Box Or Agent?

The first problem that we faced when we met to discuss editing the book, was what large sections we would have. We felt that if we could get a structure to the project, that structure would help us determine who to ask to contribute. I refer to this as the "box" structure.

We certainly had some general ideas of how we wanted to focus the text. For example, we knew that we wanted a section on teaching which has, from the beginning, been central to Stockton's mission. We also wanted a section on the earliest personalities, earliest pedagogies and the earliest ideas about what the Stockton experience should be like.

We knew we needed to have a section on the future plans of the College; the President has advised us to include a long range planning document that suggests what the institution might be like in 2020.

So we had the time period from when the College opened in Sept of 1971 to 2020. But what might be in the middle?

We could have organized the middle sections around the various Divisions (now called Schools). We could have had texts about the School of Arts and Humanities or the School of Professional Studies. This is a fairly common way to organize anything -- committees, governance models, union representation, budgets, etc. Include one administrator or one faculty from each School. Initially, we tried this but quickly abandoned it as too restrictive.

As we discussed this initial problem, we began to see that organizing around various large efforts -- each of which brought both early and recent faculty together, which created interdisciplinary teaching, which served the wider community, focused on the "greening" of the College and still included our most ancient history and our newest vision, offered a structure that seemed right.

The tentative structure looks like this:

A Different Vision
Primacy of Teaching
Sustaining the Environment
Promoting the Professions
Serving the Community
Envisioning the Future

For us, these do not seem restrictive, they highlight central efforts of the College, they allow us to tell our story from 1971 to 2020 and they detail individual faculty and administrative efforts to continue the uniqueness on which we were founded.

What, then, about "boxes" and "agents"?

I have a piece of software named Tinderbox which I have owned for years and which I have, for the same number of years, attempted to understand.  I have had glimpses of its incredible power but have never mastered it. the author of Tinderbox is, in my opinion, one of the most creative and insightful software engineers I have ever met. My problem is not with the software but the way that I think.

Let me give a quick example which should link to how we have organized the book. 

I learned all through graduate school -- and especially when I wrote my dissertation -- that the mode was to read and digest copious amounts of research on a narrow topic and then to expand those digests (carefully written on 3 x 5 note cards) into larger texts. This was the way that all of us worked and it certainly worked for me. My dissertation ended up at 306 pages. In other words, the process required that I shape a group of boxes -- background, terminology, structure, textual issues, critical history and others -- and then fill each of those boxes with huge amounts of text. And Tinderbox certainly lets you do just this. Create an outline in Tinderbox and, then, fill in sub-categories of sub-categories of sub-categories until you can't do it anymore.

But the genius of Tinderbox is that allows users to create tiny pieces of code called "agents". These agents then rattle through all of the research data organizing, separating, combining, coloring, moving, re-labelling until all of the data makes sense. In other words, Tinderbox encourages a user to have one, really big box which. In a sense, they don't have to think about structure when they collect what they are throwing in. Structure comes later when it is needed and clear about what it is looking for.

I try to imagine what our text would look like if we used agents instead of boxes. Throw everything we can find into a file and let the agents sort it out.