DRAFT Introductory Essay Lanny Arvan I do a lot of things by the feel technique.

. There must be a more formal name for it. Im sure Ive read about it somewhere. Formal-schwormal, who cares about that? Feel technique thats perfectly descriptive. You say you want a definition. Are you a nerd, or something? We dont do definitions anymore. An example all right, I can do that. Examples are okay. As of late, I have a tendency to fall asleep in my easy chair, after weve put the kids to bed. Soon thereafter my wife will go upstairs. Just before she does that she usually has the good sense to turn off the overhead light in our family room, where I am in repose. The TV might still be on or I might have a book with my right index finger inserted where Id been reading, serving as a placeholder, slowly breaking the binding. Its been a long day and, as usual, I havent had the foresight to go to bed to watch TV or read. I do like my easy chair. Its very comfortable. But for sleeping it is not ideal and I usually emerge after an hour or two, aware that I should change my circumstance. I want to go to bed but I also want to keep my eyes closed once I am really awake it is hard for me to go back to sleep. So I use the remote to shut off the TV first or flick the switch on the lamp that is on the end table next to the easy chair, then close my eyes again and wonder if I should try to make it upstairs. Whats the big deal, right? Most of us know our own place so well we can navigate it blindfolded. Yet the task is often daunting for me. There frequently are a variety of toys scattered on the floor toys with sharp edges: Leggos, Brio trains, Tonka trucks, or some such. (Ive got to get the kids to take more responsibility for their playthings. But if youve been to my office and seen my desk, youd know that would be throwing stones in a glass house.) Im loath to pick up the toys or even to turn on the overhead light to find my way. The game is to get through the thicket unscathed, without opening my eyes, so I can quickly return to sleep when I get upstairs. I proceed by taking very slow, gentle steps, feeling the obstacles with my bare feet, finding the safe spots that way. Most of the time it works. Im under the covers in a couple of minutes and sound asleep soon after that. Once in a while I step on something and it hurts like the dickens. Ive got the scars to prove it. As with any skill, practice improves proficiency with the feel technique. It becomes easier to move to the goal quickly, without encountering the pitfalls. And, my little example notwithstanding, the feel technique readily expands beyond the tactile, to the conceptual. Actually, thats what I find myself doing most frequently while at work feeling for ideas with other, exploratory ideas. Its gotten to the point where I find it hard to distinguish between ideas I feel for, as I work on something new, from ideas I already know, that are buried somewhere deep in my memory. The idea for this site, On Writing, came from the feel technique. But maybe it was there all along. Im not sure. Heres the story. The undercurrent that girds the idea comes out of the SCALE project, a project that I ultimately ran and where I first met Gail Hawisher, director of the Center for Writing Studies and a collaborator in the On Writing site. At the beginning of SCALE there were a lot of workshops of the sort: this is how I use ALN in my class, this is what worked well, and here are some of the problems. I recall Gail and I chatting at some length about writing online after one of these workshops. (ALN is short for Asynchronous Learning

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DRAFT Introductory Essay Lanny Arvan Networks, the Sloan Foundation name for Internet-based instruction that has students and teacher interact asynchronously, with lags between when messages are sent and when they are read. Traditional face-to-face classroom meetings as well as online video conferencing are synchronous forms of instruction.) About a year later I got involved with the administration of SCALE and one of the immediate goals at that time was to create a Web space where faculty on campus who had gotten grants from SCALE would write progress reports about their ALN implementation. That first year we had some success, but did a better job in the second year when we got a number of high-quality reports. See http://edtech3.cet.uiuc.edu/l-arvan/courses/Y2Results.html. By the third year with the initial grant winding down, it was hard to get faculty to write these reports, though when they did the reports were thoughtful and informative. Now that I am the director of the campus Center for Educational Technologies, Id like to implement something similar to those SCALE progress reports but on a recurrent basis, to offer an array of faculty experience with technology, in their own words, to let others in the campus community and elsewhere understand what it is like to teach with technology from the instructors perspective. The question is how to achieve that end. That question has been simmering for well over a year, since CET started in the summer of 1999. I am hopeful that the On Writing site can do something about it. There are other independent strands, strands which helped move the idea forward. One of those is a recent penchant for biography, what I pursue in my easy chair before the sandman overtakes me. Last year I read, A Beautiful Mind : A Biography of John Forbes Nash, Jr., Winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics, 1994, by Sylvia Nasar. Nashs case is extreme, a true mathematical genius and then later a completely debilitated schizophrenic, who recovered from the disease in time to share the Nobel prize for his seminal work in Game Theory. It is the relationship between genius and schizophrenia that is the fascinating part of the book. And the book held extra charm for me since some of the other characters in the story were Math faculty at M.I.T., a couple of whom I had as professors during my brief stint there as a freshman and sophomore. (As you can see, my own nerd credentials are impeccable. Once upon a time we did definitions.) Simultaneously, one of the joys and difficulties for me in reading books is that once Im into the book that is all I want to do. The dictates of work make it hard to allocate a big chunk of time for what is in essence pleasure reading. So, I confess, I watch a lot of biography on television. It feeds my need for biography and its only an hour or so at a pop. I occasionally watch the show Biography on the A&E Network and have recently gotten into watching the Sports Century biographies on the ESPN Classic network. Ive learned that even sports teaches. The stories of Oscar Robertson and Henry Aaron are so vivid in how race and racism have become all consuming facets of their lives and turned these fantastic athletes into such bitter men. Growing up in New York City, I was exposed to racial issues on a daily basis in my ordinary life. Having lived in Champaign since 1980, race, particularly race as a matter of tension, penetrates my universe only very rarely. It is good, if painful, to be reminded regularly about the profound impact of racism and that none of us are immune to its destructive force, not even our most cherished heroes. But ultimately these shows leave me somewhat unsatisfied, not for their themes but rather because of the style. There is narration and then a bunch of

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DRAFT Introductory Essay Lanny Arvan interrelated clips from different commentators. That means we as viewers are getting somebody elses interpretation of the story. We never know what clips didnt make it into the program, whom they tried to interview but couldnt get in front of the camera. For that reason, I really like Inside the Actors Studio on the Bravo Network, see http://www.bravotv.com/whatson/actors.html. The host, James Lipton, interviews famous actors and occasionally directors in front of a live audience of acting and directing students. Lipton is a little pretentious in his questioning and because the guest sometimes plays to the audience, occasionally the responses are coy rather than revealing. But we hear the guest unfiltered by anyone else. And other times the guests are deeply insightful on why they act, what is good acting, what roles draw them in, and how they have dealt, successfully and otherwise, with their own inner demons. That is fascinating. Once in a while as I listen to them, I hear the parallel between acting and teaching. When the discussion turns to acting on the stage, which invariably they revere, I sometimes think about teaching in the live classroom versus teaching online. The interesting aspect for me in that regard is that while these guests love the theater, they also truly enjoy making films, provided the script is good and they are in synch with their director. Another strand comes from trying to improve my writing in a big project Im engaged in and in the process having stumbled upon a nice site on the Web where professional writers talk about writing. The archive with all these essays is at http://www.nytimes.com/books/specials/writers.html. I didnt find the archive first. I found a handful of essays, read them, liked them, and then chased down some more until I found the archive. The essays were compelling and I found it fun to see if there were more like them. This was an alternative to the progress reports on the SCALE site. These essays were better. (Of course, the writers that the New York Times got as contributors are all at the top of the writing profession.) Maybe faculty shouldnt write about their teaching experiences. Maybe they should just write about writing. Or maybe they should write about both why writing is important in their teaching. Then some events on campus helped to get the ball rolling. I learned that Joseph Squier, a professor in Art and Design, had been named a Distinguished Teacher/Scholar by the campus. Joe had done a couple of presentations for me at some workshops that the CET put on early last summer. And Joe and I have served together both on the campus Educational Technologies Board and on the oversight committee for Gails Center for Writing Studies. I learned further that Joes proposal for the Distinguished Teacher program was to do some project with Gail on the intersection of art and writing. My immediate reaction was that the CET should leverage this to do something incorporating educational technology. What that something might be, Im not sure I had that pinned down at the time. Although weve made a lot of progress since then, Im still not sure I have that pinned down. In any event, soon thereafter, and quite independently, Gail asked me to serve as Chair of the oversight committee. I sent Joe an email with the url of an article by E.L. Doctorow that appears in the Times archive. Putting it bluntly, Doctorow argues that written text is dead. Movies have killed that. Our literacy is now formed by film, not by the written word. In that email I

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DRAFT Introductory Essay Lanny Arvan suggested to Joe that we have a coffee to discuss a project I had in mind. Joe liked the article. I sent him another email with the url for the archive and said that was part of the idea behind my proposed project. In response, Joe sent me a proposal he and Nan Goggin have made about their @Art portal. We were both feeling the other out - slow steps, cautious steps. We had a great meeting at Espresso, at least it seemed that way to me. When youre using the feel technique, you never really know whether what youre guessing at is actually happening or is only in your mind. Fortunately for me, a while later I bumped into Nan at Espresso and she volunteered that Joe was really excited by our meeting. Terrific! Independent confirmation. Soon after the meeting with Joe, I emailed Gail with the idea about a writing site and asked her if we could put it on the agenda for the first oversight committee meeting. My thought was to get committee members to contribute to the site and then try to recruit other faculty who teach Writing Across the Curriculum courses to do likewise. We did discuss the idea at our first meeting. After I described the idea, very loosely because it is still not well formed in me, one of the members of the committee asked an important question. Who is the audience for these essays? I mumbled through an unintelligible answer. I think I have a better answer now, but let me leave that for a bit and then get back to it. Parallel to the creation of the On Writing site, Joe and Gail have been running a series of ad hoc workshops, Words + Images, where a variety of participants have made presentations about their work, work where the display and organization of the writing conveys meaning in itself, and where it is clear that the traditional essay, like this one, is in some cases too limiting as a means of expression. I have learned from attending those workshops and learned as well as from some follow up conversation. One of the ideas that has crystallized for me is how different Joes goals are from my own. Joe wants to create something brand spanking new. He wants to be the first at it, the best at it. For him, this is an opportunity to make a new art form. The Web is an enabler for that new form. I forgot to tell you. Im an economist. Whats an economist doing with educational technology? Good question. Thats another story, a long one. Whats the attraction to an economist about running a Center for Educational Technologies? Youve got to understand that to an economist, a university is a very weird place. Theres a huge volume of trade going on at a university and with hardly any prices; hardly any money changes hands. Joe gives a presentation at the CET workshops. Why? Because he believes in the CET and wants to be helpful. The CET offers Joe and Nan space on the CET server for the @Art portal. Why? Because we want to promote their creative efforts. Yet in neither case is it a quid pro quo. The favor, favor is probably the right word, comes about because of a belief that it is the right thing to do. The university is a huge sequence of favors. This is anathema to an economist, the economist as an analyst. But it is also fascinating. How does one encourage this type of trade? When does use of cash undermine this type of trade? When does cash encourage it? To me, educational technology is a form of currency, as candy is a form of currency for children. And as the director of the CET, part of the job is to be the candy man. I do create in the new

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DRAFT Introductory Essay Lanny Arvan medium. The CET Newsletters (see http://www.cet.uiuc.edu/newsletter.asp) are examples of that. But there is no pretension that this is art. It is candy as currency, a show and tell for those in the audience who themselves might find the approach useful. I use educational technology qua currency to achieve my goals and the goals I think the CET should be pursuing. Im actually quite nostalgic in these goals. When I left M.I.T. for Cornell, I floundered for a while socially and then, after a semester, fell into an absolutely wonderful living situation, perfect for me. I was a junior and found an apartment house that was a converted fraternity, where residents shared common kitchen and bathroom facilities. There were graduate students and undergrads living together and from disciplines all across the board. Rather than go our separate ways we did a lot of things together talked about politics and social issues, went to listen to music together, did silly things and intellectual things, all as a group, our little hermetic community. It was an interesting time. Nixon had resigned. Ford was president. The Viet Nam war had recently ended. Kids were still politically aware and not yet in a superficial way, as theyd become a few years later when I was in graduate school. Im a lifelong Yankee fan but Ill admit that the best World Series I ever saw was in 75 between the Red Sox and the Reds. Theyve made a clich out of the home run hit by Pudge Fisk. In truth, the real marvel was Luis Tiant and how he was able to fend off the much superior Reds till just near the end. We played a lot of chess, occasionally some tennis, softball, or touch football, and then a group meal and more discussion. Some of the folks left after my junior year but the sense of group and of doing things together remained the following year. There must have been something about the place that created it, because when I went to graduate school I lost that feeling. And it didnt reemerge for another 19 years. Sure I had friendships, some good ones too. But not with the interplay of intellectual discussion and camaraderie based on a genuine curiosity of what things were about. We got to be too expert and once you are really expert in something, its painful to be ignorant in something else. So our expertise narrowed our conversation. We became less open, less intellectual, and ultimately more repetitive in our conversation. Of course, there were other things of importance making a living, publishing, getting a life. Frankly, having an intellectual social life did not make the top 10 list. When the feeling did come back, ALN was the cause. There was a discussion conference in FirstClass where some of the SCALE grantees talked online. During the summer of 95 and on into the early fall, we had rather intense discussions with a common theme what is good teaching and how should we be using the technology to promote it? I pined for Friday evenings, when most of the dialog took place. Imagine that, Friday nights and our social lives revolved around these online interactions. Some social life, right? My excuse was that I had an infant and a toddler at home. For me the online discussion was great, given the alternatives. Yet I feel, even now, five years later, that the discussion was immensely rewarding and would have been so even if we hadnt been home-bound. That ALN was so new served as a great leveler. We could be open again. And we all cared intensely about teaching. I understood immediately that talking about teaching provided a common language for us, given our diversity. I didnt realize till much later, however, the importance of the newness of the technology as an enabler for the

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DRAFT Introductory Essay Lanny Arvan discussion. It wasnt the technology per se. It was that none of us were experts and all of us wanted to gain expertise. The intensity of that conversation didnt last very long. By the end of October it had waned considerably. Within a year it faded into oblivion. The goal this time around is to broaden the audience, by making the On Writing site popular on campus and elsewhere and to sustain the feeling the site creates for an extended period. My nostalgia contrasts sharply with Joes forward thinking. This difference in agendas creates the possibility for conflict. Yet Im guessing well navigate around that without difficulty. All of us involved with the On Writing site like each other and we want the site to work. Internal conflict of this sort is the least of our concerns. Yet there are obstacles, numerous places to stumble. Will we get colleagues to contribute to the site? Will we get anyone to look at it? If they look, what will they think? Will they come back again? What do we do to get the answers we want to these questions? As of now, I dont know. Suppose we get the wrong answers. Itll be so embarrassing. Makes it easy to sit back in the chair and fall asleep, doesnt it? Im willing to feel my way through the minefield of those questions. I hope the others on the project are similarly disposed. Yet there are some things we can do now to set up ground rules and reduce the chance of hitting obstacles. That brings me back to the question of audience and what we should do to address that audience. In these essays we want to be talking about ourselves and about our work. But there is a fundamental problem. Our work is on the frontier of knowledge and knowledge is growing exponentially. As we are in different disciplines we are on different edges of the frontier. By the very nature of the process, we are moving further apart. That makes it increasingly more difficult for us to talk with each other. If we talk in our professional tongues, well create a new Tower of Babel. And this On Writing site will go for naught. Therefore, we must not write for ourselves as professionals. We must write for each other, as intelligent but ignorant colleagues. We must proceed with the belief that even with ignorance the discussion can adhere to intellectual standards. Points can be made with depth, subtlety is possible, the audience can be educated, and in return the audience can educate us. We must let them in so they let us in. Its easy for me to say this, of course. Writing in a way accessible for all is what I do as director of the CET. It is my professional activity as of now. For others who spend most of their professional life writing for colleagues within the discipline, the task is more daunting. Yet they must try. Its the only way. I feel it.

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