I need to get caught up here.

Reading:
Dream Boogie: The Triumph of Sam Cooke. No one does a music biography as well as Peter Guralnick, and this is a wonderful follow-up to the acclaimed two-volume Elvis biography. So far Sam’s still with the Soul Stirrers, but he’s watching Little Richard burn up the charts with “Tutti Frutti” and wondering if he should put different words to his own gospel songs as well. Fascinating and compulsively readable.

Just before sleep last night, I read and fell in love with David Denby’s piece in the latest New Yorker on James Agee. Two immediate thoughts here. One is that I would love to write like James Agee (I hear my toy-piano version of his Steinway in my head as I write), and I must get the new Library of America collection of his writing right away. The other is that Denby writes the essay like a man possessed, and I wish he wrote more like that in his movie reviewing. The reviews often strike me as tepid, superficial, and overly moralizing, but this essay on Agee, like Denby’s writing about Columbia U. in his piece on Edward Tayler many years ago, is something else altogether.

Viewing: Last night I finished Richard Linklater’s Waking Life. My Donne students, and my colleague Eric, had been after me for weeks to watch this movie. I certainly understand why. I had trouble falling asleep because it thronged my head with thoughts. I was hoping for a lucid dream last night as the perfect complement to the movie, but it didn’t happen. Come to think of it, I haven’t had a lucid dream for years, though they were quite common when I was a kid.

Listening:
Morten Lauridsen‘s setting of “O Magnum Mysterium” leaves me breathless, rapt.
I treated myself to “Astronomy Domine” and “Comfortably Numb” before bedtime. It occurs to me I’ve probably undervalued The Wall and should finally break down and buy a copy. At the time of its release, it was very hard to hear beyond the notoriety and celebrity. Now that “Jessie’s Girl” and Hi Infidelity aren’t echoing in my head, I can hear the Floyd’s work more clearly.
I wish I could find something else with Ferdinand Povel besides MF Horn 4 & 5: Maynard Ferguson Live at Jimmy’s. FP’s work on “I’m Getting Sentimental Over You” (one of my very favorite jazz standards) is spine-tingling. I see from this page where he went from there, but tracking it down will be another order, and a tall one. Maybe it’s time to learn Dutch. Thankfully, the fan page very generously shares a lovely “These Foolish Things” mp3 with us.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (3.0MB)

Steve Greenlaw’s finally publishing his fall 2005 series of blog entries on teaching, particularly the experiments he was running in his Economics classes. And what a wonderful thing they are.

Start here, then read all of them. And then join me in wanting more.

Thanks, Steve.

Normally I’d just note this in a del.icio.us sidebar feed, but under the circumstances I’ll say a howdy and thanks to Michelle for the link to Net Vibes, an AJAX-enabled portal that has drag-and-drop functionality. Strange, even uncanny. Break time’s over, though: back to the grading.

A power outage earlier this week has hit del.icio.us very hard. They had restored partial service as of December 14, but had to take the entire site down again last night because of continued problems.

It’s a Web 2.0 moment, when the sparkling idea of grassroots utilities reveals some of its more problematic facets. The comments on both pages, especially on the “continued hiccups” page, are very interesting in this regard. What’s different, of course, is that there’s actually a place for these comments to collect and reveal what’s typically hidden (or only partially revealed) every time a utility goes down. There’s everything here from hostility and contempt to empathy and encouragement. I understand the entire spectrum of response. I’m annoyed that I have to hack my blog template to remove the del.icio.us feed so that it won’t hang the blog itself. I’m anxious to think that my accumulated bookmarks, tags, comments, etc. may be gone, for a little while or perhaps for good. As an IT administrator, I’m sympathetic to what I know must be frantic and hair-pulling times at del.icio.us, and I wish them well as they try to manage the PR problems at the same time that they’re working to get this giant back on its feet.

Most of all, I’m hoping that the idea of grassroots utilities remains viable. The alternative is familiar and depressing, as big capital creates an infrastructure that sets all the telecommunications rules we live by. Can grassroots utilities also make the trains run on time?

UPDATE: Looks like the data is (are?) safe:

Still waiting for the last remaining index to build. No data has been lost — we just need to fix the tables so the databases can find things quickly. This appears to be largely due to a RAID failure after our power outage earlier in the week – one of the indexes became corrupted and crashed the master database; for some reason the slaves replicated bad data from the master and then ended up crashing infinitely.

Another nice departure from traditional utilities: frequent updates with information that’s more useful than “your call is important to us.” Good luck del.icio.us.

I’m behind in blogging and reading, and not likely to catch up until my grades are in and the term is put to pasture. But Andy sent around a note to our division about Alan “Cog Dog” Levine’s latest post on wikis, and asked us not to miss the ensuing comments either. No time to write about it just now, but I’ve been mulling all this over (along with the whole “connectivism” content vs. node question) pretty fiercely lately, and the most recent bit of ferocity in my achin’ muller is this fascinating and provocative IT Conversations piece from James Surowieki, author of The Wisdom of Crowds.

Highly, even urgently recommended.

More on this anon.

No shocking news there. Just another focused, inspiring, generous, and generative blog from Jon Udell.

For people more interested in building civilization than in pushing flavor-of-the-month sensationalism, there’s just no better place to start, or end up, than Jon Udell.

Thanks, Jon.

Konrad Glogowski has written one of the best blog entries on the nature and value of online communities that I have read recently. Maybe ever. It begins with a direct report from a community of practice, and builds to a quotation from Walter Ong that very precisely and movingly expresses the potential for technology to augment human experience and creation. Ong’s words name that haptic potential in which cognition reaches out to incorporate (the word is interesting in this context) the tool into the purposefulness and joy of our shared existence. And Konrad contextualizes, indeed frames, that quotation with breathtaking skill and a heart big enough for two chests.

Thanks, Konrad.

In my interstitial time (thanks for the nomenclature, D’Arcy) I’ve been trying to follow as much of the current Wikipedia controversy as I can. It’s quite a flap. The issues are urgent, but the treatment of them is predictable. Even the truly disturbing aspects of the case are so coated in journalistic sensationalism that it’s hard to see the core truths being debated. After reading the UPI account of Wikipedia’s “at least 1,000 articles” (it’s more like 800,000 and counting) I’m reminded that reasoned authority, never in great supply, is a rara avis indeed these days, even (especially?) in the so-called mainstream media. Unfortunately, no one who knows better can reach into that UPI account and correct it. No, it’s not a libelous falsehood about a public figure, but if it were there’d be no correcting it except by the authority who let the mistake get in there in the first place.

I don’t by any means want to minimize the potential for harm in an online resource like Wikipedia. I don’t want to maximize it either, though the current media coverage I’m seeing online doesn’t encourage much careful reflection. (Can’t say I expected it to.) I’ll simply note that Wikipedia is in many respects, as Alan Levine notes, a mirror. Or perhaps it’s a time-lapse photograph of civilization itself. That sounds grand, even grandiose, but had I world enough and time I’d at least make the argument.

Until that day, it’s interesting to consider that the antiWikipedia movement includes both those who believe it’s dangerously anarchic and those who believe it’s one vast elitist conspiracy.

In a word, Wikipedia is the latest effort in the new leftist attempt to consolidate representative knowledge for the masses. It represents the migration of the old left into the field of cyber-information. Now programmers get to play at cyber-revolutions…

In a word, amazing.

Now, more than ever, we need clear thinking, rigorous reasoning, about authority: its nature, purpose, and relation to justice and democracy. Teachers are of course vital researchers in this area, or should be. We conserve authority. We interrogate authority. We create authority. And we urge and encourage those capacities in our classrooms every time we convene a class.

I think we must have faith in reason to make any headway in this endeavor. Turtles all the way down just won’t work, even as a pragmatic approach. But of course that’s only one point of view. Reasoned, but probably not neutral.

EDIT: I’ve blogged several times about Wikipedia. Two particular entries may be of interest in this current controversy. One is on Wikipedia’s plan to “freeze” certain articles once their content has become stable and uncontroversial. Another is a more philosophical jotting on what assumptions underlie all of our conceptualizations of the nature and meaning of the quest for knowledge, with Wikipedia as merely one example.

This word just in (sorry) from the New Oxford American Dictionary, who seem to have made the first such annoucement this year. Last year it was Merriam-Webster Online who got all the press for picking “blog” as their 2004 Word of the Year.

This year’s story is the especially poignant tale of a little portmanteau word that attracted some notice from the NOAD folks in 2004, but wasn’t quite ready to be thrust into the harsh lexicographical glare radiating from flat-panel monitors around the world. Yet like the little engine that could, “podcast” thought it could until it knew it could, and 2005 saw its triumph over such intimidating contenders as “IED” (improvised explosive device), “squick” (you could look it up), and “persistent vegetative state.” First runner up was “bird flu,” and the second runner up award went to “rootkit,” which is of course what “Dance to the Malware” Sony/BMG will be voguing to for some time to come.

Thanks to Anand for the heads-up on this story.

It’s an honor, and a delightful surprise, to have made the shortlist for this year’s Edublog Awards. I didn’t know nominations were being solicited; if I had, I would have sent over a list of my favorites. I didn’t know the shortlist had been announced until I saw the Technorati link. Voting started yesterday, but I just now saw the page for the first time. So much ignorance on my part! And yet someone was gracious enough to nominate Gardner Writes for the shortlist.

My thanks to that someone, or perhaps someones. My thanks also to Josie Fraser and all the folks who’re working on this project. I’m not too much on popularity contests, but in this case the more I think about it the more I’m convinced that it’s a worthy way to draw attention to worthy writers (even if I am in the bunch). For me it’s already been of great value: simply checking out my fellow nominees has introduced me to many splendid sites I had not seen before. More folks to add to my suite of trusted and inspiring experts … what’s not to like about that?

And those shortlist sites I have seen before? Humbling, and as with the sites that were new to me, high standards to aspire to.