaps expressed differently at different times of our lives.”

Some of this goes to motivation. Csikzenmihalyi (Flow) would argue that in order to achieve flow, the motivation needs to be internal. He defines certain people as being autotelic personalities who draw their strength and motivation from internal rather than external sources: “The term “autotelic” derives from two Greek words, auto meaning self, and telos meaning goal. It refers to a self-contained activity, one that is done not with the expectation of some future benefit, but simply because the doing itself is the reward.”

I would suspect that most students are influenced by some combination of external and internal motivation, and my observation has been that there are various combinations falling along a continuum from somone who is completely externally motivated and someone who is completely internally motivated. And I think people move along the continuum for each particular learning environment. An historical reenactor may have lots of internal motivation to learn about a certain era, but more external motivation may be needed to get him to take an accounting class that could lead to a raise.

Prensky, M. Digital game-based learning. New York: The McGraw-Hill Companies.

This book is Prensky’s introduction to games-based learning. Interesting overview of today’s gaming generation including the now famous idea about kids being digital natives. Plus, Prensky is the first person I’ve read who mentions Csikszentmihalyi and the state of “flow.” In terms of games-based learning, Prensky sees two challenges: keeping people in the state of flow by making the game just challenging enough and being sure they are still learning as well: “In the flow state, the challenges presented and your ability to solve them are almost perfectly matched, and you often accomplish things that you didn’t think you could, along with a great deal of pleasure” (p. 124).

The Learning Circuits Blog: Curious about the future of history based simulations?

Clark Aldrich makes the argument that the Star Trek video games are a good example for historical simulation developers. The material is similar and the Star Trek developers have chosen lots of different types of games to show their material. The post includes a list of lessons learned that should be helpful as I consider my own game.