Questions and Answers about Books I’ve Read

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Being a librarian, I spend most of my working day online — email, web searches, database articles, Twitter, Facebook, a few dozen blogs. Sometimes, really fun things capture my attention, like something washed up on the shore.

Today’s web gift was this Entertainment Weekly interview with Jonathan Franzen (“Jonathan Franzen on the Books He Loves and Loathes“). I enjoyed Franzen’s The Corrections and How to Be Alone very much. The interview is fun because it reveals Franzen as a reader to be a normal guy who likes Asimov but hasn’t yet actually managed Moby-Dick.

I like these questions so much I decided to have a go at them myself just for fun. Think of this as one of those silly games people play on Facebook, except interesting because it is about books.

What was your favorite book as a child?

That’s not so easy. All the books I read as a kid tend to wash together for me. As a kid, I loved the mere act of reading more than any one specific book. When I picture myself reading as a kid, I see myself reading The Black Cauldron series by Lloyd Alexander. I don’t remember specific plots, but I remember being completely captured by the stories, and I remember the look and feel of those books very well.

What is your favorite book that you read for school?

I remember reading The Sun Also Rises several times my junior year of high school. I was knocked out that the writing was so spare and there was so much dialogue. I knew there was a lot of stuff going on behind the scenes that I didn’t really understand. I loved the way the story hinted at big, complicated, grown up things without coming right out and talking about them. That felt pretty true to life. The things people are willing to talk about are usually pretty trivial. If you listen carefully, people tell you more than just the things they want you to know. They end up telling you the things they need you to know.

What’s a book that really cemented you as a writer?

 Reading Ralph Waldo Emerson as a junior in high school helped me realize I could dress spiritual experiences up in words. It also made me comfortable with reaching for the big, vague ideas in my head and just keep turning them over on the page until I got the sense of what I was talking about. So much of Emerson for me is a blend between brilliance and bewilderment. He helped me learn how to toss it all in.
Is there a book you’ve read over and over again?

I have read Stephen King’s The Stand at least 6 times. It is a totem for me. My original mass market copy fell apart so I got rid of it. The copy on my shelf today is the updated trade paper edition. I miss the mass market copy with the blue cover and yellow eyes. That book was my serious friend.

What’s a classic that you’re embarrassed to say you’ve never read?

I’ve never read The Red Badge of Courage. No one ever made me. Its not an easy book to just pick up and read if no one is making you.

What’s a book you’ve pretended to have read?

I nod sometimes and smile when people talk about Red Badge of Courage.

I have only read Leaves of Grass in snippets and snatches. I’ve read the whole thing in pieces but never in one continuous run. Still, I talk about it like a single, magical experience every reader should have. That’s not really being honest.

What’s a book you consider grossly overrated?

Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Don’t get it. Don’t want it. Way to many easter eggs hiding in Joyce’s work. A good book shouldn’t require a magic decoder ring.

T.S. Eliot is the same for me. To much work. Not enough substance.

What’s a recent book you wish you had written?

I was pretty knocked out by Kevin Brockmeier’s The Brief History of the Dead. He does some really tricky things in that story that simply amaze.

What’s a movie adaptation of a book that you loved?

I haven’t read Ender’s Game but loved the movie. I’m actually not sure if I want to read the book. I’m afraid it won’t live up to the film. I’m usually the other way around about these things.

What was an illicit book that you had to read in secret as a kid?

A collection of Greek and Roman mythology. It was illustrated with line drawing and photographs of classical statuary. All of the characters were naked, which my mother thought highly inappropriate for an eight year old. There was a conversation and it was decided that the text was suitable and that I wasn’t receiving any prurient satisfaction from the nude gods, goddesses and heros. Pretty tame stuff. Naked bodies were uncommon in my home. We didn’t even subscribe to National Geographic.

I realized from this small controversy that my mom couldn’t handle the more disturbing stuff I read later as a teen. I had to hide my Clive Barker graphic novels. They were everything bad — naked, demented and, occasionally, I suppose, depraved. I got them from a friend who got them from a comic shop in Nashville. They weren’t easy to get. I cherished them for the garish green sticker on the covers that read: “Not suitable for children. This is intended only for adults.” Super fantastic stuff.

What’s a book that people might be surprised to learn that you loved?

Native Son by Richard Wright. Not sure why, but people seem really surprised when I mention how much I enjoyed it.

If there were only one genre you could read for the rest of your life, what would it be?

I think I could satisfy myself by reading only science fiction from now on. The quality of ideas in good science fiction excites me. There’s no better way than science fiction to talk about the ways we live our lives today.

What was the last book that made you laugh out loud, and what was the last one that made you cry?

Vonnegut’s Welcome to the Monkey House has some wonderfully funny stories in it.

Room by Emma Donough choked me up a bit. I didn’t cry. If I did, nobody saw me and can’t prove anything.

What are you reading right now?

Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson.

Okay. That was fun. Now, its your turn. I’d enjoy hearing your take on any or all of these questions. Post comments here or blog them and post the link.

200 Bad Poems

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Billy Collins was the special guest on National Public Radio’s “Wait. Wait. Don’t Tell Me” last week. (transcript | listen) My poetry friends know I have a bit of a nerd crush on Collins for his ability to write simple, clever yet powerful poetry. I’ve written about this before (“Poems Belong Everywhere”).

As much as I admire Collins’ work, I am even more appreciative of his ability to talk about poetry in a way that helps it make sense to non-poetry people. When asked about the bad poetry people write in high school, he said, “We’re all born with 200 bad poems in us… Middle school and high school is a good time to get rid of those.”

As a college librarian, I sometimes get the chance to talk to college students about their writing. When the conversation is about poetry, I ask how long they have been writing poetry. “I started in high school,” they usually tell me and then quickly add, “but it was all terrible.”

I understand their embarrassment. I started writing poetry in high school. It was awful. Long, tangled polysyllabic stuff crammed full of grand pronouncements, sweeping generalities and unclear abstractions. Oh, and angst. Lots and lots of angst. I wrote about death. I wrote about darkness. I wrote about my feelings of obsession with death and darkness. The weird things is that I was a happy kid. I have no idea where all the death and darkness stuff came from but, between the ages of 12 and 19, it gushed from my pen and stacked up on pages and pages of notebook paper.

I still have most of that poetry. I don’t read it. I’m not really even sure how to deal with it. I keep it as a physical totem. An object that connects me back to myself in some indirect way.

Hearing Collins say everyone has 200 bad poems inside made me very, very happy. Instead of bemoaning how terrible my earliest work has been and hiding that work from sight, I suddenly feel like I should share it. The next time, a young writer apologizes for the inadequacy of their verse, I want to show them the inadequacy of my own. I want to celebrate my 200 bad poems with them. I want to celebrate the fact of their 200 bad poems. I want to give them a stack of my most terrible verse, add up all the pages, place it beside their very worst and say “Race you! Let’s see who can get through their 200 bad poems the fastest.”

This, I think, is how the new poets will be born. When we give our students permission to be weird in public, to show off their mistakes and celebrate together our inevitable iteration through failure. That’s when poetry will be important again. That’s when poetry will recapture our minds as a new kind of language.

The People You Cannot Help

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There is someone in your life you cannot help. It may be a parent or a spouse, a child or a grandparent. You may love them with your whole heart, and they do not reciprocate. You may treat them with kindness which they repay with selfish demands. These people are never happy.

These people will take everything you can give and then ask why you never offer what they need.

They will eat the full meal of your generosity and complain that it is not enough. It is never enough.

These people will never admit fault but are quick to relish every small disappointment.

These people will kill you. Don’t let them.

Do the small kindnesses where you are able. Do the things that are needed and let that be enough. Speak with patience. Know when to hold your chair and when to leave the room.

Recognize that you cannot change people or make people happy or bring people into the light against their will. Recognize that some people choose to stay inside their own darkness.

Be kind to yourself and generous with your spirit, but recognize that you cannot rescue these people.

There is someone in your life you cannot help. Do not let them pull you into darkness. If you must love them, love them, but do not let them take your light.

What’s With All the Zombies?

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If you spend time in America, you will have noticed all the zombies. Seriously, they are everywhere: in our TV shows, our movies, our literature, even our phone commercials. We are deeply fascinated by the living dead.

I grew up loving horror films but never really liked or understood the zombie subgenre. When I was a kid, zombie films were thin plots stitched together with guts and gore. The perverse frisson came from rather blunt places — children eating their parents’ brains with garden trowels. Not much subtlety or subtext.

Then, as now, I liked my horror dark, cerebral and full of existential dread. There should certainly be blood and guts but there should be darker things still — existential threats, commentary on man’s inexorable slide toward annihilation, the loss of hubris when one finally peers behind the veil and sees the mechanics of reality and realizes that the universe does not need us. We are grist for the mill. I dug Hellraiser, Nightbreed and Barker’s other films way more than any of Romero’s works.

I still find zombies a bit pathetic. And yet, I am fascinated by the resurgence of the subgenre and am deeply enthralled by my favorite story cycle of the moment, The Walking Dead. The Walking Dead isn’t really about zombies. Zombies are a plot device. The story itself is about community, survival instinct and how the choices we make either reinforce or diminish our humanity. Really brilliant stuff told over a story arch that is calculated each week for exquisite tension.

So , as much as I loathe zombies and love The Walking Dead, I am getting really interested in studies about how a particular age’s monster stories reflect the emotional or psychological sense of the times. In other words, the monsters we project in our stories reveal the deeper discomforts of our shared mindset.

During the Cold War, we had alien invasions which bespoke a fear of global conflict. The 70’s gave us slasher films, an expression of new sexual codes and gender roles. The last decade gave us vampires, a fascination with blood and disease. And now, zombies.

What should we make of the current zombie invasion? What does it mean?

I think Chuck Klosterman has it right in his article “Bonus Feature/ Reconsideration: The Real Reason Why Zombies Are Scary” (New York Times Magazine, October 27, 2013, Lifestyle: page 47). The fear of zombies is an expressed fear of monotony, the kind of mindless repetition brought by technology that dehumanizes our daily lives and bruises our souls. Here’s how he puts it:

Every zombie war is a war of attrition. It’s always a numbers game. And it’s more repetitive than complex. In other words, zombie killing is philosophically similar to reading and deleting 400 work e-mails, or filling out paperwork that only generates more paperwork, or performing tedious tasks in which the only true risk is being consumed by the avalanche. The principal downside to any zombie attack is that the zombies will never stop coming; the principal downside to life is that you will never be finished with whatever it is you do. The Internet reminds us of this every day. Zombies are like the Internet and the media and every conversation we don’t want to have. All of it comes at us endlessly (and thoughtlessly), and — if we surrender — we will be overtaken and absorbed.

This, I think, is a reality more terrifying that drained corpses and dangling entrails. The very likely prospect that I will never successfully deal with all those emails or read all those tweets or watch all those shows captured on my DVR. This is why zombies are so terrifying. It isn’t because they are the dead and we are the living. It is because we are already both. We are horrified by the prospect of becoming more of what we already are — the undead, the walking dead, corporate customers in a 400 emails-a-day kind of world.

Time Sickness

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My family took an actual vacation last week. My wife, daughter and I flew to Florida. We spent three days at Walt Disney World, three days at Madeira Beach with an additional day at both ends of the trip for travel. It was all the things vacation should be: fun, relaxed, and restorative.

I love to travel , but we don’t get to travel a lot. Traveling is an adventure and a challenge. Traveling disorients all the senses and makes it easy for me to pay attention to the kinds of things I normally don’t notice. I had a lot of great moments along this trip and more than a few realizations. The most powerful had nothing to do with travel. It was about stepping outside my routine. It was about realizing the core affliction of my life. I suffer from time sickness.

I was floating in the Gulf of Mexico, watching the sky as groups of pelicans descended, coasting a few feet above my head, skimming the water for fish. It was fascinating. I’m not a great swimmer but the salt water carried me like a mattress. I was able to relax and watch this completely commonplace yet unfamiliar thing happen around me. I watched and drifted. After a while, I realized I had no idea how long I had been watching the pelicans. It may have been minutes. It may have been hours. I had lost my unit of measurement.

Two days later, I was checking out of our hotel and realized I had no idea what the date was. I joked with the clerk about it, then realized I had no idea what actual day of the week it was.

I had become completely unmoored from the clock and the calendar. The feeling that came with this realization was very much like the feeling I have had after the flu passes and I am able to stand out of bed for the first time and feel hungry and rested and curious about what’s been happening in my house.

I get this feeling from time to time. It doesn’t require travel. It happens when I take more than a week off from work. It is a powerful, healthy feeling. It is a feeling of recalibration, a new relationship with time.

Most of my life is spent in close observation of time. The clock and the calendar organize my days. When people at work need me, they send requests for my time. These requests appear simultaneously on my computer, phone and iPad. Just to be certain I notice.

I am pushed through my day by reminders, flags and alerts that move my attention from one event to the next. My schedule for next month begins to fill early in the current month. An event like faculty in-service happens and it is immediately time to begin planning the next semester’s in-service.

This isn’t complaint. This is how life works. This is how we are able to accomplish things. We manage our time. We parcel and divide it into focused, discrete segments so we can move forward toward a goal. We schedule things with people so we can all move forward together.

At some point, the routine of scheduling and tracking time captures more of our attention than the things we are actually doing with that time.

This is, I think, the definition of time sickness: when the awareness of the tools and units used to measure time receive more attention than the activities we are trying to use that time to accomplish.

When that happens, it is time to step back. You don’t have to get on an airplane or go to the beach, although I can personally recommend both as a likely remedy. When you first diagnose the symptoms of time sickness, you’ve got to take a step back. Change your relationship to time.

Take time off. Take a walk. Disable all notifications, alerts and messages. Watch the pelicans. They are always doing their routine. You just may not have let yourself notice.

Night Work; A Kind of Farmer (Flash Fiction)

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First, a note. There is darkness inside. Sometimes it comes out. That’s what writing does. It lets darkness out so light can keep coming in.

I was listening to PJ Harvey’s “One Time Too Many” and Belly’s “Low Red Moon” when I wrote this quick piece. I’m not sure what it is about, who the man is and or what kind of farmer he might be.

Don’t let this ruin your mood. The moon is beautiful. Our appetites are cruel, but they keep up digging.

***

He digs the hole, deep enough to bury a man. Then he digs the hole deeper still. He works without thinking, pushing the shovel through the crust of ground, lifts each scrape of dirt and rock, builds a pile, a slowly escalating mound as the hole gets deeper and deeper, sinks farther and farther into shadow.

Sweat is running down his face. His shirt and pants are heavy with it. They cling to his arms and legs, weak and trembling from exertion still working and working with the steady, relentless rhythm of an automaton.

The hole is deep enough already. Still, he continues to dig.

He glances over his shoulder once, twice while he works. He wants to be certain this is really happening. He wants to be sure the body is still there.

It lies behind him, nearly hidden in darkness. Only the open curve of the face silvered with moonlight, the eyes staring up at him expressionless.

There is no guilt in those eyes. No accusation.

He is a kind of farmer. Just as his father was a kind of farmer before him and his father before him and so on back too many generations to count. It is what he is. It is what he does.

Farmers dig. They turn over the soil.

He looks down into the vast, empty space between his boots. There are secrets down there if you know where to look. Wriggling, writhing things that move silently through the soil. Unspeaking, voiceless things that wait with the terrifying patience of stone.

The earth is our mother, he tells himself. The earth is our father.

We are made for the earth, from the earth.

The moon is high in the sky, watching with its cold, appraising stare.

The work of a farmer is merciless. The earth gives us to life. We give life to the earth.

Best not to dwell too long with the philosophy of things. There are always ways to cast questions. Philosophy is useless. Best just to dig, hands grip the shovel handle tight. Best not dwell too long with thinking. Thoughts have strong fingers, they can find a niche of doubt, a single moment of uncertainty and pull everything apart.

He has worked too hard to give room for doubt. His father before him had worked too hard. And his father and his father.

The hole is deep. Certainly deep enough to bury a man. And yet, still he works, making the hole deeper, darker. He digs, tries not to notice how the grave yawns, a hungry mouth without teeth that pulls a man to dig deeper and deeper still.

Best not to think, he reminds himself. That is the catechism. Best not think. Keep your eyes at the edge of the hole. Keep the shovel moving. Do not look up. Do not look down.

Try not to notice the way the moon peers over your shoulder, an eager, greedy face.

The ground is hungry. The moon is merciless. There is no respite.

He digs because he is a kind of farmer. He digs because it is the nature of shovels to dig. He moves the dirt with a singleness of attention. He pays no mind to the body on the ground behind him. The corpse is inconsequential. There is no life. There is no death. There is only the work. The soft, steady sound of dirt accumulating. The happy sighs of things that live in dirt.

The shovel moves. Best not to dwell. There is just the work. Nothing but the work. Only the work.

The work fills the world.

The ground is hungry.

The moon is merciless.

Night has its appetite. It swallows and swallows and never is it satisfied.

You Don’t Need Permission: Why iPads in the Classroom Makes So Much Sense

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My mom-in-law is a smart person. She writes safety procedures for the Department of Energy. When she got her first iPhone a few years ago, she was excited to see what all it could do. She asked for the manual and looked a bit upset when I told her there wasn’t one. “How will I know how to use it?” she asked. My quick advice, “Just play with it.”

That was a few years ago. We’ve had a few conversations about how Facebook works on the phone, how to post pictures and how to connect to her home wifi. For the most part, I have let her struggle alone with the incredible technology riding in her purse.

Last week, we both upgraded phones to the 5c. Before visiting the store, I suggested we back up her phone to her computer. Silence. Just sync it to iTunes. More silence. I realized she had never backup her phone. That’s when I felt the full weight of my benign neglect.

We backed up her phone and went to the store to get the new phones. Everything went smoothly. Our phones were given to us in those small, shapely plastic boxes. They were activated by the sales rep. We were ready to go.

She looked worried. “Where’s the manual?”

That question again.

“There isn’t one,” I told her. “Just play with it. We can go online if we have specific questions.”

“Oh,” I realized, once again, it wasn’t really an adequate answer.

This isn’t an indictment of my mom-in-law. I told you she is smart. Way smarter than I am. She breaks down out incredibly complex problems for a living.

The story isn’t about intelligence. It is about expectation.

My mom-in-law belongs to a generation that has experienced technology as something that is unnecessarily complicated, expensive and requires specialized training. In the past, new technology always came with a manual. New technology in the workplace came with months of specialized training by experts with advanced knowledge of the system, the proper use and lots of stern warnings about how to avoid the deadly key combinations that will “crash the system”, resulting in lost time, lost productivity and loss of face. New technology required certification before it could be used.

I am thinking about her experiences because I am helping connect the faculty at my college with iPads. The faculty at my college are great teachers. Some are the same generation as my mom-in-law. Some are older. Some are younger.

We will be doing lots of training in the months ahead to make sure everybody is comfortable with the capabilities of their iPad and thinking creatively about how they want to use the iPad in their classrooms.

Training is essential to be sure the technology is useful and used.

But mobile technology is different, We did our first iPad 101 session for brand new iPad users a few days ago. We started with the guided tour of iPad buttons, settings, and functions but quickly realized that no one was following along. They had new devices in their hands and needed to know how to connect to the wireless, how to set up their Apple ID, how to navigate the Settings menu before anything else made sense. Our session quickly shifted into one-on-one conversations about buttons, settings and passwords. It was a lot of fun. All three presenters were busy shuffling around the room, triaging worried expressions or sighs of frustration. The busyness was punctuated by cries of celebration. I did it! It worked!

Even better, as the morning went on, first time iPad users started helping other first time iPad users figure things out. The trainees were also the trainers. The room was busy, noisy and fun. I couldn’t help feeling like I was seeing a glimpse into our future classrooms.

I was struck very suddenly by something I have known all along. The best way to teach a person something new is to let them try something new. People learn best by doing new things. All people. All ages. No exceptions.

I am excited about the potential for using new technologies, like iPads, in the classrooms at my college. I don’t care so much about the specific technology. I’m after helping our faculty have that feeling that comes from personal discovery. The fun of figuring out something new. The joy of sharing new learning with someone else.

So, here’s the thing: training is still essential, but we no longer need to wait for the training to start figuring things out. We don’t have to wait for an expert to tell us how things work. We don’t need certificates to demonstrate that we are ready.

There are no trainers. There are no experts. We don’t need to wait for permission.

Try things. Share what works. Ask about things that don’t work. This is how people learn. This is our noisy, busy, fun classroom.

Ready. Set. Go.

By the way, don’t worry about my mom-in-law. She is getting along fine with her 5c, even without a manual. She’s figured out Facetime. She is buying apps and organizing them into folders. Turns out she didn’t special instruction. She just needed permission and a safe place to ask about things she didn’t understand.

The future isn’t about technology. The future is about better ways to learn and giving ourselves permission to try new things. The future is about being okay with not knowing and asking for help when needed.

May all of our classrooms be noisy, busy and lots and lots of fun.

Leadership is About Attention

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“We need to make it clear that executive presence doesn’t refer to dressing well and appearing unflappable, but to someone who is in charge of his or her own attention. You cannot command the loyalty of those who cannot command your attention.” — Doug Riddle, “Executive Leadership”

 

I work with lots of teams. I lead a team of my own. I think a lot about leadership and what makes a person worthy of respect and attention.

As a young leader, I used to believe everyone needed me to have the best ideas. Believing this was stressful and limiting. I was often paralyzed by the gap between what I knew and what I thought everyone expected me to know. Things moved way too slowly because everyone waited on my ideas to arrive and I waited with them because I didn’t know any better.

I have recently been working with the idea that a good leader doesn’t need to have all the best ideas. The good leader just needs to recognize the best ideas quickly and clear the way to get those ideas in use.

I appreciate Doug Riddle’s post “Executive Leadership”. He places the focus correctly not on decisiveness but on attention. Good leaders don’t simply decide things. They have learned how to pay attention to the right things, the right people. They pay attention to the needs and accomplishments of their team.  Good leaders are in charge of their own focus. They know how to focus their team. Good leaders know how to recognize problems and also untapped strength in their team. More importantly, good leaders know how to slow down and give their team the right attention. A leader who can listen will find the best ideas more quickly and help get those ideas into play.

The Bloody Chamber by Angela Carter (book review)

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Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber is a short, savage, surreal meditation on the fate of women in fairy tales. A few of the stories succeed brilliantly. Most fall short. This is a collection of stories about men, women and the ways in which innocence is sometimes given, but more often taken. It is violent, bloody and sometimes vile. It is also, at turns, beautiful. Sometimes painfully so.

The men are beasts — lecherous, gluttonous, power-mad. As is often the case in fairy tales, the women are sacrificial virgins offered to sate the voracious appetites of terrible monsters. Sometimes, the women are ruined by failed, disastrous relationships. Sometimes, the women are rescued, Occasionally, the women give themselves over to their own transformations and become strange, beautiful, savage creatures in their own right.

The best story is the title story, which is a magically realistic retelling of The Beauty and the Beast. “The Company of Wolves” is also terrific. Wolves feature prominently throughout the stories — lycanthropes, condemned souls and a few strange twists on the Red Riding Hood theme.

There are plenty of wonders throughout the book and some really powerful imagery. Most generally, the writing is too heavy, packed tight with  arcane description. This collection of stories aspires to transport the reader. Skim through. It is a short book but I found myself taking a long time to read it. I pushed my way through. I was not carried.

Is Mobile Learning a Thing?

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I find myself using the phrase “mobile learning” a lot lately. I use it in conversations about how tablets and smartphones can serve as platforms to get more digital content into the classroom and foster greater collaboration between students and teachers.

Here’s the problem: I’m not sure if “mobile learning” is really a thing all its own. I know what learning is. I know what mobile devices are. I’m not really sure that you get something discrete, specific and concrete when you put the two things together.

And that’s the trouble with language. When we try new things, we need to find language to describe what we are doing and define the goals we are working toward. And so we find ad hoc, pastiche terminology that evokes the sense of thing we want to help make happen.

And yet, when pushed, we must admit the poverty of this language. Mobile learning isn’t strictly about the mobility of the student, though mobile technology certainly facilities easier, more flexible opportunities for learning on-the-go. Mobile learning isn’t really about the devices, though the devices certainly enable opportunities for hands-on, context-based, personalized learning.

Personalized learning is a good term, but radical personalization isn’t really the goal. There is a core lesson to be learned and a constructed path designed to help groups of learners through.

Collaborative learning is another good term, but it fails to capture what’s novel about digital technologies in the classroom. Deep learning is almost always collaborative in some way. It requires that the student and the teacher meet in agreement in some shared mental space. The collaborative aspects of active learning-based projects are also not new, though the scope and scale of student ability to create, curate and share their own work seems unprecedented.

I like the term ubiquitous learning a lot. I would, of course, given my fondness for the word. I like ubiquitous learning because it gets to the idea that deep learning connects what happens during the few hours spent inside the classroom with everything that happens to students in the many more hours spent outside the classroom. Learning only happens when it is everywhere and connected to everything. But the term, I’m afraid, is a loser. Ubiquitous is a jawbreaker. Oh, and pretentious. Did I mention the word “ubiquitous” is also pretentious?

So, I’m on the search for a useful term for what happens when mobile technologies are brought with right intention to help foster deeper, more personal, creative, collaborative learning experiences.

Please send help. What do we call this thing?