I’ve just upgraded from WP 1.5.2 to WP 2.0.4. About time. Still some tweaking to do, but a brand-new interface and some fun new functionality.

Last week Kevin Creamer, Liaison Coordinator for the University of Richmond’s Center for Teaching, Learning, and Technology, sat me down for a quick chat about information technologies in education. As you’ll hear in this podcast, Kevin was interested in some of the larger thinking behind my enthusiasm for particular technologies such as blogs and wikis. His questions afforded me some room to roam, and I also tried to give some shout-outs to a couple of folks who’ve helped me think about these topics over the years.

Twenty-five minutes of mulling, then, and if any of it keeps the conversation going, I’ll be happy. You can listen to the podcast here, or right-click/click-and-hold to download it. Gardner Writes is also on iTunes in the podcast directory. Someday soon I’ll upgrade my WP install here and put in PodPress (or equivalent). Soon.

More podcasts on the way: I need to finish up the Donne A Day series with the remainder of my students’ work (I’m woefully behind, and my apologies to them), and then begin another series of podcasts of Renaissance literature in English. Right now I’m trying to decide whether to read a series of essays by Montaigne (the Florio translation) or Bacon. If you have strong feelings either way, let me know.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (11.0MB)

Some folks resist the “2.0” tag (or heuristic, as I’ve started to argue), for good reason. That said, great resources continue to emerge from Tim O’Reilly’s meme. Case in point: a terrific podcast on Identity 2.0 from IT Conversations. I wish the visuals were available. To judge from the crowd’s reaction, they must have been a hoot.

Listening to the podcast, I’m struck by how close to a kind of “applied philosophy” these questions are. The question of identity–its nature, extension into the world of alterity, performative vs. essential aspects, and so forth–is ongoing, difficult, and engages many areas of human inquiry, from epistemology to business to law to human rights. How interesting it would be to explore a multidisciplinary combination of communications/rhetoric/philosophy/social science/computer science/add-your-discipline-here courses that could explore such questions. High-speed networked computing, online life, social computing: it’s all civilization, scaled-up and sped-up with a long tail and a slew of acceleration effects, and higher ed’s traditional means of studying, preserving, and innovating within civilization should, with some imagination, be able to get at these vital concerns with exhilarating research and conversation. Most importantly, the new context for these concerns could propel us past some stale parts of the conversation and into fresh areas that could perhaps benefit more sectors of society.

Many institutions already elicit such research and conversation, of course. My question: how long before we find a way to see what’s hidden in plain sight: that such research and conversation should be at the heart of a liberal arts education, indeed that they are another way of thinking about the entire tradition of inquiry within the liberal arts?

Funny how the small moments stick with you.

At one of the SAC sessions yesterday, a speaker reminded us that “hope is not a strategy.” It’s a good reminder that points to the need for careful planning and deliberate choices. I’ve never seen a pie in the sky myself (where did that image come from, I wonder), but I’m pretty confident that effective leaders should not be shading their eyes and scanning the heavens for dessert.

And yet.

Later in the day, a group considered the promise of an emerging technology. That promise seems enormous, but there are many rivers to cross to get to fulfilment. As we wrestled with the need for demonstrable functionality now, one participant spoke up and said, “hope may not be a strategy, but grounded belief is.” To which another person replied, “yes, and all strategy is grounded belief.”

Amen to that.

Reasonably charming setting.

Thus ends day two of my first Seminar in Academic Computing. There’s an interesting stillness to this conference. The numbers are relatively small, and the sessions are intense but often quite informal. It really does feel like a seminar. I even had homework, of sorts: yesterday I presented on Net Gen Learners with two very distinguished panelists, Joel Hartman and Chuck Dziuban of the University of Central Florida. Plenty of good energy in the room, and some very thoughtful Q&A. It didn’t hurt that the day began with a plenary address by Vint Cerf, Internet Evangelist for Google. I got a double dose of Vint yesterday: once in the very fine and astonishingly deep plenary, and then again late in the evening as I continued my reading in Mitchell Waldrop’s epochal The Dream Machine: J.C.R. Licklider and the Revolution that Made Computing Personal. (Thanks to Ernie for recommending this book to me. It’s extraordinary.) Vint’s one of what we may remember as the Greatest IT Generation, those who took a dream and made it real through brilliance, perseverance, and stubborn naivete. To hear Vint continue to hold forth on everything from the limits of TCP/IP to ICANN to his plans for the interplanetary network was a great honor and a joy.

After my panel, I could relax a bit more and take in the surroundings, both topographically and intellectually. I’ve been to deep and informative sessions on Net Neutrality (support it!), Sakai, Directors’ insomina (and what to do about it), and grants from the Mellon Foundation. I’ve learned a ton in mealtime conversations, and deepened my relationship with some dear colleagues (you know who you are). I continue to be amazed by how smart, creative, playful, and committed my IT colleagues are.

I’m also amazed by how many English majors end up in this space, including Randy Bass from Georgetown, who delivered this morning’s plenary on “Recognizing the Visible Evidence of Invisible Learning.” I blush to admit I hadn’t known much, if anything about Randy’s work before this seminar. My loss. Randy’s hard at work in many areas, including the Visible Knowledge Project, and his address today resonated very deeply with me on many levels. I’ll be making up for lost time with Randy’s work in the weeks ahead.

After all the sessions this evening, I went into Aspen with a couple of superb colleagues, friends, and mentors. More great conversation ensued. Setting, food, drink, friendship, and a passionate commitment to real school. One could do far worse.

I am grateful.

I’ve been commuting to the University of Richmond since Monday, when I started my new job as Director of Teaching, Learning and Technology. Each day in the Silver Surfer (my new Honda) I’ve been choosing my music carefully, listening closely for “winding chains of harmony” that can tune me for my new role in a new place. Plucked, bowed, hammered, or humming with sympathetic vibrations, taut or slack, the strings need to sound together, so something beautiful can emerge. Once the tuning is right, my job is easy: focus, amplify, and sustain that beauty.

In a word, my job is to resonate, and to resonate I must be tuned.

Monday I pulled out of my Fredericksburg driveway to Who’s Next. “Baba O’ Riley” was what I needed to get to I-95 South, but “Bargain” prayed for me and tuned what lay “too deep for tears.”

Tuesday I went even deeper, and departed to the strains of the live version of Tommy as realized on disc two of the deluxe edition of Live at Leeds. My heart grew strong with the first few bars of the “Overture,” and found its ascent during “Amazing Journey.”

Wednesday the tuning was more enigmatic. (How lovely to have a little breathing room for an enigma at last.) Perhaps Aja will not seem enigmatic to some readers. I urge them to listen again. There are mysterious narratives implicit in each song on this glossy album, some of them grim, but almost none of them desperate (in contrast to a couple of real downers on The Royal Scam, for instance). Even “Home At Last” seemed oddly determined to me as I powered down Interstate 95. Or was that determination mine?

Today’s tuning drives me back here, to a place silent too long. As you might guess from the title of the post, the Silver Surfer and I shook to Rubber Soul. The shaking kept me steady. And when “In My Life” sounded, I knew how to blog today.

Last week I ended twelve years of employment at the University of Mary Washington, where I joined the Department of English, Linguistics, and Speech in the fall of 1994. I’ve lost count of how many students I taught there. A back-of-napkin tally might go like this: an average of 100 a term for 24 terms equals 2400, not counting summer school, but probably a little too generous because I taught many students more than once. The number of colleagues I worked with is much smaller, of course, but even there it’s in the hundreds, and over time I got to know most of them. So last week there was a tremendous scaling problem for me. How could I possibly say goodbye even to a fraction of the people I had come to love? More to the point, how could I do any justice to the deep gratitude I feel for them, students and colleagues alike?

I couldn’t, of course–not that I could stop trying, either.

What I could do, I did. I resolved to take the full measure of their farewell, which is to say I resolved to take the full measure of the community we had created together. There are no words to describe how full to overflowing that measure was. Births, weddings, funerals, and leave-takings all release abundance. I was unprepared, though, for the scale of this abundance. Though I’m still grieving over the parting, the biggest lump in my throat comes when I remember, not the goodbyes, but the looks of delight and maybe even surprise on so many faces as we recognized our abundance together.

Inadequate words, but they’ll have to do. The details, the many narratives woven and shared in that astonishing week, are beyond me, where they should be, so I may follow.

Now I come to a new place, a new job, new colleagues, new students. Yet not entirely new, for I began my full-time teaching career in Ryland Hall right here at the University of Richmond. I can walk to that first office in five minutes, even faster if I’m in a hurry. Several dear colleagues from those days are still here. I’ve already gotten email from a student I taught during that time, a student who now works in the UR Alumni Office. I’ve also heard from an especially dear former student from UMW who’s teaching in the UR School of Continuing Studies. And the connections continue to multiply. No doubt living a certain number of years makes those connections more frequent and likely for anyone, but my apophenia also kicks in and I have the uncanny sense of pattern, of an upwardly-spiralling return.

Find, tune, resonate. There’s new abundance here, new colleagues to know and treasure, golden moments hidden in plain sight to discover and share. “Fresh woods, and pastures new,” and I am nothing if not an uncouth swain. Yet I know something of what’s possible, and delight to imagine what I’ll learn from this new community.

In my life, I’ve loved you all.

I began this blog on one topic and found it morphing as soon as I began to write. The real focus didn’t emerge until the end.

Tama’s eLearning Blog notes a Melbourne appearance by James Wilkinson, Director of the Derek Bok Center for Teaching and Learning at Harvard. Tama’s pulled a fine quote and links to the remainder of the address, available both as a Word file and as an audio recording. (Three cheers for the document, four cheers for the audio.) My thanks to Tama for the link, and his work and support generally.

Wilkinson’s metaphor argues that specialized education builds high on a narrow base, like a obelisk, while generalized education builds less high on a broad base that enables rebuilding when necessary without tearing the whole structure down. The metaphor strikes me as intriguing but limited, though I’ll obviously need to listen to or read the whole thing to understand what Wilkinson’s getting at. That he’s getting at something of great importance in the way we conceptualize higher education, however, is undeniable, and I’ll look forward to mulling over his address. UPDATE: five cheers for audio, as I got to listen to half the talk on the way to work today. So far it’s a fascinating and helpful overview of the history of the idea of curriculum. NB: the idea of “majors” was invented as way of bringing coherence to a mass of free electives. But I digress (if one can say that in an unusually digressive blog post).

One larger point: the educational blogosphere is particularly valuable to me for the way it alerts me (and others) to contributions like Wilkinson’s–and more, for Tama’s link brings me to an entire page of Menzies Orations on Higher Education, a resource I didn’t know about. I’m delighted by the discovery. It seems to me that such intense, focused, expert, and highly philosophical discussions of education are more important than ever, given the reach and power of high-speed telecommunications.

Richard Weaver once wrote that any theory of education is a theory of what it means to be human. I agree with him, and I believe that these basic questions should always guide and shape the educations we create for ourselves and for others.

I also applaud the University of Melbourne for making these orations available to a worldwide audience, and look forward to the day when every university has a “speeches and presentations” section (with an even broader title) that makes such rich content face outward, toward the public.

Musings and surfing bring yet another discovery: though it’s not structured as a systematic repository, “Harvard@home” (which I found by clicking on the link at the Derek Bok Center) publishes about sixty videorecordings, primarily of lectures and panel discussions featuring Harvard professors and guest speakers. The site dates back to 2001, and it has an interesting mission: “The mission of Harvard@Home is to provide the Harvard community and the broader public with opportunities for rich in-depth exploration of a wealth of topics through Web-based video programs of the highest calibre.” I’m happy to see there’s an RSS feed, too. Look for even more items of interest in Harvard’s Office of News and Public Affairs, though there’s no RSS feed here.

So: click on some links, and courses of study begin to emerge. It occurs to me that once all these resources are RSS-enabled, it should be possible for some large-scale aggregation to occur that will collect these scattered resources in something more valuable than link-farm directories. Something like a YouTube for higher education. UTube?

So far I’ve been doing all the post-production on these Faculty Academy podcasts. That will change–time to share the joy–but it has been a tremendous learning experience for me, and it puts me in the mind of an assignment for students. A seminar format would be perfect. What if each presentation were recorded to be podcast, but the presentation respondent also did all the post-production and, afterwards, wrote a reflective essay on the presentation? My proposal comes from my sense that careful audio work can make one unusually attentive to the content of the presentation, just as editing a text manuscript can burn all the good, bad, and ugly parts into one’s brain with unusual intensity. Just a wisp of a notion of a possibility, but there it is.

No bad or ugly parts to this podcast, however; in this instance, it really is “all good.” This panel discussion on “What is Web 2.0?” has great contributions from each of the panelists: Jon Udell, Rachel Smith, and Cyprien Lomas. It also features intense, candid, and sometimes even moving contributions from the folks in the audience. I was so in the moment that I couldn’t think about it all as it was happening, but going back and listening again I’m struck by the commitment and richness of the conversation. (There are also some very funny moments.) The focus is where it should be: on what the tools enable, not on the tools themselves. Even better, the discussion builds many bridges between philosophy, pedagogy, research, publication, culture, and innovation. If we could foster and sustain such conversations more frequently and more widely, higher education would come much closer to fulfilling its promise, and its responsibilities. On this day, I could see real school just a little more clearly.

I hope you enjoy the podcast.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (30.3MB)

About fifteen months after Jerry Slezak introduced me to the wonders of Jon Udell, I was standing before a capacity crowd in Combs 139 introducing Jon as the keynote speaker for Faculty Academy 2006. Now, almost two months after that introduction, you too can enjoy this moment. Beginning with Teilhard de Chardin and Doug Engelbart, and ending with a stirring challenge to transform higher education into a truly open, outward-facing public resource, Jon provided every bit of the focus, insight, and vision that mark a truly great keynote address. More than that, however, Jon combined a deep conceptual grasp of the project of higher education with the top-level professional expertise generated by a lifetime of leadership in information technologies. In this address, and in the Web 2.0 panel that followed, you’ll hear the depth and precision I’m describing.

You’ll also hear a world-class imagination at work.

Thanks, Jon. You did us proud.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (37.5MB)

is catching up with back issues of other blogger’s work. Case in point: Lisa Williams’ excellent “Principles of Blogging,” a golden oldie (2003) from her “Learning the Lessons of Nixon” blog. I found her blog by following one of Obadiah’s links, making an educated guess that a Bloggercon IV session he found particularly inspiring would be of interest to me as well, and then following that link to Lisa’s blog, where “principles” was a permanent tab at the top of the page. I read the principles with admiration. I just downloaded the podcast. I’ll listen to it on my way in to work this morning and even if it isn’t my full cup of mp3 I know I’ll learn something valuable, given the principles list I just read.

I’d call this an example of reading for reading. It probably lines up with George Siemens’ whole notion of “connectivism,” except that when I’m reading for reading, it’s not just about being a node on the network or even looking for other nodes on the network. At least, that’s not how it feels. It feels more like hearing a record at someone’s house and then going out the next day and buying it for myself. The network leads me, not to another node, but to another place to be, to reflect, to experience. Connections will radiate from there, of course, but the “there” is not entirely defined (may be defined very little) by what it’s connected to. Although I admire much of what I understand Siemens to be saying, there’s something a little concerning there for me, something that seems to define meaning as endlessly deferred, or located only in the network itself. For example, I cannot agree with his statement that “the network itself becomes the learning.” In my view, the network enables learning and represents learning, but it is not learning itself. Only persons learn. The network points to meaning, and enables us to share meaning, and the network itself is meaningful, but it is not meaning itself. Meaning is prior to the network, and subsequent to it. No Saussurean, I. A link is a portal, a pointer, but not the thing itself. Or so it seems to me this morning.

Back to the principles. I wish I had found them earlier. They’ll be a great resource for my next classroom experiments in blogging. I’m naturally a little skeptical of such lists of principles–how could I not be, having seen Charles Foster Kane’s “Declaration of Principles” and its painful denouement close to one hundred times?–but I’m also an idealist and a good audience for anyone’s attempts at a comprehensive ethics. So I salute Lisa Williams, and thank Obadiah for the link. And I look forward to more.