It’s not been widely reported, but students at Planet Blacksburg have been contributing their own brand of “citizen journalism” to the news of today’s horrific events at Virginia Tech. No, the site is not so polished as professional news organizations’; and yes, there’s undeniable value to the editing and fact-checking those organizations provide for their coverage–not to mention the expertise contributed by the professional writers and photographers they employ.

But there’s a human face to this tragedy that’s more clearly visible at Planet Blacksburg than at the professional sites I’ve visited, and there’s unique and significant value to the glimpses these Tech students are sharing with the rest of the world. The comments coming in from around that world make that value clear.

Here’s how Planet Blacksburg defines itself:

“Planet Blacksburg is a student-run new media organization striving to provide content to the New River Valley and beyond.”

Tonight, that “beyond” has grown far past what anyone could have expected–or desired, under the circumstances. Our thoughts and prayers are with the students, faculty, and staff at Virginia Tech, and with their families.

Catch of the day:

“I consider that beside Your site there is future!”

Well, I’d certainly like to think so too.

I could say it’s a meme worth studying, and probably it is, but the truth is that I just enjoy looking at the way these things are constructed, and the results I get back. This one is Alice‘s fault, as she led me to it.

What poetry form am I? Read on.

Me and Dante. I feel better already. Even more terrifying is how much sense this diagnosis makes as I consider it.

Now back to our normal programming.

I just popped over to take a nostalgic look at the EdVidWiki for our NMC Online Video Throwdown and was delighted to see some new contributions, several of them from my film students. One of those students offers a by-the-way comment that I can’t resist quoting:

“This one blows my mind, which is why I’ve decided it’s inherently educational.”

Works for me.

Brian’s got a very interesting post on Abject Learning concerning Twitter, Tumblr, Tumblog, and other new hyperconnected picocontent generators.

I left this comment, but it grew so long that I figured I’d just post it here.

Two quick and quixotic thoughts:

Nicholas of Cusa argued that it would be philosophically impossible to distinguish between a top rotating at infinite speed and a top standing still. In some respects, once hyperconnectivity exceeds a certain threshold, it not only has diminishing returns, but begins to turn into an accelerating disconnection. It’s a paradox, like alterity–but George has already heard some of what I think about connectivism.

No, I don’t know what that “certain threshold” is. I’m just musing about the value of disconnection, perhaps because every disconnection reveals other connections that may have gotten lost or overwhelmed or drowned out. But of course the answer is not to pursue hyperdisconnection, either, as many do who resist life online.

Second: not too long ago I read a Scientific American article in which cognitive psychologists investigated the formation of symbol-competence in children. What did it take for a child to learn that a picture of a box of popcorn would not spill popcorn into his lap if she held the picture upside down and shook it? There were two answers. One was that the competence was age-dependent. The other was that a certain inhibitory function had to be learned. In other words, there needed to be a gap between the visual stimulation and the motor response (and, presumably, the cerebration) so that the kid would not jump to the wrong conclusion about the picture (it’s a box of popcorn!) and grab it but would have time to come to the right conclusion (it’s a picture of a box of popcorn).

It seems to me that the next layer of thought in this whole shebang will have to account for connectivity, barriers, inhibition, and instant access as multidimensional, dynamic, and dynamically related (and necessary) ingredients of a complex model of cognition and education.

L-R: Gardner Campbell (moderator), Shannon Hauser, Serena Epstein, Ben Vigeant, Adam Turner

Last Saturday UMW’s Division of Teaching and Learning Technologies hosted its fourth annual Student Academy on Information Technologies. Like last year, this year’s event closed with a student panel speaking to the general topic of “Life Online.” Acting DTLT Director Martha Burtis invited me to moderate this year’s panel.

Again like last year, the discussion was wide-ranging, funny, thoughtful, and provocative. I hope we can continue to record these panel discussions, for ten years from now they will constitute a rich and fascinating map of changing attitudes and expectations. In fact, just comparing last year’s panel to this year’s is already a fascinating exercise.

Audio note: We had four panelists this year, and in hindsight (hind-listening?) it’s obvious I should have used multiple microphones. You’ll hear an awful lot of volume adjustments in the course of this recording. I hope the result is at least listenable. My thanks to Andy Rush for engineering assistance in the location recording. Special thanks to the four students who participated. This year we had a senior, a junior, a sophomore, and a freshman, so we had an interesting generational spread within the panel, too.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (21.6MB)

I finished Robert Hughes’ stirring memoir, Things I Didn’t Know, a few weeks ago. I’ve been wanting to note this passage here for some time.

The best thing fishing taught me, I think, was how to be alone. Without this ability no writer can really survive or work, and there is a strong relationship between the activity of the fisherman, letting his line down into unknown depths in the hope of catching an unseen prey (which may be worth keeping, or may not) and that of a writer trolling his memory and reflections for unexpected jabs and jerks of association. O beata solitudo–o sola beatudo! Enforced solitude, as in solitary confinement, is a terrible and disorienting punishment, but freely chosen solitude is an immense blessing. To be out of the rattle and clang of quotidian life, to be away from the garbage of other people’s amusements and the overflow of their unwanted subjectivities, is the essential escape. Solitude is, beyond question, one of the world’s great gifts and an indispensable aid to creativity, no matter what level that creation may be hatched at. Our culture puts enormous emphasis on “socialization,” on the supposedly supreme virtues of establishing close relations with others: the psychologically “successful” person is less an individual than a citizen, linked by a hundred cords and filaments to his or her fellow-humans and discovering fulfillment in relations with others.This belief becomes coercive, and in many cases tyrannous and even morbid, in a society like the United States, with its accursed, anodyne cults of togetherness. But perhaps as the psychiatrist Anthony Storr pointed out, solitude may be a greater and more benign motor of creativity in adult life than any number of family relations, love affairs, group identifications, or friendships. We are continually beleaguered by the promise of what is in fact a false life, based on unnecessary reactions to external stimuli. Inside every writer, to paraphrase the well-worn mot of Cyril Connolly, an only child is wildly signaling to be let out. “No man will ever unfold the capacities of his own intellect,” wrote Thomas De Quincey, “who does not at least checker his life with solitude.”

A few quick thoughts:

1. I believe at least some of my faculty colleagues resist their online lives, even at the cost of access to very compelling resources, because they sense a reduction in solitude. I do not myself believe that life online necessarily reduces solitude, but to be fair, most of the talk I hear and myself propogate about the virtues of life online have to do with the kind of togetherness Hughes rightly cautions us about. Bear me witness, my far-flung friends and collaborators: I crave the network, the “thinking-together,” what Vickie Suter called the “thought-jam band.” Yet I am a writer, too, and I crave my solitude as well, and recognize it as a garden that must be tended. With walls, though easily crossed and connected, for walls give shape to the tending.

2. I have expanded a little on my thoughts above in this comment on Jon Udell’s recent blog post on “The essence of openness“:

Collaboration exists at the boundary between self and other, between tribes (what’s a family but a small tribe?), and depends on both the boundary and the crossing to work. In my view, if we talk about erasing boundaries, we risk erasing selfhood and thus one element of true collaboration. Instead, we should talk about boundaries and crossings in the same breath, think them in the same thought. Maybe something like the idea of “semi-permeable” is what I’m trying to get at here.

Milton is all over this idea in “Paradise Lost.”

3. I want my students to thrive together and alone. These are synergistic, symbiotic skills.

4. Hughes’ word “anodyne” gives me pause.

5. In a peculiar way that I’m not sure I fully understand yet, blogging seems to give me both solitude and togetherness. As, presumably, writing and publishing do for Hughes, on whom the gentle ironies of mass publication of his thoughts on solitude are surely not lost.