On the phone with him that day, I remember most being impressed by his commitment to pedagogy. His desire to make meaningful learning happen online was entirely sincere. I found him earnest, and charming, and humble. He seemed like a person I’d enjoy speaking with again and again about things pedagogical and digital. I was far less interested in his celebrity than I was in his ideas — ideas for which Jesse, my long-time colleague (and co-conspirator), and I found precious little purchase in academe during our decade working online together.

It was not long after that phone call that I received the following e-mail from Sebastian:

Just had a crazy idea. What if we got the 8-10 most interesting people
together for – say – 3 days, to dive into online pedagogy. The goal
would be to brainstorm about this, and exchange experiences. Perhaps
develop a master plan? No NDAs, no proprietary information – just for
the goods of humanity.

The e-mail was addressed to me, Sebastian’s wife Petra, and Cathy Davidson, the as-laudable-as-colorful author of Now You See It and cofounder of HASTAC. It signaled the beginning of a new lurch (for me) into high academy (think high camp, but with credentials and a less-subtle cultural impact). The date of December 14th was set, the members of the summit selected, and the preliminary ideas drafted up. We wanted to be sure to include people who represented all levels of the educative process — from journalists to technologists, teachers to avowed drop-outs — and we wanted to be both as broad in our discussion of online pedagogy as specific.

We met, we wrote, we produced. And what came from our congress was different from what we set out to produce. Inspired by the insistence of Betsy Corcoran and Bonnie Stewart that students needed a bill of rights in order to navigate safely the new world of online learning — and crafted around a short piece of our day’s work written by myself, Jesse, and Betsy — we created the Bill of Rights and Principles for Learning in the Digital Age.

When it was released on January 23, 2013, the BoRP (an unfortunate and unforeseen acronym) met with resistance and criticism. Where were the students in the writing of this? Why had this summit been convened so privately? How had we dared leave so much of academia out of the loop? To an extent, these criticisms were fair, especially in that we ourselves foresaw them. We ourselves bemoaned the lack of student voices in the room. We ourselves worried about the exclusivity of our congress.

But pedagogy is evolutionary. It does not rest upon the shoulders of a few outspoken individuals. It never has. It rests on the teachers and students who cooperatively implement (implicitly or explicitly) pedagogies in the classroom and online. The document that we created was released in an open format, so that everyone could chime in. And, as Jesse said, “this document can’t be complete (can never be complete) without continuous and dynamic contributions and revising by students”.

I don’t say any of this to defend myself or the community with whom I wrote the bill of rights. Rather, I’d like to position the entire effort as an anecdote. It is not what we’ve done with our pedagogies that matters; it is not what we’ve built that means the most. A bill of rights is only as good as its implementation. It’s only as good as its practice, and the discovery through that practice of its nuance, its permutations, its chemistry. Every pedagogical theory, every pedagogical stance, every pedagogical discussion is only as good as the people who put them into play.

The Bill of Rights and Principles is only a mile-marker. I believe it’s intended to shift the instructor’s lens away from her position at the chalkboard (or behind the screen) to a position in the seats. If these rights are correct, if they are true enough, then what? As academics, we may argue until the cows come home about whether these specific rights represent what students truly need… Or we can use this document — and other documents like it — to give us an itch to scratch, make us restless in our roles, and encourage us to reconsider how we move forward pedagogically, technologically, humanely.

“How can I tell what I think till I see what I say?” – E. M. Forster

In her short piece, “First Person Singular: Sometimes, It Is About You”, Deneen L. Brown tells us that, “To get at the truth in a story you have to go deep — deeper than any surface interview. Deeper, sometimes, than the subject knows he or she can go. Sometimes you must tell your own story.” In other words, sometimes when we seek to relate something we’ve seen, heard, read, or experienced, we must do more than simply point it out to our readers; we must engage with it, and tell the story of our experience of that thing. We must say not just what we want to say, but what the story said to us; even what happened inside ourselves when writing or telling that story.

Writing — and especially digital writing right now — is always an experiment. What is happening when we write is invention, each time. And, like a scientist, it’s not just our duty to report our findings, but it’s also our job to present the autobiography of our experiment: the “what it meant to me” and “how it felt to do it” part of the work.

All of our work, then, whether fiction or non-fiction, is autobiographical. Not just because we are telling the stories, but because telling the stories changes us, affects us, makes us someone new. We are the storyteller and we are the listener always. Every story, and every experience of writing, always has two layers: that of the writing, and that of the written.

This meta, or second order, way of looking at writing is important when we arrive in the digital. When we write digitally, especially at first, it’s likely we are affecting ourselves more than we are affecting others. Our audience when we begin is largely unknown, and is usually relatively small in numbers. And so, writing becomes for us the experience of writing, rather than the experience of being read. Because this is so, what we write has an even greater impact onwho we are becoming through our writing, and who we are becoming online.

Who you are on the Internet is always already second order. Who you are on the Internet is always already meta. Not only are you manicuring what you look like, how you appear, how you sound, and what you say — by choosing the look and feel of your blog, your profile picture, and the type and quantity of content you create — but you are doing so in ways affected by and integral in the medium. If you write, you know you have a certain way you can look. If you create a video, you’ll look another way. If you create art, yet another of your faces appears. When you write digitally, you are choosing to write in a way more liquid and transformative than putting pen to paper. And the more ambiguous the medium, the more discerning you have to be.

As much as we are inventing our work online, we are inventing ourselves as well.

Getting Playful

I say, in my Digital Writing Month post, “Creative Beasts with Crayons,” that

We can find digital writing the way we find purple, burnt sienna, maroon, and forest green. As familiar and known as they are surprising, crayons stimulate our bigger hands to muscle memory. How to tint, how to shade, how to outline, how to color within or outside the lines. We pick up crayons again for the first time, and we draw a smile, or a Christmas tree, or a yellow daisy. Given enough time, though, we begin to remember how elaborate crayons can let us be. Suddenly, we’ve drawn a castle with a moat, a star ship, the Earth, or Sunday on the Island of La Grand Jatte. What we make is new, and it is old. It is what we’ve always drawn, in vivid color.

I think it’s very important to be playful when you are creating work online, to not take it too seriously. Especially at first, we are adopting a new way of thinking about ourselves, and so it’s important to spend some time figuring out all the dimensions of who that person is going to be, is becoming, or already is. The only way to find out who you are online, the only way you can figure out what you’re going to say, is to experiment, to say things, draw back, explode forward, and refine.

In his book, On Moral Fiction (Basic Books, 2000), John Gardner says that:

True art imitates nature’s total process: endless blind experiment (fish that climb trees, hands with nine fingers, shifts in and out of tonality) and then ruthless selectivity — the artist’s sober judgments, like a lion’s, of what can be killed, what is better left alone, such as (for the lion) rhinos and certain nasty snakes. Art, in sworn opposition to chaos, discovers by its process what it can say. That is art’s morality. (14)

Your job in this class is not to “get it right” or to produce one or another type of presence online. It is to find out, through experimentation, who you will be, what you will say — and eventually, who will hear you. The only way you can do this is to try new things rampantly. To write rampantly. To explore with appetite.

There’s a thing I want to say. I heard it coming up when I was sitting in Starbucks. Watching the sun and the people in the sun and thinking this was as good a place as any for a writer and a teacher to be composing his thoughts. And I was imagining composed thoughts – organized and clear and inspiringly meaningful. And instead I was watching a father and his young son have an argument. The four-year-old boy wanted to climb the back of the booth he was sitting on, and then he wanted to lay down on the seat. And the father wanted him to stop. Whichever he chose. The only solution for the father was for his son to sit still, to sit down in the chair and behave as. Well, as he himself was. In all his age and sediment. The argument grew to a boil, with the son never quite getting the sitting in the seat right and the father getting more upset each time. Finally at one point reaching over to grab his son’s knee, force him upright, and threatening to take away his cookie. Which he did. Which he did because the boy didn’t obey. The boy couldn’t find it in his small legs and busy hands to sit still. And away went the cookie. And on came the tears.

They did, too. The boy began to cry. He started to rub hard against his eyes. And the dad stood to go. Asking brusquely if the boy wanted at least to keep his water. The boy said only one thing, and he said it probably ten times during their exit from the store. Through his tears and in the stretched-mouthed crying voice of young children, he kept saying: “I want to say something. I want to say something.” And his father ignored the request.

After they left, I thought: There’s a thing I want to say.

Writing is an aching occupation. You learn that the more you write, the more you look inside for stories, the more you realize that what you want to put in your stories are pulled from people with lives you may only partially understand. That there is this orbiting that goes on in our lives. People and people and people all around us, moving around us, curious and careful and scared and amused and loving. They’re there. All around. And they’re real. Very, very real. They can be touched, they can be hurt, they can be stolen from, they can be honored.

And I look at the words I’m writing and I think: Are these teaching words? Do these have to do with the craft?

Writers have a responsibility.

Annie Dillard talks about how writers live in isolation, away from the world, remembering the real as they write. She says that the worst part of the writing life is not being one of “Many fine people who are out there living, people whose consciences permit them to sleep at night despite their not having written a decent sentence that day, or ever.” But what if I disagree? What if I think the worst part of the writing life are the days we spend all our time writing?

Is it okay for a writer to live in isolation? Is it okay to set oneself up in a cabin on the edge of a cold island shore and type away under the protection of a wool scarf and hat? Is it okay for a writer to go days and days without touching anyone?

Much ado is made of Thoreau’s escapade in the wood he recorded in his timeless piece,Walden. “Ah,” many writers say, “if only I could find that isolation. Then I could really write.” But as much as Thoreau likes to say he was alone there, he was in fact not far from town. He made trips to town daily to speak with others, to interact, to invite people out to his hermitage by the pond. He did not live alone. And much of the best writing in Walden comes out his direct interaction with others, or his insight into human society and culture.

I said last week that all digital writing is public writing. And I guess this week, I want to reconsider the nuance of that. Does it mean that all writing is exposed, that it is open to critique? Perhaps. But it also means that all digital writing is part of the public world. It responds to it, moves with it, just as it moves with and responds to the writer’s internal world. We are living now in a time when the external and internal become blurred. Or better yet, mixed, blended into an alchemical formula that wakes up something new. Something not entirely the writer, nor entirely the public world.

Your story doesn’t start with your words. It starts with how you live in the world. And it doesn’t end with your words, either. Your story ends within the echoes of those who listen.

I know, asking it, that I’m actually asking the question of any instructor. I want to say that, as educators, we have both the privilege and the responsibility to ask the questions. But I think it may be too early to say that. I ask the question, this particular question, pretty much whether I should or not.

The response comes back something along the lines of: “I enforce deadlines because there are deadlines in the real world, like taxes, etc.” It’s the response I expected, the response I think just about any instructor would give me in answer to the question. I’m far from satisfied with the answer, though. This is a composition classroom, I want to tell him, and not a course on teaching young people to turn in their tax forms on time. Not only is that decidedly not one of the course objectives, it’s not a responsibility – as an English teacher – I want to take on. I will feel plenty sorry for the student who doesn’t turn in his taxes on time, but I won’t go so far as to blame myself because I didn’t enforce a paper due date.

In part, I’m being deliberately obnoxious here, and I’m also aware that I’m raking this poor, unnamed faculty member across the coals for an answer, frankly, I couldn’t expect him not to give. When I’m ruthless, I’m quite aware of my own ruthlessness.

But the fact is, the problem of his response alarms me. I did not become a teacher to help students learn to meet deadlines set by the Federal government, their future employers, or even other teachers. I became a teacher because I am interested in genius. To me, the cultivation of genius is the only really interesting thing about hanging out with students (or, really, anyone). Grading, paying dues to rubrics, monitoring attendance and tardiness, plagiarism, and the problem of due dates (especially in a writing classroom) are boring. Any time a student or group of students gives me the leeway to throw these pedacratic trappings out the window, I’m thrilled.

That said, I want to get back to the question: “What is your pedagogical reason for penalizing late work?” To me, penalties are only useful because they coerce organization and order in the classroom. Should such coercion be part of the classroom dynamic? While organization and order are not unnecessary, if we use penalties to enforce them, aren’t we assuming that the students will not, of their own accord, organize and order themselves? Is it necessary to take that power from them in order to create a workable classroom? Could it possibly be better to establish an environment of trust? This particular faculty member also supplies that he believes the disorder that would result from allowing students to turn in work “whenever they want, without penalty” (a strategy I was not championing) will cause undue stress, added discussions with individual students, and that these will collaborate to take away from the time he could spend teaching.

Which then draws the definition of “teaching” into question – (when is discussion with an individual student not teaching?) – which is, ultimately, what I want this blog (the whole blog, not just this post) to do.

Let’s go back to beginner’s mind, and to the example of teaching a dog to sit. When I first got my dog, Max, I felt certain he needed obedience training, if only because he had four furry feet and wasn’t training necessary for any dog? But as soon as I started to train him to sit, to wait for his food, not to bark, etc., I found myself questioning: why are these behaviors necessary for Max? Or am I teaching him these behaviors in order to exert my dominance over him, in order to control him? If the latter is the case, isn’t it enough that he can’t eat without my permission, can’t exercise without my help? Isn’t he already dependent enough on me? So, I began to think about revising training to make it relevant to Max and his well-being. Teaching him to sit would be extremely helpful if, one day, he were walking with me off-leash and I needed him to wait up ahead or behind me. I mean, what if a car was coming and he didn’t know how to stop in his tracks and sit? Teaching him to wait for his food kept him from becoming anxious about eating; and training him to wait on a little padded bed in the corner of the room while I did yoga allowed him to be near me without interfering with my practice – saving me from frustration and him from confusion. In other words, training him should not be a matter of convenience for me, but a matter of improving his and my quality of life together.

I could go on, but my point is clear: teaching really is only about relevancy, and not relevancy to us teachers, but relevancy to our students. We are put in the most unique spot of coaching learners into a world of knowledge. What we need to remember is that their world of knowledge may not align perfectly with our own, their process may not fit our schedules, their ideas may not synch with our own. Ultimately, what they learn will be a combination of that material we provide for them, and the material provided by their lives outside our classrooms.

And then there is the fact that most students already deal with the world in some capacity. I don’t think that teachers can make any sort of argument that our students are any more isolated from the “real world” than we are… And don’t we learn a vast majority of our practical lessons (like turning something in on time) from worldly and not classroom experience?

What is the classroom meant to be? Should it be a microcosm of an unforgiving world? Should it be a retreat from that world? Should it be some kind of safe synergy of novelty, rigor, and relevant experience? And if it is this last, what “rules” must we establish in the classroom to keep our pedagogy intact?

Digital writing is emergent writing. It mutinies at the imposition of form, the edicts of the grammars of old. It rails to change the rules. It raises the flag of anarchy. The council of digital writing is one of spontaneity, rambunctiousness, the aloof horror of invention, the frenetic joy of dismantling what came before, and the abdication of the author. It is audacious, demanding that we writers free it from the prison of specific rigor. It emerges. It revolts.

And yet, there is something familiar about digital writing. We can go to it through the mind of theory, through the analysis of the ways it breaks down our learned structures, and the expectations we’ve been told to have for the written word. Or we can come to it in the same way an adult picks up crayons, again for the first time in over a dozen years, or two dozen years. We can find digital writing the way we find purple, burnt sienna, maroon, and forest green. As familiar and known as they are surprising, crayons stimulate our bigger hands to muscle memory. How to tint, how to shade, how to outline, how to color within or outside the lines. We pick up crayons again for the first time, and we draw a smile, or a Christmas tree, or a yellow daisy. Given enough time, though, we begin to remember how elaborate crayons can let us be. Suddenly, we’ve drawn a castle with a moat, a star ship, the Earth, or Sunday on the Island of La Grand Jatte. What we make is new, and it is old. It is what we’ve always drawn, in vivid color.

Digital writing is familiar in the same way. It’s territory we’ve been to before, though also unexplored. As children, not all of us worked with computers, not all of us were raised on the Internet. For those of us who were, digital writing is the only writing there’s ever been, and everything I’m saying is like a recitation of biology, a list of the muscles you’ve always used, bones you’ve never considered but have relied on nonetheless. But for those who came to the digital later in their various adolescences, the familiarity is like stretching those muscles, mending broken bones. Or like picking up crayons.

These are familiar words we use (when we use words). They are not the product of a newly learned language. The letters look familiar, the words sound the same when spoken, and the sentences follow along the tracks they always have. But they occupy digital space, space that is always wider, more open, and more blank than the paper page. Our word processing softwares offer us the familiar shape and color of the paper, as if to extend a hand to our sensibilities, to invite us in with something we think we recognize. But there’s no paper here. There’s no end to the notepad. No limitation on the flexibility afforded us. And the more we occupy this space, the more we realize how foreign it truly is, and how it seems to know more about our own creative process than we do. The more we occupy this space, the more we let our sentences derail, our words evolve or devolve, our letters become only illuminated figures upon the screen. We begin to see within the space of the digital, beyond our words to the code, to the systems behind the page, and to the binary behind it all.

We approach digital writing as if it is the same as our old familiar writing. But as our occupation of the digital continues, we discover the only familiarity left is our approach.

Language begins to fail, to become not language at all, but images. Typing is not storytelling, it is placing figures upon a non-existent background, floating our ideas upon the ether, like writing on water. They are eradicable, impermanent, unenduring. With the flip of a switch, the stroke of a key, the accident of spilled coffee, they can vanish. Or, they can be manipulated, reformed, sculpted, torn down by other authors who wish to fashion their own handiwork from our airy habit. Our words at times wait to become pastiche, to be imitated, parodied, dissected, distributed. Because digital writing is like writing on water, our words will always ripple and distribute, becoming more deformed the farther they go. We get worried about plagiarism, about others using our words and ideas, we get concerned that the face we’ve made for ourselves from the words we’ve fashioned will simply be deleted — or worse, written upon, written over.

And yet we come back to it, again and again. Slowly beginning to write not for recognition of our own authorship, but to make ripples and waves. And this is what makes digital writing worth doing. It is less the writing that matters, and more the persistence of voice.

It is a brave act to pick up crayons, whether you are a child or an adult. It is a brave act to commit to the digital the words and images, the ideas and theories, the stories and poems that we do every time we wield keyboard and cursor. There is something in the mind that wants expression. There is something in the mind that wants recognition, too, and honor for our texts. But the digital grants recognition only reluctantly. There is little else left of our efforts but our expression, our raw bellow, our “this is what I want to say.”

Within the digital, we can all be published, we can all see our works distributed and read; yet within the digital, we speak as if within a crowd, knowing only some will hear us, or that none will, and so it is the act of speaking that becomes vital, and not the return of recognition. To write digital writing is to write in and for the moment of wanting to say something, of needing to say something. And to do that again and again.

Out of this emerges the spontaneous. The spontaneous grammar, the spontaneous phrase, the spontaneous sound of our voice that may create a spontaneous listener, or a spontaneous community of listeners. Digital writing is emergent in the way that we voice it, the way others hear it. Digital writing changes the rules because it is immediate, urgent, momentary.

And so as you go out to write within the digital, to scrape your name in the sand, remember that if your words get diluted or deleted, if they do not get heard, that the important thing is speaking them. We are all animals of speech and expression, we are creative beasts with crayons, we are all authors, and we are all founding mothers and fathers of a territory yet unclaimed. So write because you want to, write because you need to, and may the echo of your voice stir others to say more and say again.

“I find nothing so singular to life as that everything appears to lose its substance the instant one actually grapples with it.”–Nathaniel Hawthorne, The House of the Seven Gables

The author is dead. She is become as a specter. Faceless, genderless, subject not now only to scrutiny within her own text but to exorcism from it. That text never again will be her own, but a relic of her fondest desire, her wish toward something that mattered, something that made her matter. Yet, she becomes no more than a wisp behind the words, a half-embarrassed face in the mirror, bodiless, wordless.

Authors drain all their lives into their words. They die into them sometimes, and then resurrect themselves within the fashion of letters, phrases, and sentences that describe what they know, what they’ve seen, how their bodies have felt, what their ears have heard, and also what they cannot know but pine to know. Anyone who has committed to paper the story that woke him at night understands the plight of author, desperate for vivid, livid language to deposit that dream, that narrative, that true true story into the mind and heart of a reader. Anyone who has stared unblinkingly at the deep, dark line of the cursor for minutes and hours, deliberating and waiting on the next word — which. will. be. the. right. one — would happily share a beer, a shoulder, a cry with any other author. For the writing process, in the end, is always the same. Write what you know, and hope your readers will know what you’ve written.

Our words are greater than ourselves. They are our memories, and what we’re remembered by, how we’re referenced, how we’re thought of. These words as I write them inform you of me, and in ways you cannot be otherwise informed of me. Dinner conversation won’t do it. Intimacy won’t either. Hold my hand as we walk through the city and you may soak in a part of me that these words are, but you cannot catalogue that, cannot preserve it. These words are me, and they remain me long after I no longer do. Words are the author, and he writes them as a testament. More than that, traditionally the reader has sought the author through the words: who is this speaker? where has he lived? to what does he testify? The “explanation of the work is always sought in the man who has produced it”, says Barthes. Readers have looked for the mind behind the voice in the work, even to the point of cherishing that mind in ways greater than the works it produced. Shakespeare matters as Shakespeare, not as the words alone which he wrote. Melville was a man who wrote about a whale; the whale did not write itself.

To now, the honor of being an author has been knowing your name is attached to a work.

But words are not now what words once were. No testament is final on the Internet. Where ink holds things in place, pins them to the page pretty and still, code behind digital writing is unquiet and shifting. Our words are not even words any more, but strange combinations of numbers, symbols, commands. Our words appear to our fingers as permanent as they did upon the blank sheet rolled around the carriage of an old Underwood, but they are not. Behind the letters we type, our words prefer first the company of the computer before they cozy to any reader; even they speak in secret with the machine’s brain before they register at all to the writer’s eyes. This is not handwriting, and this is not printing. This is a ghostlier writing; and the computer is the medium, staring into the crystal ball, telling those who listen (and he who writes) what communications come from afar.

When words are made of such ectoplasm, the author himself becomes the specter. He dies, and it is not his words which are the relic, but the proposition that he is the author, that a thing-called-author really even is. Indeed, we are coming to a time when people are as likely to believe in authors as they might believe in ghosts. If he is born at all, it is a birth by text; the “modern writer (scriptor) is born simultaneously with his text; he is in no way supplied with a being which precedes or transcends his writing”, says Barthes. This is literally a performance, an actor coming to life on the stage through the words he utters. But today that act is not the act of original creation; today, texts are uttered through acts of distribution, sharing, revision, repurposing.

Writing is an act, and the original writing (like this typing I am doing now) is merely performance, a first utterance which necessarily — if it is to live — will be followed by countless other utterances; and each utterance makes a new writer, a new author of the old words (made new).

Write what you know, and the world will write upon it. The world will tweet it, like it, share it, parse it, abbreviate it, duplicate it, splice it, excerpt it. And each new iteration and variation on your text becomes less your text and more the text of the world. Your testament, which you so carefully crafted and which your mother said was so you, becomes ever more recrafted as it is dispersed; and, ever more applied to others, it begins to resemble that text their mothers would recognize as so them. But of course that text is only them as long as it hovers in suspense, unredistributed, unrepurposed, unshared, unreauthored.

The digital reader holds the power of the life or death of the text. It is in the readers hands that words populate the web, that they roam freely and breathe, or meet an untimely end. The digital writer writes, and no one notices. Unless a reader takes those words so carefully crafted and disperses them, the writer’s words fade into the indiscernible background, the mayhem and buzz of all that comes to nothing on the Internet. “The true locus of writing is reading,” we are told. As readers, we do not receive words of an author, we receive words as good as unoriginated, which we author by the act of the reading and the act of passing them on. But this cycle is perpetual. All our efforts to be an author come to nothing but to serve as machines for transmission, as if all writing is like tuning the radio, or answering our cell phones.

Authoring, then, is momentary, impermanent, a solitary, lonely act of the mind; in contrast, reading is perpetual, a communal, celebratory act of manifestation. “The unity of the text is not in its origin, it is in its destination.” But in the world of digital writing, we are origin and destination, reader and author, spirit and medium. As origin, we are mechanical, creating words like creating mulch, making texts only to push up daisies; it is in being destination that we find joy and meaning in the work of the text.

And now, for the last week, I’ve watched the infant MOOC take its first steps, go to school, learn to drive, grow strangely unfamiliar, and rebel as all good growing things must. I had no idea this is what we were making when we made MOOC MOOC.

I didn’t expect the response. I knew that participants might get overwhelmed by the amount of work and the pace of the week. I knew that some people would object to collaborating with fifty people in a document, that some would resist making a video… and that in the crowd, some would never allow themselves to enjoy the experience, caught up instead in the politics, social implications, and pedagogical conundrums of MOOCs. But what I didn’t know was this:

And what I didn’t know was this:

And what I didn’t expect was this:

From Lurker to WordleKing in MOOCMOOC?

I didn’t expect the race to become the #wordleking. I didn’t expect to to be nicknamed. What I didn’t foresee was the community that would rise up from the MOOC, gather around its nightly campfires, and sing songs of invention and inspiration, collaboration and investigation. I hoped people would like MOOC MOOC; I didn’t expect MOOC MOOC would give them a fresh approach to the work they’ve been doing for years.

To be perfectly honest, I don’t know if we created a MOOC. Some people assured me that we did. Our little course wasn’t massive in terms of attendance, but it might have been massive in terms of information and ideas. Though it was open to everyone who wanted to attend, as evidenced by the droves who continued to sign up all week to be part of the experiment, and though it was clearly online, I don’t know if it was a course. Some say we scaffolded information, and some said they kept looking for grades on their homework; but at the same time, the learning we all achieved was not the learning we built the course around. We had no learning objectives. Those were invented along the way.

But whether it was a MOOC, a mini-MOOC, or a sort-of-MOOC-ish thing, I am sitting here on Saturday morning thinking perhaps we did a GOOD (grand open online discussion) thing.

And so, where do we go from here?

When I’m not designing and implementing MOOC MOOC, I am a father. When I’m not checking continuously on conversations and questions in the LMS, I am writing a fantasy novel. When I’m not questioning and complimenting under the hashtag #moocmooc, I speak for hours with my husband about spirituality and religion. I am not an educator 24/7. On average I’m more an educator 7/7, or 4/7. What I’ve been at this week is uncharacteristic.

I’m sure this is true of most of MOOC MOOC’s participants. I’m sure most of us have a lot of other things to do besides explore ideas about online education. (My MOOC copilot, Jesse Stommel, is an exception to that, but he’s a rarity.) So, what do we do when the week is over? Will we still be MOOCing about a week from now, a month?

I think what MOOC MOOC proves, if it proves anything at all, is that innovation through collaboration and discussion is still possible in higher education. Many are the woes of that institution, many are our complaints and concerns about it. We are worried that it will collapse, or we’re worried it won’t collapse soon enough; we’re angered by the political economies of higher education, frustrated by blindered pedagogies, and afraid to be complicit in the ivory tower’s continuing renovation upon the backs of underpaid adjunct faculty. But MOOC MOOC became a place for discourse and invention, for constructive rather than destructive thinking.

Was it a MOOC about MOOCs? Who knows? But it was a home-away-from-home for those willing to engage in a new dialogue about what is possible in higher education, what is possible in online learning. If that’s what a MOOC can be, then I say we need more MOOCs. Many more MOOCs.

What I learned this week is that MOOCs require community. They are set up on the premise that a community will assemble to create and learn together. Participants create the learning within a MOOC; if a community doesn’t assemble, there is no massiveness, and there is no course. There’s just, well, OO.

So, maybe all we need to MOOC-ify our lives is sustained community discussion bent on invention and the discovery of solutions. Maybe we need a massive open online common space to gather, to partake of ideas and critical inquiry, and to take away to our homes, institutions, and classrooms experimental new ways to engage with learning.

Today, the MOOC ends. But maybe today, the MOOC begins.

But the course is an old idea. Learning has changed.

Or, more correctly, learning has revealed itself for what it really has been all along: creative and spontaneous, umbilical and imminent. A course today is an act of composition, of the drawing together of thoughts through the use of tools to create – birth, deliver, discover, startle – not an artifact of learning, like a paper or final exam, but a use. To create a use for those tools, a use for those ideas, a use, indeed, for the course itself. To complete a course today means a student finds himself at the beginning, but well equipped. The course as composition is not fundamentally instrumental, producing an article or living up to an outcome; but rather the course as composition is an action which has intrinsic value.

The first hybridity occurs (hybridity, too, is an action, and not a state) between the mind and the tool it controls. Consider the mind as one site of movement – biochemical movement, neuron to neuron, or metaphysical movement, inspiration to dream to spontaneous revelation to curiosity. Into the mind rushes memory, observation, calculation, confusion and resolution, error and correction. All of these things remain in the mind, impotent and useless without tools to bring them to light.

Hybridity occurs when the thinker picks up the hammer, the beam, the pen, the paper – all things decidedly not the mind itself. Hybridity occurs when mind and matter cooperate to create. There is in fact no creativity without hybridity – there is only thought or action. But the movement of hybridity causes thought and action, which make process into use.

The internet, and all the digital worlds, are impotent and useless without the synthesis of hybridity. Without the sense-making and use-making capabilities of the creative mind, web sites are flotsam, the trillions of lines of code are silent and meaningless. It is the human who composes who gives use, meaning, and order to the jumble.