Ian Campbell’s blogged on a whole set of nifty ‘Net phenomena, beginning with the Numa Numa Dance that we discovered after I read the story in today’s New York Times. After Ian, Alice, and I had grooved mightily on the NND, Ian got inspired and put links to it, two Badger versions, the mighty Bananaphone, and a soccer irony into his blog. Get ’em while they’re hot!

(Thanks to Larisa Mount for tipping me to Bananaphone.)

Silly title (homage to Marshall Crenshaw) but another quickie podcast, this time of some guitar noodling that might become a pleasant enough theme for my long-aborning podcast on last Friday night’s Paradise Lost readathon. Coming soon to a podcatcher near you!

Bryan Alexander blogs about Flyguy, a wonderful Flash dream-game that I will not describe. Instead, I urge you to check it out for yourself. Then, if you’ve a mind, read what Bryan has to say about it, and if you’ve half a mind, read my comment in response.

Flyguy reminds me a little of “A Silly Noisy House,” an early multimedia CD-ROM by the Voyager Company that my family has always found very charming, piquant, and lovable. You’ll find a brief description of it in this Wired article from (gulp) 1994. Another website recalls “A Silly Noisy House” fondly and calls it “abandonware.” (CD-ROM as Velveteen Rabbit?) On his MIT website, Marvin Minsky talks about Voyager and his work with them on his “The Society of Mind” CD-ROM. He also gives SNH a mention.

Some folks complained that SNH was cute but a waste of time. All play, no education. My own position is that the best play is an education in wonder, and that lessons in wonder (or, you might say, lessons in expecting neat stuff) must always be part of the curriculum.

I have located more information on Peggy Weil, who developed A Silly Noisy House. I don’t have a definitive timeline for her, but it seems that in the late 90s she was working on a project called “The Blurring Test: Mr. Mind” for a company called “Web Lab”. (Is this company still a going concern?) As of last fall, she was an adjunct professor in the USC School of Cinema-Television, and she spoke on “First Person Media” at a conference in the Interactive Media Division. I wonder if Prof. Weil ever met Bob Keeshan. (Strange TV site here, but a good little piece on Captain Kangaroo, complete with lo-res clips.)

Two DTLT blogs merit immediate attention.

One is Jerry Slezak’s blog on a screencast about the Wikipedia article on “umlaut bands.” The Wikipedia article itself is fascinating (“rockdots”–who knew?), but Jon Udell’s screencast takes it to a whole ‘nother level and immediately triggers my devious faculty brain into imagining scads of wonderful assignments, projects, etc.

Another is Martha Burtis’s cris de coeur (I hope I spelled that right; French is not my forte) regarding information overload. Food for thought about, well, too much food for thought.

The BBC is reporting an effort by the Committee To Protect Bloggers to mobilize the “blogsphere” (or as some call it, the “blogosphere”) in support of two imprisoned Iranian bloggers. (The article calls them “cyber-dissidents.”) I’m wary of supporting a cause I know so little about, but when Amnesty International responds to the situation (they’re quoted in the BBC article) I do take it very seriously. Reuters is now reporting that one of the bloggers, an Iranian journalist named Arash Sigarchi, has today been sentenced to fourteen years in prison.

So a one-month old “Committee To Protect Bloggers” can, with one call to action, quickly get the attention not only of the international press but also of UN individuals concerned with Internet governance issues. Reading through the comments on the CTPB blog on this effort is itself an education. One commenter, if he’s for real, offers particularly nuanced advice about how to make this kind of protest most effective. His name–“vb”–leads to what appears to be a preliminary report by the Working Group on Internet Governance that will eventually be submitted to the World Summit on the Information Society. The report is dated February 21, 2005–i.e., yesterday.

I am awestruck by the speed and pervasiveness these things represent, and I wonder how any institution of higher education can afford not to offer students rich, focused opportunities to reflect on, and shape, these emerging technologies. I hope that the blogosphere is indeed a potent force for human rights, but whether or not that turns out to be the case, we owe it to our students to help them reflect on the phenomenon we’re witnessing.

That’s the title of a recent article in ComputerWorld magazine. My colleague Martha Burtis’s work on bots in education has helped me think about cognition and AI in some new ways, and this piece reinforces my sense that a breakthrough in these areas may arrive sooner than we think.

Favorite pull quote:

In any case, we probably wouldn’t want to make machines that are too much like humans, he [Robert Hecht-Nielsen] says, or we might end up with systems that are influenced by personal biases, just like many people are.

Instead, AI systems will handle tasks that humans aren’t particularly good at today, like dependably answering tedious customer questions with an endless supply of patience.

“AI will mean ennoblement for the customer,” says Hecht-Nielsen. “Someone will answer calls in a call center and spend as much time as the customer needs, and they will be polite and fun. It just won’t be a person.”

“Ennoblement”: a new concept in customer service. What’s not to like about that?

For the curious, the sleepless, and Claude who asked, here’s a podcast that Explains It All. Or tries to, anyway.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (4.9MB)

I apologize for being silent so long. I’m told by a reliable supervisor that the California strain of influenza, probably the strain I hosted last week during my ‘flu festival, was a) particularly hard-hitting and b) impervious to the flu vaccine that I didn’t qualify for anyway. Since I am a scholar, I am somehow comforted by this knowledge. And I believe I am on the mend. So without further ado, a gadget:

Lots of buzz in the aether about DEMO, the innovation/demonstration revue that just concluded in Scottsdale, Arizona. The press coverage I’ve seen has focused on blogging and wiki applications, which of course pleases me, but I’m even more pleased to see an old friend from my Amiga days still in play. NewTek brought the Video Toaster to market in the late 80s , and the era of affordable desktop video production was born. Now it looks as if NewTek may have another ace to play: the BlackBox.

BlackBox is a portable live production switcher/Web streaming appliance. For under $5K, BlackBox allows the user to produce a live event, including switching multiple cameras, graphics, pre-recorded video material, PC screen shots, etc. (eight simultaneous video and graphic sources) and stream the output to the Web in real time. There is no other similar product in terms of price range, range of functionality and portability, on the market today.

Live TV for five grand: just add cameras and event. I can imagine plenty of illicit uses for this gadget, but I can also imagine a revolution in webcasting for education, and I know some enterprising undergrads will start doing some deeply cool campus TV shows, coming soon to a desktop near you.

Actually, BlackBox is part of the product (or “solution,” as the buzz goes) called TriCaster, which NewTek bills as the world’s first portable live video production suite. I bet they almost called it a TriCorder, but sober heads intervened. In any event, this may turn out to be the Portastudio of the video world. I’m intrigued.

Today’s Technology Review has an interesting blog from Henry Jenkins on recent developments regarding “fansubbing,” in which American viewers (or at least viewers in America) translate and subtitle Japanese anime that hasn’t yet been released in the US. Jenkins’ earlier article on this phenomenon, “When Piracy Becomes Promotion,” discusses the practice (and its intellectual property issues) in detail. The latest news is that a major anime studio called “Media Factory” has asked some fan sites that distribute fansubbed anime (mostly via BitTorrent, to the tune of ninety terabytes per day) to stop handing out or linking to copies of its works.

Following the easily visible threads of this story has led me from the MIT Anime Club in the late 1970s to the poignantly-titled Anime-Faith website (“Anime-Faith is chill,” it proclaims), where this morning one can download eighteen of these fansubbed productions. One title on the list is not available for download, however: Anime-Faith simply notes that it is “now available from Pathfinder Pictures.” This little notice is at the heart of the fansubbing community’s ethical understanding of itself. Once the title has been made available for retail purchase, ethical fansubbers take it off their sites–or at least that’s the promise they make.

Fansubbing, like fan fiction, is a fascinating example of learning communities that spring out of entertainment phenomena. (That may be a distinction without a difference, but bear with me.) To put it another way, the distance between a fansubber or a fanfic writer and a scholar may, in certain instances, be nil. One could make the same argument about creative writing, but writers I’ve known always have favorite writers whose work serves as touchstones for their own creativity, so there’s no news there. To flip the idea around, however, is to consider whether fandom, mutatis mutandis, might be a useful paradigm for understanding and encouraging learning communities.

I anticipate some early objections.

Q: Doesn’t a fan simply lose him- or herself in a kind of superficial hero worship? Won’t fandom be another opiate for the masses?
A: Not necessarily. Fans are not necessarily infatuated or fatuous. And the idea of fandom might encourage a sense of personal agency, commitment, and community in the learning enterprise.

Q: Can fandom coexist with critical thinking?
A: Insofar as critical thinking means an habitually ironic, distanced, self-excusing skepticism, I suppose not. But it’s obvious from that definition that I don’t believe such critical thinking should necessarily be at the heart of the educational enterprise. Nor do I think such “critical thinking” is even what its name promises. But that’s another blog.

Q: Can fandom coexist with critical thinking?
A: As fandom approaches the condition of a maturely loving relationship (modulating distance and devotion in a cycle of ongoing understanding) with ideas and their expression in human utterance and praxis, yes.

Q: Isn’t this all rather Dead Poets Society?
A: The idea at the heart of that film is worth exploring, despite the sentimental narrative that surrounds it. Or because of it.

The fact is, fan communities flourish and generate astonishing energy, whatever our official attitudes and strictures, and they will continue to do so. That energy can obviously fuel great personal commitment and creative output. It’s a renewable and communal source of energy that education would do well to explore more thoroughly.

Love is not all you need. A clear head and a light bulb are also handy, as Bob Dylan once said. But without love, where would you be now?

I just updated my Word Press installation to version 1.22 and it killed the WP 1.2 enclosures hack. Or at least it wounded it: my SQL database still had the extra tables, as I discovered after much trial and error (sometimes it’s good to assume you’re wrong, and sometimes it isn’t), but the new admin files overwrote the blog forms so I didn’t have the enclosure fields I had before. Ah well. Now I think I’m ready for a test ‘cast, which will be nothing but a banal impromptu version of what I’ve just written, which is a banal impromptu version of what I’ll say in a moment. But I’d better stop before I descend any farther into “I’m the world’s worst self-deprecator” mode.