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)

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.

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.

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.

@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.

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.

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.

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.

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.