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Outtakes
am well prepared to do soby addressing the questions as fully as I can. with my remaining energies, and since I am both old and obscure, and include address with my remaining energies, and since I am too old and relatively obscure, to be an active player, I should say something about my experience
more than distance learning or the use information technologies in campus courses. An institution's URL, alma mater.edu, situates its digital campus, an emerging place in cyberspace, co-existing with the physical campus. Increasingly, the digital campus is becoming a place where faculty, students, staff, alumni, parents, and the general public can do all the activities they want and need to do through alma mater.
I'm working to advance that development because I believe it can become a transformative one for the betterment of all, and that purpose brings me to the business at hand: not to tell all that I think about the digital campus, but to say a bit about my experience that has led to my interest in it.
My career, a long one from 1957 to 2024 from college to the present, has spanned significant engagement and achievement in both these realms. Now, late in a long life, I'm drawn to setting forth what I think the digital campus can and should become because I see it as a telos of emerging developments arising with the use of information technologies in higher education and believe that fully developed it will exert a powerful counter influence to the progressive depersonalization and reduction of autonomous agency making contemporary life less and less fulfilling for most persons.
I'm old, born 1939 in Manhattan, a child of depression yuppies — dad, investment banking, & mom, dress design. To the age of 3, I was a minor prince in Gramercy Park. Then I was moved, to my delight, to a small farm in eastern Pennsylvania, where I enjoyed a Rousseauian childhood. While my parents commuted to their work, I was looslely overseen with animals to tend, fences to mend, vegetables to grow, and a large wood to explore with a shallow stream in its middle leading home. At 8, youth began as the family together started to shuffle between farm and city, enabling me to shore up my formal education in elite schools — Buckley, Deerfield, Princeton (BA '61), and Columbia (PhD '68).
In retrospect, all that went quickly. As an only child of older parents, I spent much time alone among adults, acquiring an ease inspeaking with them, observant of both insights and imitations, forming my own views in a thoughtful reserve. I was cognizant of my own ignorance, and that of others, and without much alienation, I would fit in in many situations while rarely feeling a sense of belonging.
In school, I preferred sports to academics, doing just well enough on the scholastic escalator to keep advancing on the path I believed to be my choice. I had a strong sense of my ignorance and the curiosity that came with it. I was relatively adept at covering up what I did not know, and I advanced, not on grounds of achieved excellence, but thanks to perceptions of having strong promise. I didn't hold mastery of conventional learning in much esteem, wanting instead to tackle actual, intractable problems. As I matured, it came together in a knack for thinking-out-of-the-box while finding a good place within the box.
Hence, through my formal education, I was poor at assigned learning, but ardent in self-directed study, in the classical sense — striving after, concentrating on, favoring, applying myself, giving attention to, being eager, zealous, taking pains, diligent, devoted to. With the bookstore as my curriculum, I studied my way through Princeton, sparked by avid reading in the work of the Spanish thinker, José Ortega y Gasset. At first, I flirted with flunking out. My grades were awful, and then not good but getting better, until in my senior year I aced comprehensives and wrote an excellent senior thesis, graduating with high honors and a prize for most improvement from the Woodrow Wilson School, my major.
My senior thesis drew from a wide range of my reading as an undergraduate and from my experience during several summers working in a program called Swiss Holiday, run by the American School in Switzerland, then a small American-style boarding school starting up in Locarno, at the head of Lago Maggiore. My "work" there had two sides, one teaching waterskiing, and the other, in tandem with another "adult" circa 18 to 20, conducting 9 twelve-to-fourteen-year-olds on four 8-day long road trips, around Switzerland, then Austria, southern France, and finally northern Italy, in all questng culture, adventure, and amusement. The experience had effects, as Goethe ssaid in Wilhelm's indenture, "he learns sportfully, seriousness comes on him by surprise."
At Columbia, I made the verb, to study, the means and goal of my career. I had left Princeton wanting to study the interaction between educatonal experience and the quality of cultural life for the better and the worse. I started at Columbia with no clear idea what that intent would entail or how I might fit it into the channels of expectation established there. I began in American history, a misstep, and at the end of 61/62 switched to work on the PhD through the department of Philosophy and the Social Sciences at Columbia's Teacher College with Lawrence A. Cremin my mentor. I found my footing there and my work moved well as I grounded my academic career.
In the early to mid '60s, the old-boy network combined with a great job market to create magical opportunities, especially for a young, white male with a fortunate pedigree, a few ideas, and a confident self-preentation. A phone call recruited me in my 3rd year beyond the BA to a tenure-track assistant professorship at the Johns Hopkins University. Two years later, a similar call initiated my return to Columbia, where I joined the Teachers College faculty in 1967. There I stayed, rising through the ranks – fast, then slow, and fast again – becoming the inaugural holder of the John L. and Sue Ann Weinberg Professor in the Historical and Philosophical Foundations of Education in 2002. It wasn't, however, without considerable work.
For a time, good publications came easily. In 63/64,
As an emerging actuality, the digital campus has many instances, each a large, historical undertaking taking place through continuous metamorphosis. It has no mastermind, no genial inventor; the digital campus appears as an encompassing infrastructure within which the character, spectrum, and limit of a person's educational agency takes place. Let's grasp the changes in pedagogical possibility arising through the digital campus.
Many different participant-observers will contribute distinctive interpretations of these emerging developments. My personal experience and developed intellectual skills enable me to illuminate the advent of the digital campus, attuned to the historical implications of it for educational experience. I believe these historical implications are important and want to further their development in theory and practice as fully as I can.
Born in New York New York, a child of depression yuppies — dad, investment banking, & mom, dress design, to the age of 3 I was as a minor prince in Gramercy Park. I was then moved, to my delight, to a small farm in eastern Pennsylvania, where I enjoyed a Rousseauian childhood, looslely overseen while my parents commuted to their work. At 8, I began to shuffle between country and city beginning my formal education in elite schools — Buckley, Deerfield, Princeton (BA '61), and Columbia (PhD '68).
I came of age came fast, as well, owing to a job market then so different from now. In 1965, I became an assistant professor at Johns Hopkins, and in 1967, I joined the faculty at Columbia. Then I completed my PhD in 1968.Substantively, by the start of my 30s, I had published extensively and launched a budding career as a public intellectual. I had read my way through Princeton, sparked by the work of the Spanish thinker, José Ortega y Gasset, an interest that developed into my dissertation and then into a large, well-received first book, Man and His Circumstances: Ortega as Educator, published in 1971. I interpreted Ortega as a many-sided educator, first aiming at the renovation of Spanish public life and then seeking Jacques Barzun, co-sponsor of the dissertation, observed that the work had a prophetic tone, not as a criticism to be corrected but as a caution to be wary for the vision in it would not come easily.with Lawrence engaged in the free-wheeling study of political and educational thinking from Rousseau forward and an exploration of how modes of communication and material life affected personal and collective self-formation.
An Ignorant Life
Introducing what is to come
Hello. Thanks for coming by. I'm getting old, 85 as we begin, so I've got a lot to say. And I'll say it as I think and feel it. Lifelong, I've aspired to educate myself and others, and I'm not so sure how well I've done at that. In speaking of my life as an ignorant life, I'm recognizing that that doubt, that uncertainty, pervades all human action, everything a living creature does, everything that I've tried to do. I write to explore my ignorance, so to speak.
What's the point of doing that? Not a quick question. As things go along, we'll develop a response, doing it recursively, observing many repetitions performed with variatons that correct errors and omissions, revealing unexpected possibilities in thought and action. That's how education comes about. Recognize the pervasive actuality of ignorance in all we do; attend to error and omission; openly try possible corrections, over, and over. Perhaps this is what Friedrich Nietzsche meant by eternal recurrence.
I'm unabashedly over-educated, staying in school my whole life, usually not doing what was expected I would, but charting my path through the body of learning. Early on, I came to recognize the pevasive actuality of ignorance and to feel its usages were underappreciated throughout the sphere of cultural activity in which I participated. Consequently, what I and all others may have to say may involve significant and difficult departures from what we educators commonly say. Here's where things get a little tough.
Hello. Thanks for coming by. I'm old, so my story's rather long, but you can click "Add comment" to interject in many places—just keep it to the point. Also, I'm not here, rich and famous, trying to seem like an ordinary guy. I've accomplished some things under the radar, working the intersticies. They may or may not be worth your time, but for you to judge that, I'll say a little about them.
I'll start with the title above, two little words—"wagering" and "life." As I see it, life consists in a sentience, however rudimentary, making choices with respect to what is given to it. And the wagering enters into life because life's sentience cannot fully grasp the worth and the complexity of what's given relative to life's effecting any choice.
Humans live extended lives, like many other kinds of life.
As I see it, life encompasses everything. That proposition presents serious difficulties because what I intend it to mean differs from common, nearly universal usage.
My Studiolo
I come here, attentvely, to reflect on interests and uncertainties, feeling troubled yet curious, buffered from immediate cares, responsive to unexpected remembrance, speculative while (or because?) I'm imperfectly informed, eager to follow clues that point to something promising, to something that will support me in my ignorance.
My ignorance — alive, I am uncertain; I never know what will happen next. Were the stone thoughtfully sentient, it would be certain that nothing would happen until external force jolted it into action. Alive, I come to mystudiolo owing to my ignorance. My ignorance arises, and continues, because I live, situated in time and space like the stone, but able to some degree, tangible however faint, to act, to initiate and sustain acting force within the realm of forces all about me.
Ignorance emerges, not from failings, not from excessive wants or needs, but from vital activity. My ignorance is the price of my living, embodied in vast space and restless time. In living, nothing exists; all emergesable to discern prospects fully or surely
Here, it's my space where I recognize the value of things about me, seen and unseen, raising this up, lowering that, then reversing, this down and that that up, judging worth as I see fit, its possibility and its lack.
The Point (as in "What's the point?")
Arendt on Natality
Overcoming Identities
Seeking A Place to Study
Power and Pedagogy
The Cumulative Curriculum
The Dalton Technology Plan
The Eiffel Project
Smart Cities: New York
Formative Justice
On Not Defining Education
The Educators' Manifesto
Homeless in the House of Intellect
Enough
The Reflective Commons
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My worksite, a prototype of MyStudiolo
== Robbie McClintock == Robbie (talk) 08:44, 15 January 2025 (MST)