but only just. Thanks to all for the get-well wishes. They’ve worked, though I’m still pretty weak. Odd how flu makes for such lethargy.

I’m trying to tie up a few (thousand) loose ends as I get ready for the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative 2008 Annual Meeting. This meeting is the one that feels like “home base” for me. It’s where I came in, back in 2004. Lots has happened since, and I’ve at last been to the New Media Consortium Annual Meeting and found out that all the wonderful things folks said about that meeting were also true. Chalk it up to pure slavering greed on my part: I treasure and need them both.

My thought for the evening as I try once again to think through my half-baked ideas about metaphor in the metaverse: perhaps what I’m trying to articulate is something like what Stanley Kubrick tries to do when he portrays abstractions in action. Or like what Hitchcock meant when he talked about “pure cinema.” I think that if we manage to avoid killing the planet or each other, or both, we may soon be able to tap into and explore an entirely new world of discourse and analysis, one that takes what we already know about cinematic grammar, semiotics, semantics, just plain expressiveness, and puts it into practice on a hitherto unimagined, unexperienced scale. What would happen if we educated our students to be sophisticated moviemakers, just as we now educate them to be sophisticated writers? What if those capacities were used not just in the service of narrative film, but as a means of conversation, analysis, etc.? The semantic metaverse–that gives our meaningful world back to us? Worth a thought, even if it’s half-baked.