#SOL16: Four Words

I.

I didn't know what being brave meant. Courage was more an abstraction, not of this world--or at least of my world at the time. Now I see more. Towards the end of Rob's life a friend sent me a private tweet that simply said, Try to stay curious. At the time I was barely hanging on and I didn't stop to think how staying curious could keep a body whole, present, brave. But words are sometimes acted upon without conscious thought.

By the last day of February, Rob's hold on reality was fractured. On that day, I recorded this:

Rob has had a total break with reality. Even when he did not know me by name, he knew me by sight, sound, touch. Now he stares beyond me. Yesterday he said he wanted to die and who could blame him? (2.29.16)

I wrote that early in the morning as I watched him grow still. And later that same day I would open Twitter and read the message about curiosity. That night as the house quieted those words found me again.  Curled in the chair pushed up against the hospital bed, I listened as my brave Rob figured out how to consent. How to leave. He would be lucid again--temporarily--before the foot he had in this world was gone. He would tell me during the next few days that he had figured out how to cross over.

He would die seven days later.


II.

Six months have passed and though the calendar won't note the season's official end for another few weeks, summer closes with Labor Day.  Early this morning I was reading Henri Nouwen's The Genesee Diary (recommended by another friend via Twitter) and came upon this:

"Back in my 'cell' I unpacked my suitcase and was surprised by the collection of books I had decided to take with me: A Spanish Bible, the works of Saint John of the Cross, a history of the United States, a book about common weeds, and the novel, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance" (Kindle Locations 128-130). 

The mention of Robert Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance brought me back years--nearly a decade before I would meet Rob. Then I was a college student and the whole campus read the book, not too long after it was first published. I recall knowing it was an impressive work by what others had to say, but at the age of 17 it was out of my reach.  This morning I reread the opening, noting how the idea of perspective is illuminated. The father/narrator thinks,

"At age eleven you don’t get very impressed with red-winged blackbirds.  

You have to get older for that. For me this is all mixed with memories that he doesn’t have. Cold mornings long ago when the marsh grass had turned brown and cattails were waving in the northwest wind. The pungent smell then was from muck stirred up by hip boots while we were getting in position for the sun to come up and the duck season to open. Or winters when the sloughs were frozen over and dead and I could walk across the ice and snow between the dead cattails and see nothing but grey skies and dead things and cold. The blackbirds were gone then. But now in July they’re back and everything is at its alivest and every foot of these sloughs is humming and cricking and buzzing and chirping, a whole community of millions of living things living out their lives in a kind of benign continuum.  

You see things vacationing on a motorcycle in a way that is completely different from any other" (p. 4).  

Reading Pirsig this morning sent me back to my art journal to paint. I had blackbirds on my mind. Ravens actually. And I painted outside as crows called to one another and throughout it I felt an odd sense of peace.

from my art journal (9.5.16 - gesso, acrylic and watercolor paint, ink, digital remix)

III.

There are some things you have to get older for. Others that defy age. I know this now.

Most days I begin with the hope the day will teach me what I most need to learn--what I will surely forget. Against the waves of grief, the making helps. I was told it would be making art that would heal me and perhaps there is some truth to that. So after reading a bit of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, I took out an art journal and painted outside. I felt the wind, heard the call of birds through trees, and watched the way light moved. Soon it will be fall.

These too may well be things you have to get older for.

I painted boldly, allowing movement and line to guide my hand.  Meaning emerged and I stayed curious--whole, present, brave.

On Learning: Twitter, College, Frames, and the Accidental

A Certain Stillness (M.A. Reilly, Wales, 2014)

I. 

Occasionally, I read tweets that argue how Twitter can be a source for professional learning.  I too have found tweets that lead to interesting learning. Most often these are to blogs or particular sites. Rarely, though do chats on Twitter require me to think deeply, differently, or to work arduously. When a chat does lead to an A-ha moment, I find these insights fade, quickly forgotten against the rush of the day. Twitter chats are more about being in the moment and there's a beauty to that.  

There are different types of learning with different intensities. 

Sometimes I'll read tweets that accompany these 'chats about PD that state rather emphatically how Twitter is the superior method for learning in comparison to college courses/programs, reading/viewing, and outside-provider professional 'development'. These tweets are often met with a round of retweets--a Twitter form of marginalia that affirms, says, "Yes!" At these times, I wonder about the Twitter-Tops-All sentiment.  What rests beneath these assertions? What assumptions are being made/unmade?  Is the subtext here more about asserting one's agency, rather than quality? When it comes to learning, can there be a single method that is somehow superior to other methods?  Does that even make sense? Are those who send such tweets telling us a truth, a type of truth? 


II.

A few days ago, Rob shared an email from a former student that mentioned an interest in a course being taught at the University of Rochester. After reading the course description, I contacted Professor Paul Duro and requested permission to post the description here. He agreed and sent me an updated version for the course, Rhetoric of the Frame, which appears below: 

The task of any discussion of frames and framing in literature and the visual arts is first and foremost to counter the tendency of borders, boundaries and frames to invisibility with respect to the work they contain. We see the work, but we do not see the frame. It is against this tendency to overlook the paregonal aspects of the work that this seminar is directed. Starting from a close reading of the foundational texts of frame theory in Immanuel Kant’s Critique of the Power of Judgment and Jacques Derrida’s celebrated study The Truth in Painting, we will explore the boundaries of the artwork from the point of view of its material, discursive, and metaphorical borders. Topics to be considered range from Edgar Allen Poe’s short story ‘The Purloined Letter’ to Martin Heidegger’s essay ‘The Origin of the Work of Art,’ and from Nicolas Poussin’s comments on the role of painting to Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s meditation on the limits of painting and poetry to the textual frame of literature in the work of Gerard Genette. 

After reading the description, Rob and I agreed that this was a course we would enjoy taking.  We each lamented the distance from home to Rochester.  I've long been interested in what we (un)frame and fail to frame and how frames alter how we see. Shift the frame and the artwork contained alters too. The uncertainty and ambiguity of it all intrigues me as does the way we see when peering through frames and how we see in their absence. A week ago, I bought a used copy of Derrida's The Truth in Painting and plan to crack it open during the weekend and see what sense (if any) I make of it. This may not be a book I can initially read well on my own as I find Derrida's work dense and sometimes obscure. Sometimes, I enjoy a more knowledgeable other to help me get anchored in a text. This may be one.

III.

I've been fortunate having learned with and from teachers, professors, and fellow students--in and out of school.  As an undergraduate and while earning a doctorate, I was encouraged by teachers and family to learn, not for a specific utilitarian purpose, but more often for the art of it. I can recall my doctoral adviser saying to me to slow down, take my time. "When will you have the time to learn this way again?"  When indeed?

Take courses that interest you was a mantra I lived by and one I could live by as the college degrees I earned were paid for through generous scholarships. The most memorable of these programs were ones where I was able to select the majority of courses and design independent studies as opposed to following an pre-established curriculum. I didn't recognize then how significant such freedom could be. Learning at college has afforded me the opportunity to ponder deeply--to struggle with complex ideas and to compose theory that was most often connected to my work as a teacher, artist, and professor. It has afforded me the interest and opportunities to set into words what these theories mean/fail to mean and to then publish these works. Such study has helped me to coauthor written and visual texts.  Frankly, it's hard for me to imagine learning such depth, such contradictions in an hour-long chat regardless of the participants. The preparation for such study required a very different use of time and resources. I think of this now as I am working with two friends who are each completing their dissertation and I am serving on their respective committees. The work and curve of learning these women do is so significant, challenging, and brave. It is these experiences that make me question the belief that Twitter represents the apex of professional learning.  It so often feels so fleeting.

IV.

Perhaps what I am struggling to articulate here is the idea that a multiplicity of ways to learn may be superior to a single method, and may be more truthful of how we compose ourselves professionally. I think that different types of learning require different degrees of responsibility from us and perhaps we are the better for such differences. What may be more important than method is the privilege of saying yes and/or no to what is being learned.   

I credit a blend of accidental and planned learning for much of the professional knowledge I've composed and forgotten and am grateful for professors, colleagues, teachers, fellow students, friends and family who have taught me and learned alongside. 

I'll let you know how the Derrida book goes.  

A Mean Tweet and A Response

I have never received a hateful tweet, until this morning.  I don't inspire such rancor, largely because I am careful and realize that what I write here or tweet there is going to travel to places and people I have not met.  I don't seek to offend.

So you can imagine my surprise this morning when I read "Simply First Grade Fun's"(@beckyd256) tweet to me. DeVries decided that she would send this tweet:

Tweet by DeVries on  July 4.

Well that certainly caught my attention.
You might think I actually know DeVries as her tweet is so personal.
Well I don't.
We do not follow one another.
We have never met.

Her tweet was in response to a tweet I retweeted several days ago.

Here it is:

I retweeted @Nuerocrat's (Dr. Dave) tweet citing the gender difference in the recent Supreme Court decision about insurance for contraceptives--a difference that I also thought about via a recent collage I made for July 2, 2014.  Decisions made in the last week by the Supreme Court are a concern. Whenever personal freedoms are limited in a republic, I grow concerned and take notice.

But, it's a large leap in logic to interpret a tweet about the Supreme Court's gender difference as a stance about the morning after pill and then conflate that with abortion.

My head spins.

And although I would not apologize for the way I think about freedom, that does not mean that I have have no values as DeVries has concluded.  I abhor the limited logic that is espoused by some that if you do not oppose everything they conflate with abortion than you are without values for life.

Who exactly are they to judge?  How narrow.  How mistaken.

This is what I tweeted in response to DeVries:

My tweet.

II. Be an Adult

It's well past time to call out people who behave in ways that are aggressively mean. I'm sure you've seen this: the driver who can't wait and needs to be first regardless of the realities of traffic and puts lives at risk with his/her aggressive behavior.  Or the newspaper columnist who thinks he has the right to conflate rape with privilege and pens hurtful trash in a syndicated column.  Or lawmakers who publicly joke about domestic violence. Beneath these different acts is this twisted belief that there is a given right to spew nasty and vile stuff at unknown others simply because an opinion or reality not liked has been expressed.  The inability to let others have their views is at best a sign of immaturity and can escalate to the kinds of drama we see playing out in the Middle East the last month  (here, here) where teens have been killed--and not by someone carrying a morning after pill and forcing others to swallow--but by thugs with intent to murder.  

I'm not sure that DeVries understands that aggression often begets aggression and that being kind is the better fit.

It's the Golden Rule. The one we still teach in first grade.
I'd think someone sporting the logo: Simply First Grade Fun would know that.

Disassemble, Reassemble: Some Notes About Curriculum and Improvisation

I was listening to music on my morning commute (2.5 hours. Yes, Northern NJ can be a nightmare). 

Anyway I had my iPod set to random and David Bromberg's "Such a Night" came on followed by Lester Bowie's Brass Fantasy "I Only Have Eyes for You."





In both pieces, the music seems to disassemble and reassemble, leaving spaces between that are hard to name as they are to contain--almost as if the instruments had minds of their own. 

Feedback.
Jamming.
Harmony.
Improv.

And so as I sat in traffic I began wondering about things that disassemble and reassemble and yet make something bigger than itself. 

II. Sr. Corita

Some time later I participated in a brief twitter exchange about curriculum as I caught up with a slew of tweets that came in while I slept the night before about a brief bit of video, Become a Mircoscope, that Thomas Steele-Maley (@steele-maley) via Roberto Greco (@rogre) tweeted out to several people. It's an inspiring 3 minutes of video, taken from a longer work, that chronicles through recollection the influence of Sr. Corita.  How to see with new eyes.  I so appreciated this tweet RT by Bo Adams (@boadams1) and tweeted by Alan Levin (@cogdog)

Hope you can take a few minutes to watch.



The tweets about curriculum were rather fractured to me--perhaps because I was watching Sr. Corita and thinking about disassembling and reassembling and how these twin acts keep me in the middle of things.  But the gist, as best as I can recall was the varying definitions we walk around with when we attempt to define curriculum.  Here's a bit of it:

The tweets kind of reminded me of the music I had listened to earlier: How the disassembling--the taking apart leaves something less refined, something more urgent. 

It's an improv about curriculum and doubt and loss.  

I wondered if taking things apart & reassembling them (& the agency to do both) leads us to compose the less refined, the more urgent.

This movement then might be a way of naming curriculum as tha which we embody.

Or perhaps, not.

III. Curriculum and Juxtaposition and Being 15

I had almost in hand the unstable idea that these separate happenings from this morning when juxtaposed might just be something to notice--something I might want to pay attention to. 

I had t in hand and then not.

And perhaps this flux, this juxtaposition of things that don't easily go together--might be my working definition of curriculum--the need to make, not only consume.  I thought about my 15-year-old son and how he is accelerating high school so that he can finish it in 3 years and "get on with it." 

I want him to know about improv.

It's this getting on that I think Will (@willrich45) is on about as are others. Valuing my curriculum is really different then creatin curriculum with you to occasion your thinking, your interests and passions. It's what Sr. Corita was so on  about. It's what Maxine Greene inspired so many to embrace.  

Live wide awake.

See and (un)see.

Be bold (and not). 

Jam.

Improvise.

Be. 

Curriculum as complicated conversation (thank you Bill Pinar) can help us to resettle the false understanding of curriculum as product.  
It's what we make between and among ourselves and others. (It's there in the spaces between and among.)

IV. Moving Out of This Time

The endless list of things to know is rather ridiculous.

We ought to just say it.

Loudly.
Now.
Here.
Together.

Like instruments with minds of our own.

Exploring Layers

I. Layer 1

I have been thinking about layers for the last month since I had a conversation with Lolly Daskal.  I can't even recall how the idea of layers emerged as we were talking but it did and it has been on my mind.  I have been trying to understand leadership as layers and why leaders need to understand, be attentive to layers.

I tend to think in layers as I make art in layers.  Beyond that though, I have been noticing how layered my life is and in such ways that claiming it as my life seems a bit faulty.

This is not new.  Whitman said with such power years ago: For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.

I received a google + comment from Maureen Devlin which had me remembering layers again:


II. Anyone There?


So I experimented a bit today and sent out this tweet.

Rob Greco sent back a tweet recommending an amazing pictorial essay, The Basement,  that needs to be viewed. 

Karen Steffensen provided a link to a film, "Life in a Day" I had not seen and it so captivated me that I watched it  for the next 90 minutes and as I watched I painted.

Who I interact with on Twitter and Google+ becomes layers within me as well.

III. Meanwhile...

For the last two weeks I have been busy creating three e-books for a client that focus on read a loud books for K-2 children. One collection of texts focuses on the Himalayan Mountains. I have been dreaming about these mountains as I read book after book.  So it is not surprising that the painting I was making today should be influenced by what I have been seeing and visualizing for the last two weeks. What we read and view become layers within us too.

IV. Collage and Paint

Work underway...

I had no idea what I was making as I began working. I had propped up an iPad so I could see and hear the movie and set out materials to work with.  I wanted to limit the work so I set out gesso, pages from NY Times, pan pastels, different types of brushes, painter's knives, sponges.  As I played, I began to see mountains emerging and followed that path.   It led back to the Himalayas--or at least my version of the Himalayas.

Mountains Begin...

Detail from work. 

Dreaming of the Himalayas (Gesso, Newspaper, & Pastel. M.A. Reilly, 2013)

V. And This Was Going On Too

While I was working and watching the film, others were following the link that Rob had sent and were finding it fascinating too. Just think of the layers upon layers of meaning that were happening.

VI. More Layers

Our lives are merged and separated in ways that are hard to detail and yet within creative acts those layers are given voice.

It is this that I want to follow now.  The accidental mingling of ideas, interests, provocations sometimes leads to art that surfaces and finds traction and voice in what we create.

Creating is powerful and never truly our own.

Thank you. 

Remix: Composing Education Futures/Getting Ready for #Literacies Chat on 10/18/12

Part I: #Literacies Chat

On Thursday, October 18 from 7 PM (EST) to 8 PM, I will be hosting a discussion about remix on #Literacies chat via Twitter.  I hope you will join me.

HOW TO JOIN #LITERACIES

You can find the #literacies chat on Twitter every Thursday from 7-8 PM EST. Search for the hashtag #literacies in Twitter. We’ve learned from our friends and colleagues you participate in#engchat that another tool like TweetChat can help you follow the discussion.

In preparation for the chat I am posting some initial thinking on the topic and a few questions here, as well as some general resources about the topic. When I think of remix, I think of it as a method for making meaning and (re)presenting meaning based in part on someone's work that is resituated into a *new* composition.  It reminds me of Mikhail Bakhtin's (1981) notion of language as heteroglossia: the unofficial forms of a particular national language; a hybrid of utterances.

Remix is a hybrid of utterances.

Lawrence Lessig (2005) defines remix as: someone mixes things together, and then someone else comes along and remixes what they have created.  

There's a lot of space to explore in these definitions.  During the chat, I want to think with you about remix in two specific ways that I see as being connected. Remix

1. as a means of social and rhizomatic composition, and 
2. as a playful method to (re)design concepts about living, learning and schooling.

To situate the discussion, I hope you will take 11 minutes and watch an animation by DML Research Hub of a John Seely Brown (@jseelybrown) lecture that helps to frame these questions.  Take a look:

 

Some questions then that I am thinking about and might use during the chat:

• How do you currently understand the term, remix? 
• What confuses you about the idea/practice of remix? What do you wish you had more clarity about?
• Are there rules to remixing? Do you need to tinker and build in order to remix?
• How does remix produce content and context and connections? 
• How does remix shape thought? Consider this video produced hours after the first presidential debate. 

• In what ways is remix social? Rhizomatic? 
• What are potential relationships between play and remix? 
• What spaces of permission are required in order for students to tinker, build, and remix at/during school?
• How might our definitions of schooling alter if we think of learning as remix?  
• Can school redesign be influenced by remix? How might that work?

Part II. Some Resources

1. Video

Remix the Early Years



Everything is Remix




Copying is Not Stealing



Steal Like an Artist



A Response to Steal Like an Artist




Words



Julia Child Remix





2. Print, Blog Posts, Websites

Hitrecord

Bob Egan's work from here. 

1. Amerika, Mark. (2012). remixthebook. University Press of Minnesota.
2. Callahan, Meg & Jennifer M. King. (2011). Classroom remix: Patterns of pedagogy in a techno-literacies poetry unit. Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy 55(2), 134-144. 
3. Bob Egan's Pop Spots. 
4. 14 Quotes about Remix
5. Free to Mix: An Educator's Guide to Reusing Digital Content.
6. Gainer, Jessica & Diane Lapp. (2011). Literacy Remix: Bringing Adolescents' In and Out of School Literacies. Newark, DE: IRA.
7. Jenkins, Henry. (2009). Confronting the challenges of participatory culture: Media education for the 21st century. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
8. Jenkins, Henry (10.5.2012). Digital Detrournement: Jamming (with) the Simpsons-Bansky Intro, Jonnstyle. (Blog post)
9. Knobel, Michele & Colin Lankshear. (2008). Remix: The art and craft of endless hybridization. Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy 52(1), 22-33.
10. Lessig, Lawrence. (2008). Remix: Making art and commerce thrive in the hybrid economy. New York: Penguin.
11. McVerry, Greg, (2011). Remixing websites with Hackasaurus. New Literacies Collaboratives.
12. Reilly, M.A. (Blog Posts): Remix as Composition (2012). Remix Bricolage: Making Art from Multiple Images (2011). Trying for Fire: Or Why Technology Has Never Been Just a Tool (2012). 
13. Tips for Using GarageBand JamPack 2 Remix Tools Instrument.
14. Vasudevan, Lalitha. (2010). Education remix: New media, literacies, and the emerging digital geographies. Digital Culture & Education 2(1), 62-82.

Apps to Help You Remix

Gendered Advertising Remixer
Looptastic HD
MadPad
Romplr: Remix
UrbanRemix Recorder
VidRhythm

Remix Tools/Sites

Creative Commons

dig cc mixter

Fan Fiction

Free Sound

Remixoid

Remix Tool Collection

Composing Across Time

Last night, Chris Berthlsen (a_small_lab) tweeted the following:

The link led me to the  W. Ross Ashby digital archive which contain 25 volumes of Ashby's journals.  They are most fascinating. I spent a few hours looking through different volumes and was moved to begin to collage bits of what I was reading. Making alongside the reading helped me to understand.

Collage: W. Ross Ashby (M.A. Reilly, 2012)

We live in wondrous times when a man in Japan can tweet a link to journals that an Englishman kept for 40 years during the last century and pages from these can serve as seeds for a collage that a woman in New Jersey makes. 

The intersections among our lives offer a rich source of learning, of wonder, of notice.

It is this that some of us have been going on about for some time when we conceive of schools as community-based,  open beyond walls and borders, where curriculum is complicated conversations that learners generate.  How we occasion learning matters.

The random, happenstance that may occur--the juxtaposition of one thing alongside another: these are the ways in which we learn.  How welcome is the random, the distant neighbor you've yet to meet, the collision with other in your life? In your workplace? In your classroom?

TwitterArt Collaboration w/ @AndersonGL

On Wednesday night Gary Anderson tweeted a haiku that just captivated me. He wrote:

The smell of lilacs
through the kitchen window now
long after nightfall

With the poem as inspiration, I made the following image, embedding Gary's words.

Visual Haiku (M.A. Reilly, 2011)

Why I Tweet (Unlearning and Unfixing Beliefs)

It seems somewhat surreal that I (one with little faith about Twitter) should be authoring a post about tweeting. I  mean a mere month ago I was highly skeptical about Twitter and posed the question in a blog: Where would Emerson find his (wo)man thinker on Twitter? For the last month I have followed and 'unfollowed,' and in doing so have begun to make sense of how tweeting helps to (in)form my practice as an educator by nudging me to unlearn and unfix tenets of learning I have privileged. I had the pleasure to listen to and interact with Will Richardson this last week when he helped the school district I work for open its year.  He talked about his children and through them his hopes for education and educators, inviting us to embrace a goal of guiding students to become global citizens. It was a thoughtful, unhyped, commentary. Poetic.

He then met with administrators for 90 minutes to discuss what we are privileging with regard to learning. He was largely quiet, occasionally interjecting to refocus the conversation. I admitted that day that I initially found Twitter to be a rather foreign landscape with lots of irrelevant commentary and I heard Will say, Ouch.  I've been hearing that ouch over and over again and wanted to expand.

Twitter is helping me to understand that a different concept of learning (and teaching) is required in 2010. Whereas, I have read numerous accounts that students from the class of 20xx would need to be continuous learners, would need to be able to make x number of career changes, and so on, there was a comfortable distance between these fictitious students and me.  In some ways these predictions helped to distance me from a far more intimate discovery: I, at the half-century mark, would also need to adopt new ways of learning and given the economic uncertainty of these times, might also need to change careers. 

I don't think I'm alone in this discovery: The very comfortable ways I have been learning no longer represent the totality of methods I need to use in order to continue to learn and teach.  The landscape is moving at such a rate that it is difficult to discern foreground from background.

Now to be clear, I deeply believe that the theorizing I was privileged to do en route to a doctorate is extremely valuable.  My professors (especially Ruth Vinz) and fellow students at Columbia helped me to turn a sharp eye at flashy educational trends, understand and apply Dewey, Bakhtin, and Deleuze to educational matters, and in doing so conceptualize progressive schooling.  My 25+ years as a public educator has helped me to actualize these theories into local practice.

I still believe it would be better for students if we read more Bakhtin and less Ed Leadership, but here's the rub: it is not a question of get on board with Twitter and its equivalents or tread water.   There is no water to tread as that metaphor has dried up.  The real dynamic is:  breathe or become irrelevant. 

Tweeting is random breathing, an embodiment of self and other represented in the "tweets" that sound.  A few minutes ago on my "TweetDeck" a tweet about Yoshitomo Nara's White Ghost sounded, sandwiched between a link about an abducted journalist tweeting from the captor's phone and a link that took me to an article about Mozilla's plug to play games via its browser that ended with these questions: Are native apps really where it's at? What do you see in the browser's future, and do you think Web games are a good way to get there?

13 years ago I composed a theory about learning and randomness in the guise of a dissertation, and titled it Courting (In)Stability.  Tweeting is all about instability, stability and the movable spaces between where learning happens and I want to suggest here, where teaching needs to be situated.  I am reminded here that at the end of Milan Kundera's novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being, the narrator says that happiness is the longing for repetition.  I have thought about that phrase for a long time and composed a piece (see below) where I attempted to (re)present that idea:

Happiness is the Longing for Repetition. Image by M.A. Reilly (2009).  

Kundera is clever. He knows happiness is not repetition, but rather the longing for repetition.  I had forgotten how it feels to be unsettled and how necessary such imbalance is, as is the longing for repetition.  Tweeting has reminded me that everything is really in flux and that there is something oddly soothing about the repetition of tweets twittering.

Where is Emerson's (Wo)Man Thinker on Twitter?

I'm new to Twitter and tweeting. On my Facebook "wall" I posed the question: "I am wondering if u have a lot of people following you on twitter and you tweet crap but name it as gold and it keeps getting retweeted, is it not an Emperor's New Clothes dressed up for the 21st century?"

As a teacher and learner, I have found myself a bit dismayed as I followed links that bring me to 14 things a 21st century teacher must know--or 20 ways to use an iPad-- or thousands of free lesson plans, and so on. Now to be sure, not all the tweets I read are of this sort, but a lot are.  It isn't the quality of comment and link direction that fully concerns me, but more so the certainty that underlies and fixes these tweets as "givens".  Each time I read one I ask: For whom might this be true? In what context?  It's the absence of context that worries me. I think of Robert Frost's poem, The Mending Wall, when the speaker declares:

Before I built a wall I’d ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offence.

Do Tweets by their very nature function as walls?  Let's pause a moment and consider the link that promised thousands of free lesson plans.  When I followed it I was directed to a site where a pop up immediately let me know that I had won something. 

!!!!FLASH YOU HAVE WON BLAH BLAH BLAH FLASH!!!!

After clearing that away, I was directed to a list of choices. Here's where the problems really started. Again, it was not the quality of the lesson plans, although the number was daunting, but rather it was the reality of them. I mean, why do I actually want these plans that someone or some group made?  What will these plans disrupt and displace with regard to my own thinking and my specific context as teacher and learner?  How do plans actually get made that don't involve the students?  Have they and the teacher no voice in what gets privileged in the classroom?  What does all of this suggest about what is valued and not valued in the education?  What might the presence of these tweets that are retweeted and labeled golden suggest about what it means to teach and learn?

DoesTwitter in some way facilitate the rapid replication of the accepted dogma?  Against the speed and volume that makes Twitter tweet, has Emerson's (Wo)man Thinker been lost?  In a commencement speech, Ralph Waldo Emerson said:  

"The sacredness which attaches to the act of creation,--the act of thought,--is transferred to the record. The poet chanting, was felt to be a divine man: henceforth the chant is divine also. The writer was a just and wise spirit: henceforward it is settled, the book is perfect; as love of the hero corrupts into worship of his statue. Instantly, the book becomes noxious: the guide is a tyrant. The sluggish and perverted mind of the multitude, slow to open to the incursions of Reason, having once so opened, having once received this book, stands upon it, and makes an outcry, if it is disparaged. Colleges are built on it. Books are written on it by thinkers, not by Man Thinking; by men of talent, that is, who start wrong, who set out wrong, who set out from accepted dogmas, not from their own sight of principles." 

So, can a metalanguage be heard on Twitter?  I mean consider: If you are a full time tweeter and you have, let's say 500,000 people following you, is it a matter of number and volume that makes one's truths, true?