Very, very behind in my blogging. I’d love to say I’m a slow blogger a la Barbara Ganley, particularly given her extraordinary results to show for it (please, read and savor this post as soon as you can), but for me, alas, it’s either fast blogging or no blogging at all. Too many internal filters, I suppose, and I can’t give them time to get their tentacles (yes, my filters have tentacles–don’t yours?) wrapped too tightly.

So last week’s news, today. Last Wednesday and Thursday, UMW was honored to have a young South African author and filmmaker on our campus, Nokuthula Mazibuko. Wednesday she showed her recent documentary on the mid-70’s Soweto uprising, The Spirit of No Surrender. Thursday she read from her new novella, Spring Offensive. The latter is available as a free download from her website, http://www.thulacreative.co.za. Interestingly, Nokuthula has published this novella under a Creative Commons license that allows derivative works. She invites others to tell their stories as well.

I found her visit, indeed her very presence, stirring in ways that are difficult for me to describe. There was an openness along with a tremendous sophistication, a sense of wonder along with a sense of the weight and importance of history. Her laughter sounded like bells. She sang for us as part of the reading. She told us stories of great loss and misery, but in a way that seemed to make anger or outrage, however necessary and appropriate, a lesser response. The greater response, and the theme she returned to again and again, was the basic human desire to be free.

In one of our conversations, Nokuthula told me she recognized her agenda (her word) of unity, trust, and community-building emphasized similarities instead of differences, and was thus controversial in some sectors of the conversation, here and in her native land. She is a very mature thinker and does not offer simple panaceas or naive idealism. But she does, very stubbornly and almost matter-of-factly (as Serena notes extremely well–thank you), insist on idealism, hope, and connectedness. She insists on our common humanity. To experience her firm and clear-eyed hope in the midst of such fraught and uncertain times as we live in was tremendously inspiring to me. In fact, it took my breath away. She made me feel welcome. But I’m in my home territory, you say. True enough, and yet I never felt more welcome here, as myself, than I did in her presence. Something to mull over, that.

I will follow this young artist’s work with keen interest. Thank you, Nokuthula, for sharing your work and world with us.

God bless the person who thought up trackbacks/pingbacks. Dave Ferguson at Dave’s Whiteboard just linked in, and of course I went over to click around. That’s how how I found this gem, new to me:

To paraphrase Kurt Vonnegut, odd topics that catch your interest are dancing lessons from God.

That explains it.

Bryan’s got some fascinating thoughts on what he’s calling Third Life, which he imagines as potentially a set of interoperable virtual worlds that would be a kind of 3D, persistent, avatar-driven, immersive Web 2.0 (a crude reduction, but this is a draft for me too). There’s a lot to chew on here, but before I lose the moment I want to think about two of Bryan’s ideas.

One is that Third Life should have different entries for different people.

There should be different entrance points for new people with varying backgrounds and interests: the educators’ gate, the gamer portal, the adult club entrance.

On the surface, this is an attractive idea, particularly given the grotesqueries of Orientation Island and the subsequent Welcome Center in Second Life, but I wonder about the loss of richness when there are no necessary points of shared experience. For example, all ed folks in Second Life, and many outside of education, love to moan about the Welcome Center, and I’d say that this shared experience is nontrivial. (Indeed, in the wake of Chris Dede’s talk at ELI 2007, I’m wondering if we can ever with confidence call any moment of shared experience trivial, especially when it comes to learning.) I’m also uneasy for reasons I can’t quite pin down about the idea of an adult club entrance for some new people. Would we build a dedicated Internet porn client for those folks who just want to cut to the chase without having to use a browser that might, alas, access the news as well as porn? The analogy’s not strong, but perhaps it clarifies things for me a bit.

The second is a genuinely provocative question that I’m already enjoying: what are the offline components of (the experience of) persistent virtual worlds? I think our usual cognitive patterns fall into a rhythm of engagement in the sense-stream and a disengagement in which, in some respects, we take ourselves offline. Paradoxically, “offline” in our waking world suggests contemplation and cognitive virtualization (whoops, just went to Bermuda for a moment there, as Steve Martin used to joke during his stand-up routine), while “online” means engaging with sensory input and conversation and so on, whereas these terms might well have opposite meanings inside a virtual world. That interesting mirror-state or alienation effect is something I’ve tried to work through in my ideas of metaphor and play within virtual worlds.

If we want to counter the unhappy outcome of turning ourselves into brains in vats, at least those of us who can afford to do that because we live in a prosperous society (rapaciously so, I’m ashamed to say), it will be vital that we work out the relationship of offline and online, of virtual and real, in all their manifestations. I think that virtual worlds, particularly in the metaview that Bryan’s ideas about Third Life suggest, can offer us a parable or symbol or allegory of our very cognitive existence in the physical world, and may enable more complex conceptual understandings of what that existence means–and what we might effect thereby. A wiki world that enables richer imaginings, and thus better solutions. An incubator world, a sandbox, a bootstrapping augmentation laboratory.

Not many surprises there, I suppose. It is interesting, though, to see how high a “Beth” score I received–nearly as high as my “Amy.” As a friend of mine likes to say, “muse, reader.”

Many thanks to B&B for the link to the quiz. Deeply fun.

I just logged on to Second Life, mostly to see if a new client was ready for download (they’re the kings of iterative development at Linden Labs), when I saw this “tip” appear as the stream filled the cache:

“Ever get stuck in an embarrassing dance loop?”

Well, yes, though most of my dates were pretty forgiving, if I recall correctly. Now, of course, I just click on “Tools” and “Stop All Animations.”

Life is so much simpler in its Second iteration.

Jim “Bava Tuesdays” Groom must have his police scanner on, for he spotted my upgrade to WordPress 2.1 mere minutes after I’d finished. Uncanny fellow.

All looks fine so far. Whatever they did with the SQL back end worked like a charm: everything is much faster and more responsive now. I did have some trouble getting the tabbed editor to show up. I went to the WP forum and found several threads detailing this problem, with plenty of suggestions to try. In my case, it turns out that the Plain Text Paste plug-in (another gift from J. Groom) broke the new feature. Thankfully, the PTP author has already upgraded the plug-in to be compatible with WP 2.1. Open source responsiveness at its finest.

Always a happy day when a WP upgrade goes well. Kudos to the entire WordPress team for the extraordinary work they continue to do.

Welcome new functionality for the virtual camera in Second Life: ALT-CTL now allows the camera to crane-up/tilt-down and crane-down/tilt-up. Much more interesting angles are now possible.

Sometimes I wonder: what would it be like if I blogged almost everything?

Today, then, I’d blog about a Milton seminar class in which I did most of the talking and ended rather dispirited, only to find via the class syllabus wiki that one very attentive student had not only taken it all in but transformed it into a leap forward in her own thinking by making a sharp, essential connection with another class she’s taking. (Some say that can’t happen when a teacher did most of the talking–but I’m not sure I believe that anymore, myself.) I’d blog about the Introduction to Literary Studies class that considered Judith Butler’s arguments in “Gender Trouble” about gender and sex as a Saussurean play of signs, and how they agreed and protested and fumed and laughed and gritted their teeth, and began talking to each other very intensely about how the very idea of meaning becomes tenuous in all sorts of ways. I’d blog about the Larissa Macfarquar (sp?) piece in the New Yorker about the couple who have tried to unite philosophy and neuroscience, and how I want to share that article with those students to keep ’em thinking. I’d blog about the detailed conversation I had this afternoon with a colleague who wanted to know what I knew about Hopkins and sprung rhythm, and to talk about her research on a contemporary poet who may have been working the same vein. I’d blog about fifteen other things rattling around in my head in addition to the music I hear almost constantly in there as well. I’d leave out many things, but I’d at least capture all the interesting stuff (interesting to me) in all its variety; I’d capture my “input” fascinations that ramp up so powerfully at times, especially if the times are propitious….

What would it be like to pour it all forth and hold back nothing? Not to lay bare one’s private life–I’m not terribly interested in that–but to lay bare one’s internal del.icio.us, to serve up one’s own cognitive gumbo in all its stew and savor.

I wonder.

Here’s a reading I did a couple of weeks ago for UMW’s “Thursday Poems” series. The lyrics are by Robert Herrick. You may recognize some of them. I felt rusty and not quite all the way on my game, but there may be some moments to enjoy here. I hope so.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (13.7MB)

My son Ian just emailed me a link to an astounding video: a young man performing “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” on a ukelele. The informal video is set in New York’s Central Park, right next to Strawberry Fields. George loved ukeleles, and he also loved John, so everything about this performance feels very aligned and unusually resonant. (That sounds so trite, yet I don’t know how else to describe it.)

As I prepare for a talk on mobile learning I’m delivering at Longwood University on Thursday, weather permitting, I’m struck by how mobility enables something soul deep about this video. The mobile camera, the mobile instrument, the mobile person, and the song that has traveled through time and space to that performance, and then again to my computer today: all so I could hear birdsong combine with plaintive, bell-like tones from an instrument played with love, commitment, and real virtuosity. And my son shared this thing with me.

Astonishing.

At moments like this, I don’t fear that I’m addicted to the Internet. I fear I am addicted to the world, and to those fellow travelers who look straight into a machine of glass, plastic, and metal and, whether or not we ever meet, see me on the other side.

Martha Burtis at The Fish Wrapper via Ken Smith points to the Mojiti version of Michael Wesch’s two-week-old-already-famous video on Web 2.0. Mojiti was new to me. Like Martha, I find the Mojiti version very stirring. And I’m already scheming how to use this new site in my teaching.

But before I get to that, I need to say something about the spot sets at Mojiti. It’s extremely cool (I disagree with Ken that “cool” marks disengagement) to have the VH-1 popups all over the place. Those “popups” are what Mojiti calls “spot sets.” They’re the video equivalent of Flickr annotations on the image itself, but with the effect heightened because of the temporal dimension, and because the comment elements themselves can move. The comments truly become part of the video. But it’s even cooler that one can have both collective spot sets and individual spot sets. Ken discusses that dynamic here. Interestingly, the pull of individual authorship overtook Ken shortly after he posted, when he (I’m pretty certain it’s Ken) created his own spot set to illustrate his idea about online life and embodiment.

I have a lot of thoughts running through my mind about these spot sets. The concept is pretty simple. The complexity comes from the way the Mojiti creators have imagined the sharing. One can hide spot sets, for example, but still share the permalink (pointing not only to the video but to the video-plus-spot-set-commentary), which means that if one needed to restrict access to certain spot sets, one could–and that means that some teachers who are (understandably) reluctant to have all their classes’ work exposed to the whole world can nevertheless benefit from these tools. And for that matter, it’s great that spot sets have their own permalinks, allowing for precise location and citation.

Something about the flow of all this commentary fascinates me deeply. But there’s more. Something about the way these comments layer themselves into the original experience without erasing it (and after all, they can be turned off), and the way they can exist both collectively and individually, seems to me to reveal something hidden in plain sight. We write together because we are not each other, and because we are together. I don’t think any of this activity complicates our ideas of authorship. I think it does complicate some of the postmodernist assumptions about authorship by showing that the liminal states, and the way definitions get tricky near the borders, are not the only objects of interest. They may not even be the most interesting objects, given the energy and creativity released by both collective and individual commenting, especially when those distinctions are not only preserved but heightened in an environment that at every opportunity points to both as important and valuable.

CODA:

I’m very frustrated at this point, because I want to cite a passage from Amadeus. Unfortunately, two moves within six months have put many of my books in boxes, so a quick scan of the shelves in my temporary office has only confirmed my suspicion that I don’t have the play to hand. Because I live so much of my life online, “in the cloud,” I feel an irrational surge of annoyance that the text of Schaffer’s play is not available to me now, for immediate perusal and quotation, in an e-form I can get to right away. This is why I want a digital library. Not to replace the book, but to make these voices, these things I read and remember, instantly available for my orchestration and repurposing. But since Schaffer’s text is not available, this moment will pass, and a seed–for you, perhaps, or perhaps for me–will not be sown. To be surrounded by sense is the goal, and that surrounding must have its building materials ready to hand when the Muse reveals a blurred but compelling blueprint.

And what was the passage I wanted? The one in which Mozart talks about hearing voices sing together in opera, and how that uni-versity preserved each voice and each separate line, even as it enabled a synergy which no single voice could find on its own. If someone out there has the passage, I’d appreciate a bit of assistance. If not, I know: that’s what libraries are for. And thank goodness for them.