I watched Kathy Sierra’s opening plenary performance "Creating Passionate Learners" with a mixture of excitement and disappointment.
Sierra is an engaging, funny speaker. She creates wonderful graphs using a unique, personal style (an enviable talent, with results I’d put on the spectrum nearer Indexed than Excel).
And I certainly don’t disagree with many of Sierra’s ideas. What I love about her is that she unabashedly drills right into the heart of the matter (of many matters): being passionate, engaging with passion, the feeling of flow that comes from "kicking ass" and how that feeling can be predictably enjoyed only as the result of practice and mastery.
My disappointment stems from Sierra’s presentation being essentially a stump speech, and one that I know pretty well because I’m a regular reader of her blog posts and other writing. Perhaps I’m too demanding when it comes to keynotes (and I acknowledge Alan’s point that keynotes are a difficult proposition given the difficulty in knowing the dynamics and composition of the group being addressed), but I would have enjoyed the presentation much more if she’d dug in enough to at least replace the software developer and technical writing references with parallels and examples from education proper. I’m not averse to connecting the dots! Nor am I saying that the examples should be drawn from education… but the address would’ve been much more interesting if some of the implied cross-domain parallels and analogies between the activities had been teased out.
Despite Sierra’s overt engagement in the gaming community, her presentation here invoked many characteristics of game mechanics with hardly a mention of games or gaming. I couldn’t help but consider presentations I’ve seen at the O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference by speakers such as Amy Jo Kim and Jane McGonigal, both of whom were careful to make explicit how characteristics, principles and techniques from one domain (game mechanics) could– and should– be implemented in another (social software systems; the real world). Specifics could help in two ways: the obvious, making it easier to actually envision and implement the ideas, and the more subtle, which is to battle the conflation of game mechanics as a way of developing rich educational experiences and the feeble, shallow stereotypes of "educational gaming" that seems to lurk everywhere in the discussions within the academy.
The concept of "hi-res experience" is an important one. Discussions in education often break down between the polarized perspectives of education as content transfer and education as a rich social experience in which knowledge is almost (if not actually) a byproduct. But beyond the initial taste and first impression(s), I don’t see how passionate engagement can exist without the "stuff" around and within which that passion is built. Fervor and zeal are complex emotions that quickly break the thin threads of pure, instinctive emotion. I don’t mean that education must be all serious all the time or we must elevate "book learning" above experience… a rich manifold of engagement has to include formal and informal learning, times of distinct, single-purpose focus and times of mindful wandering. At the same time, there’s nothing intrinsically elitist about the idea that the "thick" appreciation borne of study and practice and an understanding of context– which as often as not is a characteristic of the natural enthusiast as the dedicated student (and, ideally, how much difference is there between the two?)– represents a heightened, qualitatively better experience than its "thin" counterpart…
Another important area covered at some length in Kathy’s presentation was that of practice. I feel like a broken record when it comes to the importance of practice, not just in the sense of rote repetition, but the kind of attentive repetition that leads to mastery and overlearning and, when everything comes together, that wonderful feeling of flow. It’s essential that educators help students discover the power of practice, but also that they help them "shrink the 10,000" hours as Kathy put it. A few ways that come to me to achieve this end: increase the intensity of the practice, increase the richness of the practice (which might amount to the same thing), learn– and make habits of– a variety of ways of thinking (particularly pattern recognition, a skill with nearly ubiquitous application in our connected learning environment), and increase the number of opportunities to practice. Kathy’s example of her homemade saddle chair, which literally has a saddle for a seat, is a great example of the last method… it’s not just about the amount of the opportunity cost for practicing but when and where we have the chance to pay it.
Total immersion is, in essence, highly compressed practice. It provides an opportunity to reach that point when we can actually change our minds– when we can get "in the zone"– more readily. The best form of immersion (total immersion jams) are tied, as Kathy mentioned, to actually creating some kind of product, providing the constraint that– paradoxically– grants freedom of thought.
As expected, Sierra’s points can be distilled to the triad of dyads I wish were an inevitable part of these discussions: love & trust, passion & fearlessness, and practice & attention.
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And, my friend, quotes like this is why your absence from the blogosphere for an extended period of time was not simply a another voice fading into the ether, but the loss of a tongue so gossamer in its precision it brings eyes to the intimate complexities of fervor and zeal, a subject that can never be truly experienced in a stump speech. And, at least for me, can never be delivered in terms of “self-help”—which is how I saw this talk-which, btw, sounds exactly like the one at SXSW—but rather through a truly unhealthy belief in the possibility of communion and change.
Chris, this is an extremely thoughtful and judicious reflection on the presentation. I’ve followed Kathy’s blog for a good while, and I’ve heard several interviews with her (most recently with Tim O’Reilly), and I agree that she was walking over well-trod ground here.
That said, I don’t think her points were shallow. They were incomplete, yes, but not shallow. While I get tired of her “kick ass” rhetoric–I’m not sure why kicking ass is the gold standard for metaphors of accomplishment–I do think that her notion of “cognitive seduction” is brilliant and aligns very well with what Bruner calls “the canny art of intellectual temptation,” even though Sierra and Bruner take their cognate notions into rather different directions some of the time. Some of the time, however, they’re singing nearly in unison, though Sierra’s presentation style is more that of the motivational speaker (not an ignoble thing at all, for those of us who love Tennyson’s “Ulysses” and think he’s not just leading his followers to hell) and Bruner’s more that of the ruminative academic. In any event, I think “stump speech” downplays the importance and depth of what she brought us this morning. I never got the idea she was phoning it in or merely reciting tired maxims.
@Jim I agree wholeheartedly about the wonders of Chris’s blog and the gratitude we should all feel for his return. But I must take issue with your dismissal of Sierra’s talk as “self-help.” She’s not peddling tech soma or empty convictions, and she’s paid her dues for being passionate. There are many varieties of passionate engagement with the needs and possibilities of the world. I for one am content to grant Sierra hers and learn from it what I can–which has been a lot, over the years.
It’s easy to criticize thinker “a” for not being thinker “b,” but I don’t think it does much good or sheds much light on the complexities we have to map.
That’s a rather reductive way to discount my concerns with what I think is pandering passion tot he lowest common denominator. Is criticism now premised on something other than how I think about something? And, there in lies the very complexities we have to map.
The idea of passion as I understood it from the talk I heard at SXSW was a kind of being the best that you can be in the new landscape of the web. It was abstract enough to be anything, but also imbued with far too much positivism (not the philosophy. mind you) to really get at the idea of passion as a complex and often debilitating characteristic. One which leads to an unhealthy fervor, I personally cannot relate to passion as something healthy and productive, not to say it can’t be(though when it is I tend to think of it as something else), but I have some deep issues with it being the premise of a theory about expertise or mastery. I don’t buy that correlation at all, in many ways it is the passion about something that makes you more (or less) than an expert, it makes you an almost unhealthy learner, an anomaly, a beautiful freak that is neither learned nor envied.
Chris, you have no idea how much I have agonized about this in the past… but I’ve never heard or thought of my talks as stump speeches. I’ll have to think about that. I’m not a professional “presenter” and do not like being a “keynote” speaker. I do not accept any fees for speaking, anywhere, in part because I really AM a one-trick pony. It just happens to be a trick I care very deeply about.
After the first two years of talking about this, I felt compelled to come up with new topics, but then it began to feel like I was contriving content just for the sake of having something new, and that took me further away from what mattered most to me. The talk I gave at NMC was not one I’d done before, but of course it included a great deal of things I’d discussed over the years. These are the things I care about. These are the things I teach. And Alan convinced me that this was not a group likely to have attended my talks before, so I went back to some of the fundamentals.
I also take your “self-help” comment to heart although it is the most difficult for me to hear. At the least it means I suck at communicating, since my entire approach is based around the tools/techniques/importance of helping people get really GOOD at something… in start contrast to empty “feel good” programs which I’ve railed against in the past.
As I said, I’m not keynote material and am very uncomfortable with the idea of doing these talks. At the same time, I’m deeply grateful for the opportunity to evangelize a message I feel so strongly about. Since I no longer blog, the talks (I do about 3 or 4 a year) are my way of continuing to push for better learning.
I get through these talks by telling myself I’m just teaching, and as a teacher–I don’t think of the fundamentals as a “stump speech” — I think of them as the prereqs. And I don’t want to lose those in the rush to find something new. When I believe I’m speaking to a new group, I go back to those basics.
As a result of your post, I’m going to seriously rethink whether I should do keynotes. As a conference attendee you have every right to a high expectation, and one that I sadly did not meet. And for that I apologize and also thank you for such a thoughtful criticism. I’ve learned more from your post than from any other feedback I’ve gotten.
Kathy– an important point is that, for all I know, you WERE speaking to mostly a new group who wasn’t already aware of much of your work. In which case I was an outlier to begin with. Alan was surely right about the composition of this group (and he should be!). I’m not blogging for the body of the NMC, just as a single representative out in the audience who can be relied upon to be honest. After this exchange, I doubt I will ever be asked to do so in any “featured” capacity again.
I have good reason to believe that your talk was very well received! For instance, I hope you’ve seen Leslie Madsen-Brooks’ liveblogging. And Gardner Campbell– who is much smarter than I– shares none of my reservations and all of my enthusiasm… and then some.
The disappointment aspect on my part is being greatly (and sadly) magnified here. The irony is that this magnification is occurring, at least in part, out of my desire to make it clear that my feeling of disappointment was by far the smallest part of my reaction and limited to a very specific aspect of form, not content.
I was really excited to finally see you speak in person after the aborted Emerging Technology Conference engagement. I enjoyed having this chance to do so and I nodded my head “yes, yes, yes” when it came to the ideas you were sharing. Maybe I had unrealistic expectations… but in any case it’d be a shame if you stopped sharing what you have to say because I was expecting a graduate level course in kicking ass and got a senior level seminar instead.
What you have to say IS important, particularly to educators. I hope some of them take it to heart and run with it. In the end, my logical assessment of your talk is less important than my positive emotional engagement with it. There may be nothing to be learned from my individual reaction… that has to be a personal evaluation on your part as an individual artist. But the worst possible outcome would be that you share your vital perspective less when it needs to get out even more.
@Chris- You are crazy if you think I wont ask you to do this again; all three of you did exactly what I was hoping for; giving your own personal take on the keynotes. Consider yourself ready to be asked again.
@Kathy- I lost track of how many people told me how important and influential your talk was. Chris was just asking perhaps for more of the educational connection- which I nudged him in twitter, we ought to be able to leap ourselves. Your keynote was referred to in such positive terms, and you cannot draw conclusions from what is said in blogs and twitters– a lot does not get captured online.
@Jim Smile, be happy. Man gotta dig more into what is in your crawl.
@Jim — Your characterization: “The idea of passion… was a kind of being the best that you can be in the new landscape of the web.” means I’ve failed dramatically since it’s quite far from what I wanted/intended to say. My talks have ALWAYS been about about helping someone (users/learners) get *really really good* at a specific thing. Not to “be a better person”, but to “be better at [x]“. (Though I will admit to having referred to the research on “flow state” that shows it to be connected to “joyful experience”). To have your description make sense to me, I’d have to change your “being the best you can be” to “being the best you can be at teaching/helping your users learn and develop their skills.”
And unless I’m speaking to a domain-specific group, I do make sweeping generalizations that most people have little trouble connecting back to their own examples and implementations. I’m sure I do this far too often and far too abstractly.
As for self-help, well, if you refer to development of expertise and mastery at a specific skill as self-help, then yes… it was self-help. I realize that many people are very uncomfortable with the idea of “a passion for [X]” being connected to learning and mastery… but I’ll quote Richard Restak who–in discussing research on high levels of expertise that were not driven by “natural talent”–said a common factor found among those with true expertise is “a rage to master”. Of course there’s a line somewhere between unhealthy obsession and my particular definition of “passion”, but I’m certain you and I simply draw that line in different places. One person’s “freakish zeal” is another person’s desire to put in the extra time, effort, and expense.
And when it comes to *learning*, I just don’t think the danger today is that we have too many “beautiful freaks”. When lack of relevance, lack of context, and lack of motivation are no longer a major, common roadblock to learning, I’ll celebrate and dial back.
I think you are entirely right here, and I have to say upfront that I apologize if I come on a little too strong in the comments above. I really wasn’t thinking about the implications this may have, and that is my fault entirely, and my critique is rather personal in the sense that I am reacting from my own struggles with this concept and grafting them on your talk. I freely admit my shortcomings in that department, and offer up my cry of “Uncle” right away.
I think my concerns about an approach that frames someone better at X (I conflated the thing with person, so that’s on me too) often gets framed within a space that is removed from the thing, it becomes about a series of practical and pragmatic applications. I think the whole discussion around this idea of expertise is fraught with questions. What is Gladwell that said it takes 10,000 to be an expert? What does that mean? And can we speed it up?—if so why? The measuring of these things through sweeping abstractions is dangerous in my mind.
I truly do wonder what the opposite of a “beautiful freak” is. I was using this to some degree in jest, but I also think a lot of what frames experience for the popular theorists of web 2.0 on the web is a kind of shaping of ideas and character to achieve something through these new tools (which is in many ways what I do too), and I’m just not sure what that ultimately means for learning. I deeply struggle with the meaning of this idea, and therein lies my unhealthy passion. And I really do feel the shaping as a series of techniques, how-tos, and approaches that are general enough to apply to most people, no matter what they want to master, yet not really specific to the larger complexities that are implicit in this discussion is where I find the paucity of this field. I’m very much a part of this “movement,” but I’m not sure if motivating people for the brave new world of the web is necessarily always a good thing. Especially when framed so positively about its power and possibility, rather than its concomitant side of trolls (like me), addiction, and schizophrenia in the transitioning into this space. What all this might mean to one person rather than another is complex enough, and then when we frame it for a kind of aggregate with an assumed starting point of passion and desire, the meaning and the terms seem somewhat dislodged.
That is where a lot of this stuff breaks down for me, and why learning, when understood within institutions according to a comprehensive structure that leads to mastery is in so many ways limiting, if not downright in crisis. But I guess this is where your last point in the comment above really holds sway over me—motivation, context, and relevance is exactly what you are framing for people, and in many ways I missed that being caught up in my own critique—which is my failure as a thinker—an how one generally frames this for a wide range of people is both your art and practice.
So perhaps I should dial back, and after this comment I really think I will. Thanks for responding here, and I really hope no hard feelings.
Really, Chris and Jim, if you’re going to insist on being all *thoughtful* in your criticism, the internet might implode. Feels like I’ve slipped into a parallel universe where people make honest critiques, and actually care that the person they’re criticizing understands their perspective (and that it’s not personal). Weird.
So… thank-you for giving me new things to consider, and helping me strengthen the things I care about.
cheers,
Kathy (hoping your ‘net license isn’t revoked for this willful display of brainy kindness)
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