Or it will be in less than a day.

Mind, on the other hand, is all over the place.

This was the last day of EDUCAUSE. In the morning I convened a session on alternatives to illegal file-sharing. Russ from Penn State described their experience with full-on Napster accounts for students (and for faculty and staff who wanted them, which were some but not many). Chuck from Yale talked about cdigix. a turnkey solution they bought to get streaming media into the classroom and residence halls for academic use, with a piggy-backed entertainment service option students could purchase if they so desired. Two striking things for me here. One was Russ’s statistic that about 30% of the students’ use of Napster was devoted to looking through the Napster catalog information–i.e., as Russ so insightfully put it, “learning.” Yes indeed. The drive to learn appears in the oddest contexts. The other striking bit was Yale’s insight that the effort to curb illegal file-sharing could shake loose some money and inspire some thoughtful design about delivering media on demand to classrooms and course sites. Two very different approaches, and each with intriguing surprises about teaching and learning.

Later I attended a session on mentoring, then finished with the general session on preparing the IT workforce of the future. The secret theme of the talk emerged about midway through. It seemed both a benediction and a rallying cry, if you can imagine that. Perhaps a better phrase would be “call to remembrance.” Diana S. Natalicio, President of the Universityof Texas at El Paso, spoke about the need to make K-12 better (a litotes, dear reader), about the need to enable underrepresented and underprivileged groups to have futures full of opportunities, about the need to encourage US citizens to take their science and engineering commitments as seriously as does the rest of the industrialized world. All good points, all made well. For me, though, the haunting moments came as President Natalicio described the joy, privilege, and responsibility of helping young lives embark on a life’s journey constrained only by their imaginations and motivation. Yes.

That was EDUCAUSE. Or is still.

Dessert was lunch at the Hard Rock Cafe, then a movie. “Friday Night Lights.” Quite an astonishing movie in many respects. Some sequences of almost pure cinema a la Eisenstein or Hitchcock. Great use of music. Casting and acting, excellent as well. I’ll go out on a limb here and say that this was an art film about mulish, destructive, monomaniacal heartland America that’s also a love letter to a nation’s character–or what that character could enable, used rightly. It reminds me of “Breaking Away” and “The Right Stuff” and “Heartland” in those respects. Not flawless, but very compelling and, I think, unusual.

Last: I’ve added Bryan Alexander’s blog to the links at the left. Check it out and let him hover around you, too. I don’t think you’ll be sorry.