Pirates and social media. Innovative collaborations? Movement of information across the world via new technology? Exchanges between groups previously unable to work together? New jobs created by access to new information? Disruptions of market values due to new forces and actors? Sure, but are we talking about pirates here? Yes. See the later paragraphs of Chana Joffe-Walt's 5/22/09 story, "After A Pirate Negotiation, A Personal Connection," on the All Things Considered series called Planet Money. [0 & P]

Pages (academic) never meant to be read. The epigraph from a new book on Shakespeare by Clinton Heylin:

The greatest advantage of Shakespearean studies seems to be that questions may be asked over and over again, and that almost nobody pays attention to the answers — unless he borrows them for his own use in an article or a book. — HYDER E. ROLLINS, 1944 [0 & P]

Working with your hands (your mind). "A good job requires a field of action where you can put your best capacities to work and see an effect in the world," says Matthew B.Crawford in his essay on "The Case for Working With Your Hands." Students and faculty might enjoy his essay for the strong writing as well as for the clues he gives about why academic work sometimes becomes arid and the careers college trains us for sometimes do too. What are the essential elements of a lively, satisfying life of the mind? Crawford has a good list, and the former academic illustrates his list from his current work as a motorcycle mechanic.

It seems to me that this essay gives some ways of talking about personal power and agency beyond the obvious aspects of rank and authority earned by position in society or workplace. (NY Times, 5/24/09) [0 & P]

What students love. The book group had been meeting every other Tuesday for several weeks, and many good ideas about the campus came up for discussion along the way. But I sat up and took note when a colleague said this:

Students love it when faculty 'own up' to not knowing something. (R. duC)

I connected this sentence immediately to another thought I had been carrying around for a few weeks, something spoken by a teacher to a group of students:

I don't know how you will apply this [thing we are studying] in your life. (Source lost)

Seen together, the two sentences help teachers remember why students aspire to be the center of their own learning. It's respectful for us to help them do so, and important, too, since they become the users of the knowledge that is passed down and reshaped for new times and invented wholesale along the way. And between the respect and the potency of knowledge that they get to work with, students become energized as learners. You remember whenever you've witnessed such a thing in your own school.

Too often, however, we behave as though we know down deep that we must ventually pass along the cultural heritage, the tools and habits of mind and bodies of information that is our common property, but we don't want to let it quite out of our hands just yet:

No, you can have this stuff later. You know, it's the good stuff, so we can't let you try it out just yet. While you're waiting, could you memorize this other stuff here for a quiz? [0 & P]

Silencing the stakeholders. One way to make clear the power of social media is to identify the thing that is broken without it. Clay Shirky, I'm guessing, might speak about creating the opportunity to coordinate a group that can't easily act in concert, or to call to the microphone a group that usually can't speak on its own behalf. I noticed in a 5/11 letter to the NY Times from Celina Su a classic circumstance where a group is ordinarily silenced even when they are central figures in a social structure.

Su is responding to a David Books column that sets up a particular school as a model for reform. He concludes one thing about the meaning of the example the school provides, and Su asks him to slow down and reconsider a wider body of evidence. She talks about listening to the students themselves, who are in one way the most expert of anyone involved in the schools. Midway through the letter, Su says:

It’s startling that urban youth remain hypervisible symbols of the “culture of failure” but are never quoted as the ultimate stakeholders in education policy debates.

Once we get numbers [indicating success] like those Mr. Brooks trumpets, we need to ask the students themselves about the causal links. The students my colleagues and I spoke with simmered with complex analyses of the ways in which school conditions prevented them from learning.

There is the classic social structure that can be challenged by enlightened practices among bureaucrats or careful work by researchers or by grass-roots organizing or by engaging with social media: "...never quoted...the ultimate stakeholders...simmered with complex analyses of the ways in which school conditions prevented them from learning."

Silenced. Knowledge ignored. Activity toward goals thwarted. Then what? Rage? Alienation? Indifference? Cynicism? And so forth.

I recall having been invited to help review my own high school's programs when I was 16 or so, and in many ways this was the most powerful part of my education in those years. It was a chance to speak on something that mattered and that was close to my experience. It was a challenge for me to formulate useful ideas about the swirl of experience, too. It felt respectful to have been asked and to have been given a seat at the table, along with some of my classmates. It felt great, and I learned a lot. In other areas, those years were pretty standard times of alienation and waiting for life to open up.

The school's review created a structure for engagement, just as social media do now for some people. Su's letter clarifies the circumstances that mark the problem, all too common, and hint at some different kinds of solution.
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