A Washington Post article led me to the 2005 Bloggie Awards website. It’s an appealingly modest award competition–prizes seem to be in the $25-50 range at most–and very much in the blog spirit. I was pleased to see the inspiring South-East Asia Earthquake and Tsunami Blog is a finalist.

A new program at William and Mary will require students students to purchase notebook (aka laptop) computers. The program, called My Notebook, will begin as an optional pilot in the fall 2005 term; it will be required the following year.

Here’s coverage from a local TV station’s website that’s basically the AP story; it includes comments from W&M’s Gene Roche, Virginia Tech’s Larry Hinckler, and Diana Oblinger, Director of EDUCAUSE’s National Learning Infrastructure Initiative. The William and Mary My Notebook FAQ has detailed information on the program.

Programs of this kind almost always require that schools standardize on a single platform if they want to get the full business benefits. One can also argue, as W&M does, that single-platform computing is necessary to realize this program’s full educational benefits. At W&M, the standard platform will be MS Windows. Students who elect to purchase a Macintosh, or any other laptop not offered by the school, will not have the convenient and fast support the school will offer. They’ll have to get their support elsewhere. They’ll also need to be sure their computers can run the applications they need to complete the assignments their instructors give them; for Mac users, this could mean purchasing software to emulate the Windows OS on their machines. In other words, instructors will assume a common platform and a common configuration and create their classes accordingly. Anyone not buying a laptop from the school will have to meet those requirements on their own–not a daunting task for the computer-savvy, but an inconvenience that will probably motivate most students to buy through the college.

I’m not myself an advocate of campus-wide single-platform computing. I understand all the reasons it makes sense, but something in me resists this step, partially because I’ve had pretty good luck as an outlier in most things and I don’t want to eliminate or even curtail that possibility for others, and mostly because I don’t think one platform fits all uses. And as long as diverse careers require diverse computing platforms, I think we need to support multiple platforms in the campus computing environment.

But there’s a larger point to W&M’s program, one that I hope doesn’t get lost in the platform wars. We’re all waiting for information technology to transform teaching and learning in higher education. At this point, mobile and wireless computing hold great promise for this kind of transformation. William and Mary already has a robust wireless network and plans to have full coverage in the very near future. The laptop requirement and its associated benefits pretty much complete the infrastructure required for this transformation. (The only thing missing is Tablet capability–a significant omission, in my view, but not a dealbreaker at this point.) Then it will be up to the professors and the administrative leaders in academic computing to create imaginative and effective uses for these resources.

That last step’s a doozy.

Good luck to our neighbors to the east. We’re taking notes.

Never mind Look Who’s Talking. Now it’s Look Who’s Blogging. Joshua Pohl’s proud parents have bought him his own domain and outfitted him with his own Baby Blog. Only three entries so far, and only one in Joshua’s “voice,” but that’s not bad for a one-week-old.

I’m sure this is not the first blog/domain bought for a baby, but it’s the first I’ve seen, and it’s fun to think about. I hope Joshua’s parents have considered the security issues. On the other hand, I’m pleased they’ve already locked up Joshua’s name domain in the .com arena.

A reader left an interesting comment on my “I Can’t Help It If I’m Lucky” entry below. I was going to reply in a comment, but I think the comment deserves a full blog entry to itself, because I imagine the writer speaks for many concerned parents and taxpayers, and because it gives me the opportunity to clarify some things that I obviously got muddled in my original entry. Here’s the comment:

Interesting…the financial state of public education is, at best, abysmal, yet there seems to be an abundance of money available for blog registrations, conference fees, suites, etc.. I am glad to see that the tuition I pay for my son to attend UMW is going to better HIS learning.

Comment by TGAMM — 1/25/2005 @ 9:49 am

First, thanks for reading the blog and commenting.

I certainly understand TGAMM’s concerns and I’d like to reply to them briefly, hoping that he or she will return to see this. It would be even easier to have a dialogue with a name and email address, but perhaps this comment will suffice. I hope the information will be helpful and perhaps address some of TGAMM’s criticisms.

I pay for this blog out of my own pocket. Even if I didn’t, the cost is minimal: about 100.00 a year for a domain and space on a web server. This particular blog is part of a entire suite of applications I also use to support my teaching. Last semester, 80 students used a discussion forum on this website, and it generated 2700 posts–pretty good investment for a lot of student engagement. This semester, I’ve got 35 students blogging elsewhere on this site and 15 in a discussion forum on this site. Eventually, I’d like this capability to be part of a suite of online services we offer all faculty, staff, and students at the University, as some institutions already do (see the University of Minnesota’s “U-Think” blog site for an interesting example). And many blogs are free: those on Blogger or Blogspot, for example, though these are harder to administer for classroom use.

The conference fees are included in UMW’s membership in the National Learning Infrastructure Initiative. By taking five faculty and one Instructional Technology Specialist to this conference, UMW provides crucial faculty and infrastructure development in a very cost-effective manner, and exposes some of our best teachers and staff to the very latest, most cost-effective means of providing high-quality education to all our students. For a school with minimal resources such as ours, the 5000.00 per year we pay to belong to the NLII, which includes five free registrations for this annual meeting and three free registrations for each of the three annual focus sessions, is a great way to maximize the few dollars we have and spend them where their benefit is greatest.

The suite was an accident, as I tried (and obviously failed) to make clear in the blog entry. The upgrade was in accommodation, not in price. I paid the same rate I would have paid had I been in a standard room. In fact, that suite cost about 60.00/day less than standard rooms in the official conference hotel. I felt the entire situation was faintly ridiculous, and that feeling inspired the blog, but tax- and tuition-payers should be assured that there was no extra charge involved.

And yes, the tuition you pay for your son is, in part, going to better my learning. As my expertise increases, the value of your tuition dollars goes farther, and the education your son receives is, at least potentially, better: better because I’m up-to-date on vital developments in the profession of higher education, better because I’ll be more informed about information technologies and thus help prepare your son to be a vital contributor in an increasingly technology- and information-driven world, better because I meet talented professionals from all over the world whom I will invite to interact with my classes (as I already have), and better because any time I learn something, I’m going to share that with my students, and we’ll both benefit. I’m happy that part of my hospital fees go to educating doctors and surgeons, and that part of my lawyers’ fees go to educating lawyers, because their benefit directly translates into my benefit. I’m paying for their expertise, and expertise needs constant development because knowledge is increasing and changing. When my wife and I send our children to college, I hope their professors’ ongoing education is a high priority for the institution. Otherwise, our children won’t be prepared for the world and the lives that await them after graduation.

Thanks again for the comment, TGAMM. I welcome further dialogue on this topic!

Interesting session going on right now at the NLII meeting: Beauty and the Beast: Bringing Blogs into Higher Education. Take a look–there are session comments on the blog questions.

Also: Segue is Middlebury’s CMS, available for free at Slashdot.

The next session starts in 25 minutes. I want to blog about some sessions I saw this morning. There’s no time to write it out, so this podcast will have to carry the load here. Load of what? Ah, dear reader/listener, that will be up to you, and posterity, to decide.:)

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (4.5MB)

I don’t think I’ll ever need to eat again.

But I should really speak to the NLII annual meeting, and not just to the New Orleans milieu, although, well, whew, what a town. Appetite city.

As wonderful as the food has been, though, the intellectual feast has already topped it. The session on Croquet yesterday morning left me rubbing my eyes in near-disbelief as I witnessed a demonstration of a 3D recursive meta-environment in which people, places, and things can be placed in rich contexts that are themselves meaningful creations, often collaborative creations. I saw a landscape in which one could carry around a 3D “snapshot” of a space that was dynamically updated even as one carried it around. In short, I saw a model of individual cognition externalized, cognition networked with other minds in a social context that was compelling, fun, piquant, and a little mysterious. Imagine a Magritte painting that first becomes “real,” and then becomes a prompt that asks students to reconceive their own conceptual work in a course–together. It’s very difficult to explain, but once you see it in action, impossible to forget. I’ll never be satisfied with the desktop metaphor for computing again.

I do believe that Croquet is a way to bootstrap the Secret Society for Real School into the next key stage of its development. The first stage, an increasing dissatisfaction with a status quo in which education scales by means of an industrial model, is already upon us. That stage will end, I think, with some kind of popular revolt in which traditional schooling (traditional in the sense of what we’ve had for the last 100 years, not in the sense of, say, the Platonic Academy) will face crippling competition with other more compelling and convenient providers. I hope before we get to the end of that stage that the social and expertise contexts of real school will be freed from deadening 50-75 minute periods to explore its real potential as an ongoing conference devoted to, as Jerome Bruner put it, raising consciousness about the possibilities of communal mental experience. Subject areas, specific knowledge, even quizzes will still be part of the experience. But as with a good conference, the narrative that threads through the individual courses will continually inspire fresh perspectives–and a powerful sense of shared mission. A sense, finally, of occasion. Which brings Croquet back into the picture: the sense of occasion provided by that 3d object-oriented landscape, both dreamy and a little edgy, makes explicit the mental landscape we want our students to inhabit and, at last, build with us.

Now for two New Orleans soundscapes. One is part of a walk down Bourbon Street I took yesterday afternoon. The other is part of the opening reception of the annual meeting. (These were “stealth” recordings I made with my Sony Clie’s voice-recording feature, so the quality is listenable but rough.) T. S. Eliot said the poet is always amalgamating new wholes: he or she smells cooking, and reads Spinoza, and finds or creates the connection. Here’s a chance for you to create some poetry of your own.

I’m in New Orleans for the annual meeting of the National Learning Infrastructure Initiative. This travel day has been odd and more than a little nerve-wracking, with a surprise ending. Snow threatened to cancel the travel–a flight out of Dulles at 4:45 p.m. just when the snow was predicted to be coming down at 2 inches per hour–but suddenly the snow stopped, visibility improved pretty dramatically, and the flight left and arrived on time.

Then the cab driver took me to the wrong Holiday Inn in the French Quarter. Fully luggage laden, I walked four blocks, one of them across Bourbon St., to get to the right Holiday Inn, the “Chateau Le Moyne.” There I learned that they had run out of rooms, so they had to upgrade me to a suite.

I figured it would be a double room with some nice furnishings. It’s not. It’s a suite. The ceilings are at least ten or eleven feet high. There’s a huge sitting room, a huge bedroom, a little pre-bath closet area, and an undistinguished bathroom. The bathroom is a relief, actually, since the rest of the decor, though undeniably sumptuous, makes me feel I’m cheating if I don’t expire of absinthe poisoning on the bed. Were this to occur, I would already be lying in state, I assure you.

I’m here only one night, then over to the conference hotel, where the accommodations will be dismal after this exotica. That’s eXotica. The other was outside my window shortly after I got here: the Krewe du Vieux, q.v. Welcome to the Big Easy.

How will they keep me on the farm after this?

EDIT: One small but vital clarification–this suite cost the same as a standard room. The hotel gave it to me as a free “upgrade” because they had run out of other rooms by the time I arrived and checked in. That’s the first time that’s ever happened to me, but apparently it’s not uncommon.

Sometimes students think literature written during the English Renaissance was written in “old English,” a natural mistake for beginners given the sometimes daunting difficulties of making sense of the language. In fact, Renaissance English is early modern English. Our contemporary English is much more like Shakespeare’s English than Shakespeare’s English is like Chaucer’s, and way closer than Shakespeare is to, say, Beowulf. But that’s not much comfort to a student struggling with unfamiliar idioms, odd-looking syntax, unexpected and often loose punctuation, and our old friend irregular orthography.

I tell my students that even scholars read the glosses in the notes, but my students still get that panicky look when they have to confront Milton’s prose, or almost anything in poetry. The only thing that reliably helps get them over that first “augh,” as they say in Peanuts, is to hear me read the passage aloud. I like to think I read pretty well–all professors like to think that, and who can blame them?–but I think the real key is reading aloud with comprehension. Which raises a paradox: if the students don’t understand the work, how are they helped by the fact I do? How can they even tell that I do? Why is my reading the passage aloud sometimes (not always) worth an hour of patient work on choosing interpretive strategies, mining the Oxford English Dictionary, and teasing the meaning out themselves in a close reading?

There’s something about the explaining voice, the voice that performs understanding, that doesn’t just convey information or narrate hermeneutics, but shapes out of a shared atmosphere an intimate drama of cognitive action in time. I’m reminded of Longinus on the sublime: for an instant, we believe that we have created what we have only heard. When we hear someone read with understanding, we participate in that understanding, almost as if the voice is enacting our own comprehension. We hear the shape of the emerging meaning, and intuit the mind that experiences that meaning even as it expresses it, and it’s all ours.

So this one’s going out to all you Miltonauts out there. You’ve heard L’Allegro on Podcast 1. Now here’s the other side. Contest or complement or lingering self-temptation? Let’s talk. (Special prize to those who catch my mistakes in what follows.)

Il Penseroso, by John Milton.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (5.7MB)

It looked like an article on military failure in Iraq, and I didn’t have the heart for it, so I went right past it the first time. But Bryan Alexander’s blog persuaded me to take a look. I found I was wrong. (Excellent demonstration of the usefulness of critics and commentators.) The article is just what Bryan says it is. I look forward to his extended treatment, because the article’s riches are so many and so diverse–and almost all of them about education.

The thought of hanging on the morrow concentrates the mind wonderfully, wrote Johnson. Obviously, combat supplies plenty of motivation for that mental concentration. So moved, the soldiers make their school out of themselves, shared on a virtual front porch, outside the dulling standardization of official training, but not outside wisdom, thoughtfulness, and the need to synthesize varying advice, experience, and knowledge into judgment when there’s no time for anything but a realist epistemology–“thus, thus I refute thee,” as the tracers whistle overhead–and a Platonic faith in the value of community.

An extraordinary article. Every teacher and school administrator should read it. Thanks to Bryan for blogging on it.