In an effort to discourage vandalism, Wikipedia will soon begin to freeze pages with “stable contents … whose quality is undisputed.” Jimmy Wales, one of the founders of Wikipedia, revealed his plans in an interview with a German newspaper, reported in turn by Computerworld.

Wales’ comments focus on the issue of credibility, a reasonable concern, although it should be noted that his plans trade one form of credibility for another. As it now stands, Wikipedia’s credibility rests in part on the commitment of those who combat the vandalism, fix the pages, and contribute to its content. That form of credibility, however, relies on some fault tolerance and patience among users. If one encounters vandalism on a page and is annoyed, as Wales fears, Wikipedia’s credibility does suffer for a moment, but the larger credibility of a culture working together to fix broken windows is not necessarily impaired. On the other hand, if the contents of a page are frozen, one will always find the page in a credible state, but that credibility no longer testifies to the larger faithfulness of the culture that supports the experiment.

It’s a classic dilemma. I’m not surprised Wikipedia has at last decided it needs to pull back on its openness. But I am disappointed, especially that it’s come so soon, and I hope that there are no commercial factors driving Wales’ decision.

David Pogue notes that water cooler talk these days is as likely to center on new Web content as on TV shows or movies, and he links to a CNET story on the “top ten goofy Web cultural phenomena.” Looks like my Gilligan’s Island analogy wasn’t so far off after all.

CNET’s list is a strange one in many respects–I’d like to see one compiled by a teenager, and I’m not sure I agree with their implicit definition of “meme”–but the point is worth making nevertheless: more and more of our shared experience comes from the Web, and whether it’s good, bad, or ugly, it’s ours.

So let’s make some good stuff, and teach our students to do the same. They’ll teach us, too, which suits me fine.

My boss Chip German and I have had many enthusiastic conversations about serendipity, and about the possibilities of making a methodology of serendipity by using the speed and connectedness of our online world in constructing teaching and learning spaces and processes.

Today I’m getting my daily dose of inspiration from Jon Udell in a fantastic post called “Blog Biology” (the cell metaphor leads to a slight awkwardness about touching extrusions, but that’s of little moment here), and what do I see but the phrase “manufactured serendipity.” Plato would be proud: memes antedate their transmission, or perhaps this is a distributed meme that a certain cultural moment brings into focus in a new metameme. Not only that, but the phrase in “Blog Biology” is itself a link (thus enacting something of its own meaning–a hyperpoem?) that takes me to a long and early (2002) essay on blogs called “Manufactured Serendipity” on Sam Ruby’s “Intertwingly” blog. Sam writes,

Jon Udell labels this phenomenon, manufactured serendipity. Serendipity is all about making fortunate discoveries by accident. You can’t automate accidental discoveries, but you can manufacture the conditions in which such events are more likely to occur.

As you can see, Sam links “manufactured serendipity” back to an essay by Jon Udell, which is apparently where the phrase began its life, at least in this particular conversation.

What does this cross-linking mean?

I don’t think it’s merely an example of A-list bloggers reinforcing each other’s Technorati profiles and perceived authority by obsessively linking to each other.

I do think it’s an example of a persistent conversation that tries to document both process and product, and thus blurs the distinction usefully.

I think it’s an interesting way of taking the reader through the history of the unfolding drama of an instance of manufactured serendipity that retains what Frost calls “the iron-fresh scent of discovery” in his essay “The Figure a Poem Makes.”

I think it’s a way of demonstrating and empowering a long personal tail (wow–and I thought “contacting extrusions” was a chancy metaphor) by enabling a kind of recursion with one’s own earlier and still vital thoughts, something like the spiraling upward that Jerome Bruner uses as a figure for education. (A long pigtail? Someone call the metaphor police, quick.) One is constantly going back over the same ground, intellectually speaking. Progress comes not from novelty, but from altitude and perspective–and from the trickiest form of altitude, the kind that allows for up-close and far-back perspectives simultaneously. That’s apparently what Bruner means by narrative thinking vs. paradigmatic thinking, though I do not know whether or not he envisions their marriage as I do.

EVDB is The Events and Venues Database, and it’s a Flickr/Furl/Del.icio.us/blogosphere kind of a thing. The idea is that you’ll find more events you’re interested in, and get timely reminders about those events, more consistently and effectively if we’re all keeping track of cool stuff together. I just finished doing post-production audio on an IT Conversations “Opening Move with Scott Mace” interview with Brian Dear, the founder and CEO of EVDB; you should be able to hear that piece sometime in the next few days.

If we’re all keeping track of cool stuff together, perhaps there’ll be less time for doing ugly stuff to each other. I’m reminded of the urban legend (or maybe it’s true) that no crimes were committed in New York City when the Beatles first appeared on the Ed Sullivan Show in 1964.

Can’t hurt to try.

Ernie posts today on a recent and very disturbing NY Times article. The first paragraph of the op-ed Ernie quotes is positively Swiftian in the hilarity and accuracy of its sarcasm, and the rest of the post notes a ray of hope. Don’t miss it!

So much research, so little time: My Odeo Channel (odeo/52b27e7ec884eae7).

Thanks for listening.

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Don’t know why I’m just hearing about this, but today’s NY Times (registration required) reports on a free Second Life service called “Campus: Second Life” that allows educators to build virtual learning spaces that last for a semester. Obviously the desire for persistence will drive users to paid subscriptions, but the trial edition seems fair and a good opportunity, as well as an effective marketing strategy. Thinking about it also makes me think about how important persistence is to real school, even as it embraces serendipity.

Thanks to Will Richardson at Weblogg-ed for linking to another NY Times story that led me to this one. (Department of Compulsive Citation … amazing how grad school can prepare one for the blogosphere, if it doesn’t kill off the impulse to write….)

Fred asks where Lewis makes the distinction between Bards and Actors with regard to the recitation of poetry. As quoting from memory is a hazard with me, I went to find the original source, and discovered that that distinction is between Minstrels and Actors. Close … ah well.

The citation is Lewis’s essay entitled “Metre,” which I have in a volume called Selected Literary Essays (Cambridge UP, 1969). I had hoped to find it reprinted in the recent (2002, paperback) essay collection Literature, Philosophy and Short Stories, but it isn’t, at least not in the British edition (HarperCollins). We really do need a uniform scholarly edition of the complete works–but I digress. Here’s the relevant passage from the Cambridge UP volume:

Unfortunately, even after we have ruled out gross barbarisms, there remain different and defensible ways of reading poetry aloud and they do not coincide with differences of opinion about metre. The two main schools may be called Minstrels and Actors. They differ about the proper relations between the noises they make and something else; that something else being the thing we are looking for, namely metre. Minstrels, singing or intoning, make their utterance conform to this, leaving you to imagine the rhythm and tempo which the words would have in ordinary speech. Actors give you that rhythm and tempo out loud, leaving you to imagine the metre. Yet both may be fully agreed as to what the metre is. They differ by deliberately making, or refusing to make, an imaginary archetype or paradigm actual. This paradigm is metre. Scansion is the conformity, made audible by Minstrels and concealed by Actors, of the individual line to this paradigm. (280)

In ADAD 16 (below) I attempt to move back along that continuum in the direction of the Minstrels.

I may simply claim a scholar’s prerogative and change Lewis’s terms to what my faulty memory originally produced, since the word “minstrels” does not connote the same thing in American English as it does in other English-speaking cultures.

Quite a philosophical romp this time, as well as an unusually long ADAD podcast: upwards of fifteen minutes (you have been warned). The poem takes up most of that time, though I confess I found myself warming to the explication as I went along. You may be the judge of whether that process produces more light than heat.

Responding to a private email from Andrew T. in Monash, I comment on the issue of two ways of reading Donne’s poetry: for the syntax, and for the line. Today’s poem doesn’t force that choice quite so starkly upon the reader as some other of Donne’s lyrics do, but even at that a tension remains between trying to make sense of Donne’s syntax (which weaves, sometimes tortuously, from line to line) and emphasizing Donne’s lines, principally by a) signalling the line’s end and b) giving a little more weight to the end rhymes. Before tonight I had been trying hard to read for syntax, reasoning that Donne was so difficult that reading for the line would make the reading less intelligible. Andrew’s email made me rethink that strategy, and indeed if a short enough lyric presents itself, I may try reading both ways and invite (copious) comment on the results.

C. S. Lewis distinguished two types of poetry recitation: the Bard (edit: no, he calls it “Minstrel”) and the Actor. The Bard, at its bardiest, is something like the heavily incantatory recitation of a W. B. Yeats, as in this excerpt from “The Lake Isle of Innisfree.” The Actor does not treat the poem as an incantation, but is likely to de-emphasize or even ignore the formal aspects of the verse in an effort to get to the sense. As Lewis argues, and as Andrew reminds me, these are extreme positions. Moreover, any lover of poetry (will the guilty parties please raise their hands) must admit that the formal aspects of the verse are inextricably tied to the semantic weight of the verse (or, indeed, vice-versa).

The matter becomes extremely difficult at time in Donne, whose “strong” lines (as they were called by older critics) are at times metrically crabbed or metrically ambiguous. Reading for the form can obscure the sense if one is not careful. Ah, but such care is no doubt part of what Donne sought to encourage by writing as he did. Keep the music, the polemic, the arch self-awareness, and the zealous intensity all in a carefully taut matrix. Something like life.

Martha Burtis once did some very smart and thoughtful (and poetic) work on understanding Donne’s reflexivity by means of the literary theorist and linguistic philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin. I wish she’d put her paper online. It deserves to be read again.

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IBM’s ThinkPad X41 Tablet PC is here, if not quite in the shops, and one early review (at MIT’s Technology Review) is quite positive.

I’ve been a tablet fan for some time now, and I welcome IBM’s entry into the market. I’m also very intrigued by the biometrics built in to this model. Apparently the fingerprint recognition works quite well and obviates the need for a series of logon passwords. (Should give hand-washing a boost as well.)