This is what I’d call interdisciplinary education.

Two days ago, video- and film-maker Michel Gondry (Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind) expressed his mind at a free public lecture at MIT. As a follow-up in the not-too-distant future, he’ll come back as an artist-in-residence “to visit classes and labs, investigate research on sleep and memory, give workshops and share meals with faculty, staff and students.” I hope screenwriter Charlie Kaufman will drop by for a visit.

I’ve been a huge fan of the movie ever since I saw it, for many reasons. I taught a class on the film at St. Catherine’s School in Richmond just a few weeks ago and came away more excited about it than ever. From the perspective of information technologies, the film reveals even more layers of meaning. I’m looking forward to seeing it again.

Is the Massachussetts Institute of Technology the newest liberal arts powerhouse?

(Thanks to Vanessa Bertozzi at MIT’s Technology Review for the initial link.)

Pioneer podcaster (and former MTV VJ) Adam Curry has a new Tablet PC, and he’s describing it and trying it out in his April 3 Daily Source Code podcast. He’s pretty candid about its advantages and disadvantages, but in general quite enthusiastic.

It’s not surprising that Curry’s Mac user fans (Curry’s been a Mac-only operation up to now) flooded the comments section of his weblog with cries of “betrayal!” and “sellout!” To be fair, the sound quality was not up to scratch at the beginning of the podcast, but in my view and experience that’s more the fault of the headset/mic he was using and his inexperience with Windows than with any limitations in the machine or platform. And of course I’m happy to see the Tablet PC get a high-profile notice, despite the fact that a) its debut was not auspicious and b) Curry described the tablet as “kind of gone out of vogue,” though he hastens to add that the new chief of technology at Amazon.com uses one. If Curry’s now using one himself, has the tablet come back in vogue? Where’s William Gibson’s Cayce when you need her to do some cool-hunting?

Dave Winer at Scripting News reports on a new Pew Internet survey indicating six million American adults have listened to podcasts so far. The survey does not include Americans under 18. (I’d bet we could add another million or two of these users to the total.) Along with this interesting news, the Pew report is also valuable as an accessible explanation of podcasting. As way leads on to way, I note the Pew report also cites the podcasting article in Wikipedia, further evidence of that resource’s growth in public stature and perceived value as a reference source.

Scripting News also reports that Peterson’s, the college admissions advising and information service, has added podcast-enabled audio to its pages.

Yesterday I upgraded my Word Press script from 1.2.2 (modded for podcasts/enclosures) to 1.5, which supports podcasts “automagically”: I simply link to a media file and it automatically generates the RSS feed with the enclosure tag. I tested the new installation yesterday, including a new test podcast, and everything seems to be working well, but if any of you have difficulties with the RSS feeds and/or the podcasts, please let me know. I’m going to put up another podcast sometime today, if the creek don’t rise.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (48.5KB)

In a recent L. A. Times column, linguist Deborah Tannen explores gender differences in the context of a) the sciences and b) public discourse. I’m not convinced by all of her argument, some of which relies on reductive West vs. East cliches about modes of thought, and some of which extends that easy and misleading dichotomy into similar gender dichotomies. If men and women are significantly different, and the research at this point indicates they are, I don’t think it’s helpful to say one or the other has a “better way.” (I recognize that those words belong to the editor, not Tannen, but they’re a fair inference, at least in the context of Tannen’s discussion of journalism.) It’s also ironic that her very argument relies to some extent on the “agonistic” discourse she’s trying to characterize and counter. That said, Tannen usefully reminds us that rhetoric includes much more than argument, and that discourse may be thoughtful, deeply analytical, and persuasive without presenting itself as a “fight.” And I’m delighted to see that Walter Ong, whom Tannen calls a “cultural linguist,” is a focal point for these ideas.

EDIT: I was so distracted by the gender lead that it was only a few hours later I realized that there was a much more important point in Tannen’s article, one that didn’t really emerge until the end: one isn’t necessarily complicit just because one isn’t attacking. In fact, once the attack has begun, it’s pretty clear that the possible outcomes are few: defeat, victory, or uneasy truce. Tannen’s conclusions remind us that these are not the only possibilities, and that advocates of inquiry and cooperation are not necessarily just “company men” (or women).

A face-to-face talk with young filmmaker (and former student) Andrew Stone brings cool stuff to light for me today: Metaphilm. I’ve only just glanced at it, but what I’ve seen looks like catnip already. Film lovers, beware. Time to take the phone off the hook (an expression that will be meaningless in five years, if it isn’t already).

I learned many fascinating things today, both on my way to Ferrum College and after my arrival there. I’m at Ferrum to deliver the keynote address for the 2005 Virginia Humanities Conference. My topic is “Tools For Thought: The Humanities In The Age Of Technology,” and my shameless crib from Howard Rheingold’s life-changing work was meant to invoke his spirit, and the spirit of the thinkers he chronicles, as I composed and then delivered my address.

So what did I learn? On the drive down, I learned that Gordon Bell is working on a lifetime personal archive portfolio project that is nothing less than Vannevar Bush’s Memex realized. I learned about Virtual Leader and lessons learned from creating educational simulations. (More to come on that one, since I have found a fellow traveler in the “don’t make the interface transparent” journey I’ve been on for some time.) I learned about NeoNet, a new peer-to-peer technology, and I learned that The Grey Album, probably the most famous mashup to date, was done in two weeks using a cracked Sound Forge Acid download. (Danger Mouse later popped for the legit purchase.) At Ferrum, I learned of Martin Heidegger’s essay on “The Question of Technology,” which I blush beet-red to admit I had not read, but which I am delighted to know about now. Heidegger’s remarks are eerily apt for what I want to say tomorrow, and I’m greatly indebted to Radford University’s Kim Kipling for the citation. The lovely Internet allowed me to become slightly more educated in this area this evening. I will speak under correction tomorrow, as always, but if I understand what Heidegger meant I am more convinced than ever that computer-mediated-communications over the Internet can be profoundly poetic, considered as a emerging whole.

I also learned that the Latin word “copia,” meaning plenty, branches into another meaning by the Middle Ages: transcript. The OED speculates that Latin phrases granting freedom to read or write helped this latter meaning emerge, but I’m haunted this evening by the realization that the God’s plenty provided by our sophisticated tools for thought is etymologically linked to the idea of proliferating exact reproductions.

I apologize for the lack of links in this blog entry. It’s late and I need to sleep, and I’m on my brother’s dialup connection at his apartment in Salem. On the other hand, I grew up in Salem, and I drove by Ferrum regularly on my way to Wake Forest University as an undergraduate there. I love this section of Virginia very deeply and feel both alienated from it and strongly drawn to it, mostly the latter.

Tomorrow right after the address I drive back north to attend a former student’s wedding. A happy day, if the winds are favorable.

Rowan Hooper reports in Wired that researchers at Duke University’s Institute for Genome Sciences and Policy are concluding the human genome is actually two different genomes, one male and one female:

Women (and all female mammals) have two copies of the X chromosome, but the extra copy isn’t needed, and is switched off in a process called X inactivation. Or that’s what scientists thought.
“Our study shows that the inactive X in women is not as silent as we thought,” said co-author Laura Carrel, a molecular biologist at Penn State College of Medicine, in Hershey, Pennsylvania. “The effects of these genes from the inactive X chromosome could explain some of the differences between men and women that aren’t attributable to sex hormones.”