He’s always on, of course, but now we have the treat of being in the room while he’s on for all of us. At once. We’ve already had toothing, handsets in the grave, RFID at the coffee shop, silicon-brain connections, and more great text than you can shake a commonplace book at.

Here you can see heads bowed at the outset of the talk. We’re all asking to be able to rise the occasion. (Not really, but I couldn’t resist.) Ah, that voodoo that he do so well. Viva Bryan!

Not just to access information.

We come to class for the same reason we come to the ELI Focus Session on Mobile Learning.

1. Face-to-face is another way to set up a serendipity field, with very rich (though often fragile and difficult to capture) channels of communication.
2. There’s a sense of occasion: dearly beloved, we are gathered together….
3. We demonstrate a shared commitment to an ideal, to a set of core values, and think about both that commitment and those values. That demonstration and that thinking yield astonishing benefits. It’s what Bruner speaks of when he describes school as always an exercise in consciousness-raising about the possibilities of communal intellectual effort.
4. To be in the physical presence of a highly-trained cognition working through complex and rich ideas and experiences is to have a gestalt experience of the life of the mind as it is located in individual identities. That gestalt conveys will, purpose, direction, interiority in ways that may elude language, but perhaps not the explaining voice….

During the break, a fellow sitting next to me at the table suddenly said, “Oh, I read your blog, and I just realized you’re the guy who writes it.” He wasn’t sure how he had found it. He asked many probing questions about my experience as a blogger. I’m gobsmacked. How rich are these connections! The blogosphere is a serendipity laboratory; we craft the occasions for a-ha and oh-it’s-you. To arrive where we began, and know it for the first time.

Uncanny. And I know that reading my blog means reading through me all the stuff I’m reading and learning from constantly. Sometimes I think I should be paying tuition. Or perhaps I’ve found the deepest meaning of “professional courtesy.”

Professional courtesy. A phrase to mull over.

Julie Little from UT speaking now on mobile learning initiatives at her school. They started in 2001 when the president said “we’re going wireless.” What happened next? A group of folks in academic technology got together over strong Turkish coffee and said “what do we do now?” Sounds like a recipe for disaster–or not. Venimus, videmus, colemus (we come, we see, we cultivate), Julie says.

It takes a president to say “here we go.” It takes an enormously talented and committed learning community, administrative and instructional, to say “let’s go here, and here, and here.” And most of all, it takes full ownership campus-wide to effect and sustain institutional change.

Getting from leadership to community and back again, recursively, is one of the central problems of any civilization. It strikes me once again that higher education is a civilization laboratory. We must devise the most interesting experiments we can imagine.

Go Julie! How fortunate I am to have met so many strong leaders at Frye 2005. Days like today, I pinch myself: I know that person; I’ve spent many hours with her and others just as strong and talented, soaking it all in, thinking “emulate, emulate, share, share, aspire, aspire.” Real School!

Coming to you live from Adelphi, Maryland, while the student panel is talking about their experience of information technologies in their learning. Whitney Roberts from UMW is on the panel and doing us proud. A couple of things strike me right away. “Students” is a necessary, useful, unwieldy, and misleading category. These students are young, and they’re pursuing degrees, and there are of course powerful commonalities. On the other hand, their experiences and habits of mind, along with their own disciplinary “scaffolding,” diverge pretty widely.

I can’t get all this together on the fly, but I need to blurt it out anyway: we are all students. There are factors unique to various stages of student development; but at a deep level that for me, at least, provides a more useful paradigm, we are all students. Teachers are students advanced enough to be able to shape, guide, and inform students at an earlier place in their learning. Teachers are also students advanced and accomplished enough (accomplished means “peer-reviewed” in the largest sense) to be able fairly and usefully to assess the work of younger students.

I’m feeling as if greater awareness of continuities in life-long learning is necessary for us to make sense of this activity we call “school.” It seems to be hiding in plain sight. Whitney just talked about how engaged learners don’t mind being surrounded by learning inputs all the time; she said that technology is another way of talking about philosophy on campus walk.

I wonder: have we designed school so that it–“it” meaning the challenge of constant intellectual activity–is compartmentalized and segmented (Whitney’s word) into toothless, leave-me-alone blanditude? Get your skills, punch the clock, move on to “real life.” We’ve made school into a job, not a calling, and that quite deliberately. Jobs are jobs. Vocations–callings–are always.

… it doesn’t mean they aren’t after you.

Andy blogs today on Apple’s response to the French plan to force all DRM-enabled music stores to make their schemes interoperable. Andy’s blog is very, very funny; Monty Python would be proud. (“pssst. Tell him we already got one!”)

I followed Andy’s link to the BBC story carrying Apple’s sky-will-fall doomsday scenario, including their odd taunting of the Parliament with threats of “free movies for iPods” that will be a boon to their business. Apple seems to think that interoperable DRM means *no* DRM. (Even if interoperable DRM means no DRM, will the sky indeed fall? Maybe not.) The real zenith for me, however, was the I-am-not-making-this-up pullquote below:

Jonathan Arber, analyst at market research firm Ovum, said: “This is potentially a big blow for Apple, whose iTunes/iPod business model is built on its very lack of interoperability with other devices and services.”

I obviously agree, and I will point out once again that there are huge risks and disadvantages if colleges and universities subscribe to iTunes U as a platform for storing and distributing academic content. Lack of interoperability equals vendor lock-in. What’s good for business isn’t necessarily what’s right for the academy to adopt.

A bit in medias res, but here goes:

This post is almost overwhelmingly provocative. I need to mull it over. I feel a ferocious mull coming on. Good golly Miss Molly. My head just got spun. I imagine Bryan will find my response predictable, alarming, or both.

Yet I must say wow. The connection with pop at the end just feels perfect to me. Perfect. (Even though I don’t yet know how much of the main argument I agree with–or am ready to admit I agree with.) And it casts the conversation/issue in a whole ‘nother light. Not often that I find those kinds of breathtaking connections. Much to mull.

I do need to state here that “playing records” in the turn-taking/fragmented conversation Martin describes was one of the great joys of my adolescence and young adulthood. One of the supreme joys.

I think there are tremendous implications here for education. What they are ain’t exactly clear, but I know that they are.

So the Princeton police used Facebook to track down student wrongdoers–and the students were outraged. Ed Felten has an interesting take on the situation:

It’s easy to see why Public Safety might be interested in reading Facebook, and why students might want to keep Public Safety away. In the end, Public Safety stated that it would not hunt around randomly on Facebook, but it would continue to use Facebook as a tool in specific investigations. Many people consider this a reasonable compromise. It feels right to me, though I can’t quite articulate why.[Freedom to Tinker » Blog Archive » Facebook and the Campus Cops]

I’m reminded of the crucial role higher education could play in this whole conversation. Instead, I hear either the utopian dreams of self-organizing civilization or the dystopian nightmares of expressing anything on the Internet. I’m not sure I’m exactly where Ed Felten is, but I appreciate his attempts to get at a nuanced reading of these issues. Don’t miss the discussion that follows in the comments.

Via Jon Udell, with thanks for the bookmarklet.

Both Martha and I found ourselves resonating with this post from Jenna, who wrote it during her trip to NYC as part of her theatre class.

Jenna’s blog is part of a large online project we’ve been facilitating for their class this semester. My own work has been largely behind-the-scenes. Out front and with astonishing diligence and imagination, our Instructional Technology Specialists have worked for months with these students and their professor, Gregg Stull, to realize a dream. You can read more about the project and process at The Smooth Elephant. From there, if you’re interested, read along with the students and Gregg as they blog. There’s a lot of material there, much of it very powerful indeed.

Even so, in the midst of all these aggregated blogging, video, and podcasting wonders, it’s often the small moments, the moments that might otherwise be lost or known only to one person, that carry the richest rewards. Jenna’s special day, like all the other experiences these students and their professor have had during this course of study, has now become part of the fabric of my life too, and the lives of anyone in the world who finds these blogs. Thankfully, Web 2.0 makes that process of discovery and sharing not only easy, but likely. These blogs will live on. I hope they will become an ongoing project for these students as they carry their work into the professional world. I hope and expect they will be a great resource for future students, and for the entire department of Theatre and Dance.

I am very proud of these students, their professor (whom I am fortunate to have as a colleague), and the work my staff has done with them. I am humbled and honored to be among them.

As you’ll see on The Smooth Elephant, this project is only one of many in which the Division of Teaching and Learning Technologies has partnered with faculty to augment and transform teaching and learning. More dreamers welcome!

EDIT: Martha’s reflections on the theatre project’s “getting down to business” are a must-read.

I’d heard about the Live Clipboard buzz at the O’Reilly conference, but as CogDog Alan Levine says, it’s the demo that does it. So when I read Jon Udell’s Infoworld blog on Microsoft’s Live Clipboard and did the demo, I had that a-ha moment, and it was pretty huge. I don’t think Jon’s assessment of this development (“blew the doors off”) is at all exaggerated. Suddenly the idea of Web Services got a whole lot more interesting. And the fact that the demo invites the user to copy and paste between Firefox and IE is elating–or worrying, depending on your paranoia threshold.

Then I read Jon’s InfoWorld column, where this little nugget caught my eye:

He [Microsoft’s Ray Ozzie] showed how RSS feeds acting as service end points can be pasted into apps to create dynamically updating views. Virtually anyone can master this Tinkertoy approach to self-serve mashups.

More on the possibilities here.

Maybe this is the good-angel version of the bad-angel Active Desktop. At the very least, I’m intrigued to think of the possibilities of a Feedbook app that I imagine as a dynamically updated text, but with a difference. Difference? The feedbook app would not just be an RSS reader on steroids, but a magic book, an application-as-book, in which each section is a continually updated portal within certain delineated boundaries and with certain dynamic or even interactive capabilities. The professor, responding to his or her sense of class needs, could tweak the mashup throughout a class. Each year the text would grow richer, and each year it would be a little different. And it would be like an app, not like a collection of feeds.

Think of a film textbook in which chapters included, embedded within generalizable analytical frameworks, dynamically updated trailers of current movies. Below the trailers would be spaces for students to take notes, share-able with fellow students. The whole thing could be exported, ripped/mixed/fed wherever, framed for evaluation or saved for further work. Dynamically updated showtimes for those movies in that area would appear nearby. Blog entries, related movies, Pandora-like suggestions for cognates, etc. All there, all presenting options for reflection, analysis, and directed browsing to the student, with partial bread-crumb trails leading elsewhere and inviting off-text exploration and serendipity. The lines between text and e-portfolio and notebook would be usefully blurred. Each text would be an invitation to another world, and a map of that world, and a record of one’s travels through that world.

I do not know what I’m taking about, really, but I’m intrigued even though I can’t articulate why just yet.