Controlling the Conversation originally appeared on Portable Learner on March 23rd, 2009

Gladwell’s Secrets of Success originally appeared on Portable Learner on February 1st, 2009

Subverting Our Reverence for Books originally appeared on Portable Learner on February 1st, 2009

Oddly enough, he doesn’t herd them all into a monochromatic training room, seat them in front of a slide show outlining the 5-step recipe (sorry) for the acquiring culinary expertise, or urge them to participate in a learning activity involving a (simulated) five-course meal. On the contrary, he relies on real-life challenges posed by an encounters with plates of marinated olives, or a bushel of apricots at a farmers’ market, or a set of dull knives, or a commitment to host a special dinner party to offer opportunities that cultivate habits of fearless inquiry, of capacious mind and spirit. So, what you might not expect from his book are insights into alternative approaches to teaching and learning. (Food, I’m discovering, is a useful metaphor for learning).

The infinite variations on the theme of tomato sauce. There’s learning bubbling up to the surface. Photo by Pete Carpenter. Sauce by ???

Consider the preparation of tomato sauce. Here is how I make it: Every six months or so I clear everyone out of the kitchen and start dicing: red onion, green peppers, celery, carrots, mushrooms. It is quite a production. Everything is added to a large dutch oven, along with a few cans of plum tomatoes, broth, tomato paste, and equal parts of dried thyme, dried oregano and dried parsley. I cook it on high, add a little wine, bring the concoction to a boil, and then reduce the heat to simmer and cook, partially covered and stirring occasionally for 3 to 4 hours until the sauce is thick and robust. Sound delicious? It is. I’ve prepared tomato sauce this way for years for appreciative appetites. I can do it mindlessly. I start with the same ingredients every time, irrespective of seasonal tomatoes or fresh herbs, without special regard to the preferences, age or minor health problems of those who may consume it (just eat around the green peppers), or how many there may be for dinner (in fact, my goal is volume), and clearly uninfluenced by the fact that I spent months traveling through Italy sampling the world’s finest sauces. Context does not matter; this is, after all, how I’ve made tomato sauce for years.

Here is how Adam Roberts makes tomato sauce:

Tomato sauce represents everything I like about cooking .… I like the infinite variation on a theme — if you simmer tomatoes in a pot for thirty minutes you’ll have a sauce. You can make that sauce with butter or olive oil or pork fat; you can make it with onions or garlic or shallots; you can make it with fresh tomatoes or canned tomatoes; you can use fresh basil and thyme or dried basil and thyme or any combination thereof. In my cookbook collection alone there are at least thirty recipes for tomato sauce.

One of the most cherished myths in education is that in order to learn a skill, we must practice it to the point of doing it without thinking. We call this learning the basics, and it involves repetition until that skill becomes second nature. Context does not matter. Psychologist Ellen Langer in her work on mindful learning points out that a consequence is that true learning stops. We become so conditioned to seeing things a certain way, the right way, that we no longer challenge or question the process. Adam Roberts’ approach is based on the view that experts at anything become expert in part by varying those same basics. In his kitchen there is no end-point at which you’ve mastered the basics, there is only perpetual variation through mindful attention:

.… making tomato sauce rewards attention to detail. The more you make it, the better you’ll get. The first time you might, say, add the garlic too soon and it may turn too brown; next time you’ll know to add it a little while after the onion. You’ll discover that squeezing the tomatoes submerged in their own liquid will prevent you from squirting yourself in the eye. You’ll know precisely when the sauce is done and how much salt to add.

If we learn the basics, but do not over learn them, Adam implies, we can vary them as we change or the situation changes. Yet, most of what we learn in school, at home, at work, and from books and other media, is given to us in an unconditional form. Teaching one set of basics for everyone seems to be the easier route, but the result is a little more disconcerting than mediocre tomato sauce. Much of what we know about the world, about other people, and about ourselves is usually processed in the same way. If this seems too dire, then let’s return to the Amateur Gourmet and a more palatable scale. How would you buy an apricot? Wait. Would you even buy an apricot without a recipe?

Part of what makes an accomplished cook more likely to choose the best apricots is that an accomplished cook doesn’t go with a preconceived idea of buying apricots. The accomplished cook goes to see what looks good and builds from there. If the apricots look good, then apricot tart or apricot should be on the menu .…When I go food shopping, I know what I need before I go, and I arrive at the store with a list that tells me what I need. I proceed to track it down and I usually do so in a hurry. This makes me a hunter. Great chefs, on the other hand, are most often gatherers. They don’t home in on a target — they let the target home in on them.

I have to apologize for giving the impression that the Amateur Gourmet is a book about teaching and learning. It isn’t. It is a fun book written by an author who is both amateur gourmet and amateur teacher. Here is Adam’s take on the value of reflection and synthesis as an essential part of the learning cycle. No, wait, it is really about doing the dishes:

Clean/Dirty. Photo by Mandy Thornton.

.… cooking makes them dirty, cleaning restores them .… The sooner you embrace the cleaning up, the more likely you are to make more messes .… the moment you find doing dishes rewarding is the moment you become a cook for life.

So here’s my advice. When you’re done with … dinner .… send everyone home with a pat on the back and an assurance that, “No, I can do the dishes, it’ll be fine.”

Once the door closes, stand in the kitchen and survey the scene. It’ll scare you.

And, when you press on, through the fear:

.… a clean kitchen is just begging to be dirtied again. May your kitchen, then, always be somewhere between clean and dirty — in transit between the two, always in motion, never still. I wish you ovens full of sizzling succulence and sinkfuls of soaking saucers. I hope your fridge is bursting with butter, your cabinets are spilling with flour and surgar, and that your trashbags are ripe from yesterday’s fist. Mostly, though, I pray that your kitchen becomes a lively place. May you never sacrifice liveliness for fear of doing dishes.

No more will doing the dishes fill me with dread, I think. Approaching a new skill is by definition a time when we know the least about it. It does not make sense to petrify our understanding before we test it in different situations, based on our own strengths and experiences. I have a can of anchovies in the pantry from a long forgotten recipe; do you think I should add it to my next tomato sauce?

The Amateur Gourmet: On Learning the Basics originally appeared on Portable Learner on January 18th, 2009

In his forward to Wilber’s Eye of the Spirit, Jack Crittenden expertly describes Wilber’s three-step method, which begins by simply retreating to a level of generalization at which the various conflicting approaches actually agree with one another:

Take, for example, the world’s great religious traditions: Do they all agree that Jesus is God? No. So we must jettison that. Do they all agree that there is a God? That depends on the meaning of “God.” Do they all agree on God, if by “God” we mean a Spirit that is in many ways unqualifiable, from the Buddhists’ Emptiness to the Jewish mystery of the Divine to the Christian Cloud of Unknowing? Yes, that works as a generalization-what Wilber calls an “orienting generalization” or “sturdy conclusion.”

In the second step, Wilber then systematically arranges these eclectic, often rival systems of truths (e.g. empirical science and religion), into chains or networks of interlocking conclusions. He ask, What coherent system would in fact incorporate the greatest number of these truths? The answer is the “integral system,” an inclusive worldview that Wilber has elaborated in his many books.

In the final, third step, Wilber uses that inclusive worldview to criticize the narrow view of each of the contributing approaches. He criticizes not their truths, which are part of the broad integral system, merely their partial nature.

As Crittenden points out, it is the comprehensive approach of Wilber’s worldview that elicits such extreme reactions to his work. In his integral vision of science and religion, Wilber concludes that while science legitimately concerns itself with exteriors and religion legitimately with interiors, both must be subject to the same epistemology and accept the legitimacy of each other’s domain. Not only must we accept the reality of interiors on an equal footing with exteriors, and we must also give up beliefs that stretch beyond a scientific epistemology. Wilber may be a little optimistic about what followers of science and religion are willing to do, but his ability to synthesize seemingly irreconcilable views offers much relief to those of us exhausted by an increasingly fragmented and overspecialized world.

The Marriage of Sense and Soul originally appeared on Portable Learner on November 19th, 2006

Robin William’s book for non-designers is a pamphlet-sized introduction timeless principles of such design literacy. She presents four basic design concepts–proximity, alignment, repetition and contrast, with many illustrative before and after examples. The section on typography is especially good, where she explains the tensions created by different typeface styles. On the downside, she does not elaborate on the use of colour or the application of the design principles to contemporary web design.

The book’s strength may well be that it gives you the tools to understand why professional designs work. I found myself looking for concordance in traffic signs and alignment in junk mail flyers. This is a good foundation for the inevitable changes coming to design in the next fifteen years.

The Non-Designer’s Design Book originally appeared on Portable Learner on August 20th, 2006

Imagine a world in which we can move about physical places, accessing not only what is stored in our brains but also multiple layers of information that have previously been inaccessible: experiences of friends, colleagues, and complete strangers in the same space; information about who lives and works in the place, their demographic characteristics, and perhaps their political affiliations; crime statistics for the area; the history of community events, from celebrations to calamities; information about businesses in the area and their products; changes that have reshaped the natural environment over time; and much more.

Map hacking is the practice of using open-source mapping applications or combining one site’s functionality with another’s to create something that is often quite surprising and nontraditional (sometimes also known as “mashups”). The contributors to the book have managed to collate some 100 locative hacks, despite the considerable obstacle of nonstandard geodata formats hosted in proprietary geodatabases, and introduce mapping enthusiasts to a variety of open-source geospatial tools, from GRASS to GPSBabel and from GeoServer to RedSpider. Given that the publication date (2005) would not have allowed them to take full advantage of decisions from companies like Google and Yahoo! to allow programmers to use their APIs, surely some of these hacks could use updating (for example, I use a WordPress plugin that gives me much of the functionality of hack #91 to build an interactive web-based map.) But that’s not the point.

The point is that geotagging is a distributed, bottom-up process, with all the emergent characteristics of the World Wide web that this implies. Maps are no longer created by a trained association of cartographers, but by legions of nonexperts who create them as needed. In their introduction to critical cartography, Crampton and Krygier (2006) cite Harley and Woodward’s 1987 definition of the map, one that emphasizes the role of human experience over technical accuracy: “maps are graphic representations that facilitate a spatial understanding of things, concepts, conditions, processes, or events in the human world.” For example, consider Google Earth. Released to the public last year, it quickly gained prominence during Hurricane Katrina when many of us, without the benefit of a cartographer, made use of aerial photographs of the disaster in our weblogs and photostreams.

Mapping Hacks is a wonderful introduction to the wealth of meaningful information mapping offers. The section on mapping with other people that includes modelling interactive spaces, mapping your friend-of-a-friend network, and geo-warchalking with two-dimensional barcodes are among the most intriguing hacks. More of us are living in fundamentally mobile worlds; adding a geographically meaningful component to navigate this world is relevant to a broader audience than hackers.

Mapping Hacks originally appeared on Portable Learner on August 19th, 2006

I’ve written a complete book review (as opposed to these little book notes) in The International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning, Vol 7, No 1 (2006).

Web-based Distance Education for Adults originally appeared on Portable Learner on June 5th, 2006