How Should Students do Research Then?

On certain rounds this morning, I followed a ProfHacker post to The Full Wiki, a site that tells people:

Students, we find sources for your essay,
so you don’t have to.

Additional explanation goes:

We find similar sentences to those in Wikipedia, complete with their citations for you to paste into your essay. It’s the easy way to branch off to find authoritative sources and relevant quotes to deepen your research.

I don’t know what these mean. “We find sources” and “We find similar sentences” is confusing. Why not “We find similar paragraphs or phrases”?

I did some digging on the site and quickly found myself trapped by its method of using links, going from directories (search results) to domain switches, such as quiz. . . and then being harassed by popups. The site aims to parse Wikipedia articles by source. Again, I have a hard time understanding what this means, as it would seem to over-complicate the process of research and make the structure of Wikipedia content ambiguous. To be fair, I watched a video explanation of the site and it was useful in understanding the functionality and intent of The Full Wiki. But this only served to make the front page information somewhat misleading.

I followed through to the Narcolepsy example. I moved the mouse over the second sentence highlight and a list of “citable” links to articles appeared. I clicked on the first listing and encountered this message at the destination: “We are sorry but the article you are looking for cannot be found.” The second link took me to a definition of rabies. In addition, I placed the current Narcolepsy article at Wikipedia against that produced by The Full Wiki and the side by side didn’t match.

The Full Wiki is still in beta so perhaps some of this “intelligent” sourcing will be fixed.

Such a service illustrates something about teaching and doing research in an academic context. I think Wikipedia is a tremendous resource. Articles at Wikipedia point to good references and provide general interest information. The problem with Wikipedia for student researchers is that Wikipedia articles are not intended to play the role of a source, as Wikipedia articles are meant to be altered, edited, and continually reviewed, hence citing an article will likely lead to holes, as citations in research are meant to be traceable and show how ideas are augmented, supported, or related. They are also supposed to show the “legacy” of ideas, providing authoritative grounding to the writer.

Research methods courses teach students about the publishing ecosystem. This is not an easy thing to do. I have a terrible time introducing methods to students in composition courses as the expectations of these courses exceed student training, a problem I don’t understand as most students come to college with high school degrees. These degrees, however, are structurally inadequate. By structural I mean that high school content no longer prepares students for college. This would imply that high school pedagogical frameworks find college expectations out of reach.

Then again, the methods of a composition course aren’t rocket science. Student ability to learn how to search a research database makes interesting and appropriate content reasonably available. What to do with content is the hard part and forms the core pedagogy of writing courses.

On Enjambment and Other Horrors

My students are having horrible troubles with the notion of enjambment. Well, not really, but they think they are. It’s important for students of writing to understand the techniques of any given form not so much for the use of those techniques but to understand how meaning is made possible and how language can be shaped. Most technique is transparent. In film, editing techniques are often meant not to be noticed.

Here’s a section of Anna Barbauld’s The Epiphany

Deep in Sabea’s fragrant groves retired,
Long had the Eastern Sages studious dwelt,
By love sublime of sacred science fired:
Long had they trained the’ inquiring youth,
With liberal hand the bread of wisdom dealt,
And sung in solemn verse mysterious truth.

That first line is significant. It provides us language about place, which is a typical routine of the phrase. It provides context. But I doubt the poet is offering that first line as a complete unit of meaning, hence we can say the line is part of an enjambed unit. The punctuation doesn’t matter. The reader is meant to follow the next several lines to the noun and verb: sages and dwelt. Of course, it’s important that the sages have had a lot of time invested in Sabea’s groves. They’ve been in there a long time, which is suggested by the words “deep” and “retired” in line 1.

Enjambment as a poetic technique can be interpreted in many ways because of the way poetic lines can be conceived. If cummings could write “i thank You God for most this amazing / day:for the leaping greenly spirits of trees” we have to be able to infer that he worried about the meaning of the line break and avoided placing the word “day” beside “amazing.” The metrical unit doesn’t need to matter, nor does the foot pattern, as in disyllabic (iamb) or trisyllabic (anapest). But it can matter, also, depending on the sense of lines, as in Barbauld’s poem above. In the cummings example, the speaker says “i thank you God . . . ” This, of course, is a clause, but it isn’t the unit of meaning of significance in the sense of a poetic line, though it might be fine as a church utterance. If the significant unit of meaning crosses lines, then we have enjambed examples.

In the history of poetry, the identification of the technique, calling it by name as a technique, might not really matter but then again it might, as techniques need abstraction. It depends on language, too. One of the things I don’t talk about in English Literature course are things like the greek ictus, which is the first beat or first syllable of a metrical foot. In the classic dactylic hexameter, which can be difficult to understand, because metrical types can be interchanged ( a spondee for a trochee–I think I’m recalling that right), the ictus is incredibly important. I would also suggest that the phenomenon is important to cummings and other poets who care about entering lines with something sharp and progressive (which I’m finding significant in music, but in the way of lines) but also as a means of distinguishing lines and making images with them.

When Frost writes in Mending Wall “The work of hunters is another thing:” he’s using critical method to control what the reader does with the lines that came before.

What is a Sensible Education Policy?

Reading the paper this morning was somewhat frustrating and dismaying. This year, Connecticut will see perhaps some of the deepest cuts to public education in a long while. Some people see this as either sensible or just the way things must be.

I disagree. Schools will shrink; higher education institutions will be required to cut services and programs; many graduates in education will be unable to fill those spaces left by retirees.

The opposite should be the case. If the current system of education remains (this is a qualifier) then more recourses should be provided to schools; programs and services of higher education should be expanded, and, not only should retiree positions be filled, current gaps in teaching resources should grow to meet demand. This all sounds counterintuitive, of course. There’s a budget crisis, after all; the economy has tanked; thousands of people can’t find work.

However, will diminishing the system solve the above problems? Will, as Brian Clemow argues in this article, cutting union bargaining power solve the problems that tax payers face (assuming that government employees are not tax payers), which is the language of divide and conquer? Unfortunately, we won’t know this from reading the article, which amounts to little more than a complaint that union members just happen to be energetic voters.

Private sector unions are active in politics, too. However, their influence is much less, in part because only about one in 10 workers belong to a union, while all but a handful of state and local government employees in Connecticut are unionized.

More important, private sector employees don’t have a say in who becomes the CEO or board chairman of their company. Public sector employees do, in effect, and this has resulted in their obtaining benefits that the average taxpayer can only dream about.

Interesting enough, Clemow never steps back and asks whether private sector workers should have a voice in “who becomes the CEO.” That 50,000 workers control who “becomes CEO” is strained logic for obvious, arithmetic reasons. In addition, the author provides zero evidence to prove a cause and effect relationship between control of elected officials and benefits. He may want to believe this, but wanting doesn’t make it so. It’s also unclear from the article from whence the unions will get “billions in wages and benefits to avoid layoffs . . .” Which brings me back to my original point.

It is indeed possible to find the saving Clemow wants. A more progressive tax code might be a start, as I’ve argued before, or some acknowledgment of the housing bubble and healthcare costs. Another scenario might be to simple divorce control of educational services from government’s role. Yes, the government might simply legislate the responsibility of educating the citizenry from its responsibility, just as it might legislate away the requirement of a balanced budget or taxes on yoga.

Come Fall 2011, no schools. Thus no burden on the taxpayer.

Of course, people will say: “Come on. That’s extreme. That’s not what we mean.”

My question will be, “Well, what do you mean then?”

It may be that the entrepreneurs will show up ready to purchase all the buildings and the neglected equipment and open up shop, hiring out-of-work ex-government employees and many faculty and staff from private schools and colleges (most people don’t have the time to do this and teaching human beings the art of learning is not easy, as most parents and fiction writers know). What they will quickly find is that their business plans don’t add up and that the per-pupil cost of education at the moment is actually an understatement not just of dreams and fantasies but of “reality.” We could always try this and assess whether the forecasts were honest accountings.

Rather, I would suggest that if solid education is the goal then we should strive to do the best job possible not the job we currently do, which is working for high ideals on a fraying shoe string. This would require, however, some rethinking:

1. Sufficient staffing and resources
2. Raising the expectations of teaching degrees
3. Rethinking the “grade system”
4. Integrating schools into the hum and beat of their communities so that they are less schoolish and more bent toward creative problem solving and learning
5. Rethink managerial elitism, expertise, and hierarchies

I may be wrong, but my theory is that the more robust the learning (rather than technical schooling), the more beneficial the system is to society. But maybe I’m wrong.

Why Write Poetry?

This semester in “school” has been all about language. I’ve been tinkering with a poem about Kansas, for example. The first part goes like this:

They say Kansas is flattest
But that just means
there
people see farther

The problem I’ve been treating is the word “there” and where it should be put. It’s an indicator of place. You know, as in: over there. But not really. There, in this sense, is meant as a synonym. There = Kansas. You know, that place.

But it’s not a place. It’s a word. And the problem is where it should it go.

One way of treating the problem is to use the pre tag in html to make sure that the thing goes where I want it to.

It may be true that in places with less stuff in the way, like mountains or tall trees, people can indeed see “farther.” But what does that mean? And what would people who can see farther than people in New England, who can only see tree trunks or cars, think about differently than people who interpret distances differently?

That’s a rhetorical question.

Does seeing farther imply more wisdom? Et cetera.

In New Media the students are still struggling with the difference between reality things and digital things. In the Ruby programming language we define an object class this way:

class Poem
end

and inside the class Poem we can manipulate or definine its elements

class Poem
def line
@line
end
end

But nothing here has anything to do with a poem, at least as far as the computer is concerned. The computer just thinks that the class Object is expecting to extend to an object called Poem. But Poem needs something like @line to make it work. Kind of like the indefinite “there” as Kansas. In Inform, moreover, stairs give students all kinds of problems.

How do I program stairs?

John and I laugh at these kinds of questions. But we shouldn’t. The student might as well ask: how do I create a tiger in photoshop?

This is actually never done. A tiger has never been in Photoshop, just as Orcs are not really in Tolkien.

In Tinderbox, we write notes. At least we fool ourselves into thinking this, as the numerous notes we might write in Tinderbox are not really notes at all but digital representations of phenomenon we call up as notes. Let’s say we peal a yellow piece of paper off a stack and say, here’s a note.

Well, this isn’t a note either.

So, so what if

Kansas is flattest

No, here’s what I have thus far:

A Poem about Kansas (though I’ve only driven through it)

They say Kansas is flattest
But that just means
there
people see farther

Say in Libya
If I’m stomped on by a tank
will I feel my tibias crack
before the crushing of my skull

It’s just a question I have no answer for
It’s more a question about the pain of fossils
And empty tar field air
As I sink through, touching for the bottom
with my fingers

of words like Lybia
and Saudi Arabia
and Casuistry

and blood
wishing that flattest
might mean I could be flatter
than the width of red and blue
between stars

I want to be bigger
than the tip of a rhino’s horn

My Fight Against Critical Thinking

As an explicit ability that is. At the college we’re still going around in our determination of what constitutes an educated human being, at least as defined by a community college where we’re referred to typically as a two year college. This isn’t always accurate but the “time-definition” does provide a framework for a stage of appropriateness. But it may be wise to consider that “schooling” in learning might take a few hours for one person and a few years in another.

That aside, it might also be wise to assert a definition of critical thinking as an abstraction for things like methods of reasoning and judgement, particular kinds of mindedness or mindfulness and awareness, recognitions of phenomena and their contexts, and the application and interpretation of systems. I’m reminded, for example, of a place in Plato’s Republic where Socrates reasons through wisdom as depending on a kind of knowledge because wisdom itself can’t depend on ignorance. This is an example of critical thinking but in the abstract. More precisely, it’s Plato using generalized deductive reasoning.

Let’s say we say something like this: students at college will graduate with good critical thinking skills. Let’s assume the above to be true as a given and then assert the dimensions of critical thinking instead of the broader abstraction, such as interpreting the relevance of numerical information in a variety of contexts. We could jack the requirements up by writing this: the student interprets the relevance and value of numerical information in a variety of contexts using a variety of tools.

Of course, students could use lots of methods to show or demonstrate the above.

Claiming that Einstein was a good critical thinker just doesn’t seem to capture the essence.

The Darkling Thrush and Corpse Metaphors

One of my favorite poems is Thomas Hardy’s The Darkling Thrush. Why: because with Hardy’s language we can think about how poets think about language in a specific historical space. Hardy has inside him an ear for language specifically bent on what he would term poetry. It’s a different poetic language than Wordsworth’s or Keats’s. Consider the famous corpse metaphor:

The land’s sharp features seemed to be
The Century’s corpse outleant,
His crypt the cloudy canopy,
The wind his death-lament.
The ancient pulse of germ and birth
Was shrunken hard and dry,
And every spirit upon earth
Seemed fervourless as I.

One issue that draws me here is the size of the image. It’s the “century’s corpse.” This is pretty big. 100 years. A whole of a specific time, part of which Hardy has no experiential knowledge, and his knowledge of yesterday would, of course, be as questionable as mine is. He was born in 1840. Still, he has a sense of the size of a century, as do I but not really. This a secret sense, a feeling of width, grandeur, and abstraction in the form of time span. But let’s consider the word “outleant,” which describes the shape of the century. This is a bothersome word, the kind of word poets love but dictionary writers and linguists hate. It goes with the first line of the stanza. If Hardy can say “The land’s sharp features seemed to be” and then follow this with “outleant” then he’s certainly drawing a massive image that forces our eye to edges, lines, surfaces that just don’t stop; they blend into all, which is the landscape, everything, including the speaker. Thus “outleant” is full of motion and energy: it’s going out, it’s leaning, outleaning, leaning out, spreading and stretching. This is a “compounding” term, packed with a poetic sense of compression.

And it’s a corpse. But it’s also a century. But it’s also not a century at all. It’s an impression of a moment in time. Five minutes later the speaker might be having a nice warm tea and thinking about butter or cake and or, best to him, pea soup with ham.

We Should Stop Plowing Snow and Other Tales

Tom Foley has an article in today’s Hartford Courant that tries to cover the difference between a “current services budget” and a “current year budget.” Unfortunately, the author’s strived-for clarity never really develops and the logical premises for the argument are clouded by characterizations which the author never examines for their accuracy. He writes:

The current services budget is a concept that turns boring government accounting into “Alice in Wonderland” where bureaucrats, politicians and advocates for government spending can pitch their causes and confuse their constituents to suit their purposes.

I’m always amazed at how politicians ridicule themselves in their own expressions. Tom Foley, if memory serves, ran for Governor. He, therefore, is a politician. Secondly, he characterizes current politicians as “advocates for government spending,” a brute force tag that’s never actually supported in his article. If, for example, a politician advocates for modern plumbing in a public school is this person looking out for interests of children or are they a government spending advocate?

But now to the meat of the matter. Foley writes:

The current services budget is a projection of future revenues and spending that assumes tax policy and state services remain as they are in the current year. So, in planning for expenses for the next budget, it factors in anticipated wage and benefit increases for the same number of state workers and inflationary increases in the cost of things the government buys. It is heavily manipulated. The estimated current services budget for the general fund for the fiscal year ending in June 2012 is $1.75 billion higher than this year’s spending, an increase of 9.8 percent. This is ridiculous.

There are lots of accuracy questions here. First off, I’m not claiming that Foley is incorrect in the numbers. But the terms “heavily manipulated” and “ridiculous” are opinions. The reader would have to conclude a budget that anticipated reductions and saw lots of spending reductions would not be “ridiculous” and “would not be manipulated.” This language amounts to codes “politicians” use to “manipulate” an audience. Foley continues:

Using the current services budget degrades the clarity and quality of debate on the budget. It enables bureaucrats to pad budgets and move the goal line in the hope of achieving ever higher funding. It enables politicians to obscure bad news and fabricate good news. It enables advocates of government spending to demagogue anyone who questions the ever-increasing funding for their causes. It confuses the concerned citizen who is trying to understand what is going on.

Here, Foley continues to “characterize” rather than argue from premises. Budget’s are “padded,” they play football, they’re “fabricated,” and politicians are “demagogues,” and simply push “causes.” It may be that new plumbing at the schools, sound proofing, and winter snow clearing are causes and that politicians are indeed “demagogues” but Foley would have been more effective if he’d used evidence or even specific examples of “padding” and “demagoguery.” Honest disagreement can be had on these items.

I can consider my own house budget in comparison to the budget the state has to put together, as can other people, and those who don’t have work are in much much worse situation. Next year, for example, I will see major loss of purchase power for several reasons. The first is a personal hit to my paycheck, as I will not be seeing a raise and my paycheck has already been reduced. I will not, however, be victorious when I ask the local oil company to please see to a reduction in the price of home heating oil and so on. Oil will rise in cost no matter my “opinion.” Those improvements I looked forward to will not see fruition, either, which would have helped to reduce the cost of oil for me; note that the oil company is just as concerned as I am, as the driver of the truck will see his own pay cut also. In the mean time, I’ll call the local grocer and ask them if they could please reduce the price of milk and butter commensurate with my own diminishing return. Economically, it is difficult to tighten the belt in such a way that reducing outlay elsewhere will make up for the cost of rising prices across sectors as most people have few options for boosting revenue. I could, of course, cut out every unnecessary purchase or obligation. But this is where I connect to the macroeconomic world: demand across the economy would go down, making problems worse. The dudes at the wine shop are trying to make a living too and they’re supply chain reaches into Europe and South America.

One element Foley doesn’t cover, and this is rare in debates about “government spending,” is the vision of government’s role by people across the board (as a rich person, his worries are less when it comes to rising prices). Should it be the municipality’s responsibility to plow the streets? Or is it the individual’s role? At the turn of the century Hartford decided that it was its role to manage water supply to the population not private businesses (to the chagrin of business but to the profit of people who would not have had the means to pay for a company to lay pipe in their neighborhood). Partly, this had to do with ethical responsibilities and with efficiency. We could have honest debate about snow removal. I could simply pay for a plow company to do my section of the street (this, of course, would require government to dictate what my portion of the street actually is). Would this amount to higher costs or to lower? I would need help with that calculation. At this point in the day, all I have to call on is Plato’s Republic.

Final note:
In addition to the two opposing views on the electoral system, the Courant would have done a service to readers, the very kind of service Foley aspires to (“clarity of information”), if it had provided space for an opposing view on the budget.

Ironies of the Education Crisis: Stop Selling Hope

Angry Bear guest poster RJS has a sobering list of news on education budget crises responses across the nation. It’s very much worth reader attention. The writer notes the irony:

while there are those in congress who pretend to be worried about leaving debt for the next generation, they are leaving the next generation without the tools to compete in an increasingly challenging future…

There’s another side to the problem of any disrupted school year or block of school time. College admissions seasons are dependent on graduating classes from high schools. In other words, graduating classes set the tone for the two and four year schools, as freshman classes are a block, excluding transfers, that form an institutional narrative. Not all freshman will actually make it through to graduation at least in four years and six is a more typical average. Off the top of my head it’s probably less than a quarter of students who will finish a degree in four years and that’s probably a conservative number.

The problem, however, has to do with that representative student who enters grade school, then moves on to high school without having a mastery of the fundamentals (whatever this may mean. I have a good idea of what it means in my own experience, who started off as a good speller, then fell off that wagon in and about the fifth grade when I took it upon myself to stand on my chair during class and fell from the good graces of the school gods). That student and his or her class will go to college carrying non-mastery with them. A few bad years of grade school, for whatever reason, let’s say it’s cuts to music (and this student has talent for music) will carry through to freshman experience. I see this every day in my own teaching. And I see how difficult it is for students to develop a skill without prior reinforcement. Certain cognitive experiences cut across disciplines. (One item I won’t cover in this post is the relentless push for student to go to college in the first place, which is, I think, a problem as state learning standards don’t map well to the college expectation.)

This translates to generational damage that can’t really be repaired. It’s my own estimation that a “schooling/learning generation” is about seven to ten years: a senior in high school doesn’t have a lot in common with a fifth grader, in other words. Worse, a student can never have their fifth grade opportunities back. Once they’re gone they’re gone. Put in other terms, if a senior in high school doesn’t read Plato’s Republic, their experience of that text as a senior is gone “forever” once they graduate.

Cuts to school programming now will always prove a deficit for higher education in the future. People who don’t teach might suspect that classrooms filled with students who are just trying catch up is a more difficult teaching job. Good college teaching is about encouraging students to learn independently of guidance; if students have difficulty learning independently, they will certainly not be of much assistance to the team, to the boss, or to company, or to the lab, or to the non-profit. Opportunities for learning at school cannot be made up. If a class size goes from 20 to 40 for next year’s kids this effectively degrades learning opportunity and prohibits the effectiveness of teachers, whose decisions have already been hamstrung by testing culture. I’ve pretty much come to the decision that those things students learn in high school don’t prepare them for college work.

One mistake RJS makes in his conclusion is this question of the “challenging future,” which is a problem of logic. Let’s articulate a thesis: is any future more challenging than the futures of the past if people are given an honest opportunity to prepare for their daily lives (think Benjamin Franklin here)? Americans in 1860 certainly faced a challenging future, just as those Europeans who turned 1 in 1899 and would soon go to war.

We have years to guide us. I can’t say that any future will be more challenging than the next. I can stress to the people I know that if we take away opportunities now, those opportunities are gone and will never come back. This is what Lancaster as “Moonlight” Graham meant when he said that once it’s gone it’s gone, but at least he had other possibilities. We seem to be forgetting this in our endless memory loss.

I’ve been arguing that we have a learning crisis in the United States. This crisis has nothing to do with math scores. The crisis can be articulated in ironic terms: we want an educated population but we want it on a shoestring. If the counterargument to my claim is that we really really don’t have the money for competent public education, then my answer is this: stop selling hope and definitely stop selling practicality.

What Does Being Broke Mean

In this article at the LA Times (which I read in the paper copy of Hartford Courant), the authors quote from Rep. Tim Walberg, placing his quote in an argument frame:

Republicans argued Friday that Americans are willing to accept diminished social programs in return for a firmer fiscal standing.

“They understand in my district: We’re broke. If we don’t deal with this, we lose the social safety net,” said Rep. Tim Walberg, a Republican from a southern Michigan district that voted for Obama. “I think they’re ready.”

The often repeated “we’re broke” assertion is common from the GOP. But, again, the last time I was at Best Buy, numerous people were at the store making purchases. In fact, I saw a fifty inch television being squeezed into a minivan. This casual observation can be used as evidence to make a counter point to Mr. Walberg. Indeed, if a deficit were some measure of “brokenness,” then every country on the planet would be broke.

Broke in my estimation means that Best Buy would close and that every dealership in the country selling Subarus would be eating 100 percent inventory. Indeed, I also read in the Courant that our local gambling houses shared over 30 million dollars of booty with the state in the month of March, which means that people are somehow finding plenty of money for slot play.

One of the ironies of the “we’re broke” meme is the implication by Walberg that the social safety net is something he’s actually concerned with. If this were so, then it would stand to reason that Congresspeople like Walberg would be promoting policies that boost the living wage and augment cultural investment.

Why Code? On Expanding Human Possibility

Over the past several years, I’ve developed a conviction that future work in academic humanities studies should involve students and developing professionals in human and machine languages. This is a conviction not a belief. Mark Bernstein, in a recent review of Hockenberry’s iPhone App Development, writes:

The treatment of design as a separate and superior activity to programming is, I think, misguided. The author is a designer and is writing, I think, for people who are not; he urges them to hire themselves a designer and then do what the designer says. Since the book clearly envisions individual developers or very small teams, this model may be unrealistic. Design and code are not separate things, and attempts to separate them are misguided.

My experience with numerous systems has trained me to agree with Mark’s statement. A couple of significant issues come to mind here.

In learning pedagogy, whether it’s engineering or poetry, we work with a traditional Aristotelean process, working from general to specialized knowledge. This is not cut and dry. In manuscript culture, specialties existed. Scribes may not have prepped the surface for their work. The labor intensity of the scribe’s work prohibited preparation of the skin. Even more complex, the scribe may not have needed reading ability, only a visual/aural understanding of the spoken word or the ability to copy already existing work. Vannevar Bush describes new conditions for the specialist in his famous As We May Think essay, where specialties can be vast in scope but also narrow in their intensity, meaning that they provide little space for study in other disciplines even though they’ve been shaped by them.

Modern education systems, as manifest in most secondary schools, don’t concern themselves with the Aristotelean tension: questions such as: what should be “learned” become strange when testing content provides a ready framework for instruction. School systems have other pressures: testing, funding, demographics. But these school systems are still dominated by the superstructures of reading, writing, and ‘rithetic in a context of “grades” of students. I consider the question of “grade level” as a critical problem to be solved. The question “What is a fifth grader” is a strange one. If she reads and understands The Lord of the Rings is she still a “fifth grader”?

For the past few weeks I’ve been buried in the Rails framework, scratching the surface of the ruby programming language and the Rails machine that puts it into a working context beyond a compiler. But I’m a poet and fiction writer, not a computer programmer. However, the framework has provided me a means of visualizing and framing a couple of systems I’ve wanted to develop for some time, systems indescribable without understanding the “limitations” of the object: what can I “not” do is a significant question. It might be true that 15 years ago a person who regularly wrote into their journal might have envisioned a web-based publishing system. The journal or notebook, such as the Moleskin, has been supported by hundreds of years of “technology,” which provides a model–a date, a body of text, an author, and a perma surface.

The computer is still a pretty simple concept if one can understand electrons. It’s instructed to do things by people using an energy one can’t see with the naked eye. How it is instructed to do something is complex. The amount of instructional language it takes to tell a computer to turn on or to display a body of text can be mind-numbing, as I continue to relearn as I dig around the notion of MVC.

I’m not arguing that all students of the humanities should become programmers or system engineers. Nor am I arguing that all programmers should write poetry. They certainly may, if they wish. I would contend, however, that some important images and relationships require competent understanding of these disciplines for teams to be successful. The Tinderbox forum provides a peek into this team concept. People use Tinderbox, they have questions, these inspire questions back, and deeper understanding of the system and its possibilities.

It’s a nice thing to behold: the possibilities or capabilities of people not computers.