Brian Lamb may have found an eportfolio system (or paradigm?) he can love, one as fast, cheap, and out of control as its creator. I’ve been reading a lot lately about blogs as front ends for eportfolios, and my first response to the “blogfolio” is that it feels right.

Next stop, perusal.

Monya Baker at Technology Review has an interesting article on three significant IT developments: algorithms that detect alterations in digitized images, 3-D virtual reality displays that don’t require glasses and that have objects one can “grab,” and new statistical methods for making “sensor motes” more effective.

An interview with Anthony LaMarca in CPU Magazine, well worth reading and a blog in its own right (alas, you’ll just get a teaser excerpt unless you subscribe to the magazine), led me to what is obviously a founding document of cyberthink, Mark Weiser’s 1991 Scientific American essay on “The Computer for the 21st Century.” Weiser’s essay envisions “a world in which computer interaction casually enhances every room,” one in which computers don’t take us out of reality into a computer-generated space (virtual reality) but augment the spaces we physically inhabit by deploying hundreds of computers–many of them tiny and tailored to specific tasks, and all of them connected via high-speed networks both wired and wireless–into the places we move through during our lives. Weiser terms this vision “embodied virtuality.” The computers don’t take us into their world, but enter ours. For Weiser, the goal is invisibility: “The most profound technologies are those that disappear. They weave themselves into the fabric of everyday life until they are indistinguishable from it.”

I’m fascinated by this essay, especially by the futurist scenario that begins with “Sal’s” clock-radio asking if she wants coffee and then takes her and us into an office enhanced by everything from time-zone customization (a window view that can be “set”) to collaborative editing with a colleague who’s sharing a virtual office with her. Weiser’s vision and argument are compelling.

Yet the English professor in me wants to argue back, especially because Weiser’s exhibit “A” of a successful, ubiquitous, invisible technology is writing. I agree that writing is a successful, ubiquitous, invisible technology, but I’ve spent a large part of my adult life trying, sometimes desperately, to make writing a visible technology for my students. (I do the same thing with the movies in my film studies classes.) I do this, of course, because I want to help them become more deliberate, reflective, and effective writers: not just consumers of verbally-delivered information, but thoughtful creators who can not only enter into dense, long-term conversations but decisively intervene in those conversations. Otherwise, it seems to me, their capacity for agency is stunted. Or to put it plainly, they’re less free. (“No easy way to be free,” as Pete Townshend observed.)

My efforts make my students unhappy at first. (Truth to tell, a few remain unhappy, but that may be my fault, not theirs.) When the technology of writing becomes visible to them, they write more slowly, and for a time many of them write less well. The process is no less maddening than if I had asked them to pay scrupulous attention to their breathing. And yet I am convinced that if writing does not become a visible technology for my students, their potential freedom is compromised.

Is there an analogy with computers? Does computing deserve to be as visible, as reflected upon as writing? There’s a continuum here, I think. Not all writing needs to be visible. I don’t need to be deeply reflective about every sentence in a short business email, or about the instructions I read on how to put together knock-down O’Sullivan “furniture.” But some writing needs to be visible, and I have to know how to make it visible to myself, and how to craft writing that not only conveys information but stimulates thinking, for me and my readers as well. Similarly, I think there are times when computing should be boldly visible, when the task should include not only the work and the outcome but also deep reflection about the tools used on the way.

Weiser’s essay ends on a seductively idyllic note:

Most important, ubiquitous computers will help overcome the problem of information overload. There is more information available at our fingertips during a walk in the woods than in any computer system, yet people find a walk among trees relaxing and computers frustrating. Machines that fit the human environment, instead of forcing humans to enter theirs, will make using a computer as refreshing as taking a walk in the woods.

Sometimes that walk should cleanse the mind. Sometimes that walk should focus the mind. Sometimes that walk should be hyper-visible and stimulate the mind in all her powers to acts of creation, preservation, and deep reflection.

We must learn to awaken and keep ourselves awake, not by mechanical aids, but by an infinite expectation of the dawn, which does not forsake us in our soundest sleep. I know of no more encouraging fact than the unquestionable ability of man to elevate his life by a conscious endeavor. It is something to be able to paint a particular picture, or to carve a statue, and so to make a few objects beautiful; but it is far more glorious to carve and paint the very atmosphere and medium through which we look, which morally we can do. To affect the quality of the day, that is the highest of arts. Every man is tasked to make his life, even in its details, worthy of the contemplation of his most elevated and critical hour.

Thoreau advocates visibility, even for “the very atmosphere and medium through which we look.” In many respects, Walden heroically attempts to drag ubiquity and invisibility into the strong light of moral awareness.

This is a vexing and stimulating dilemma for me.

After reading Bryan Alexander’s blog on dental horrors and Poe’s uber-creepy story “Berenice,”
I was seized by the imp of the perverse and decided to do something really out there for my third podcast. That’s why I’ve read section 11 from Part 2 of Sir Thomas Browne’s Religio Medici (“The Religion of a Physician”). This book, written in the 1630s and first published in an authorized edition in 1643, is one of my favorites. Strange, long sentences roll by, stuffed with allusions and paradoxes and circular singularities but ending more often than not with either a joke or a moment of poetic wonder. The book was intended as a private amusement, Browne tells us, and circulated among some friends, but in 1642 it appeared as a bootleg. (Sound familiar?) The authorized edition appeared the next year, with Browne’s corrections.

In the introductory letter to the reader, Browne warns us that his musings in this book are “the sense of my conceptions at the time, not an immutable law unto my advancing judgment at all times,” and further cautions us that “there are many things to be taken in a soft and flexible sense, and not to be called unto the rigid test of reason.” Something like a song, or a poem, or even a soft and flexible blog?

The passage I read stands on its own pretty well and needs fewer footnotes than some of the other sections. It has some good jokes. It has some sublimity. I’m not sure I made enough sense of it in my reading, but I am sure that no one writes like Browne, even though some of us are content to try and fail.

“But why fly in the face of facts? Few people love the writings of Sir Thomas Browne, but those who do are of the salt of the Earth.” Virginia Woolf

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Ernie at Webliminal blogged Monday about the Pew report released this week. The document is essential reading, I think, but the Predictions Database at Elon University is the real cabinet of wonders: a beautifully arranged database that not only maps the development of thought concerning networked computing but does it in a way that can’t help being inspiring and provocative. Think of it as a facebook for Internet intellectuals. I add my congratulations on the great work Janna Quitney Anderson, assistant professor of communications, and students in Elon’s School of Communications have done on this project. I’ll be looking forward to Professor Anderson’s forthcoming Imagining the Internet, a book based on the the Predictions project.

You’ll find a bunch of interesting pull quotes from the Pew Report in Ernie’s blog. Here are a couple of my own favorites from the Report:

“The next decade should see the development of a more thoughtful internet. We’ve had the blood rush to the head, we’ve had the hangover from that blood rush; this next decade is the rethink” (Rose Vines. technology journalist).

Unpleasant surprises: The experts are startled that educational institutions have changed so little, despite widespread expectation a decade ago that schools would be quick to embrace change.

Startled indeed. Along those lines, it’s worth quoting some of Part 8 of the Pew Report, on “Formal Education”:

Prediction: Enabled by information technologies, the pace of learning in the next decade will increasingly be set by student choices. In ten years,
most students will spend at least part of their “school days” in virtual classes, grouped online with others who share their interests, mastery, and skills….

Many of the respondents who have had experience with teaching online said only highly motivated, mature students exhibit the ability to be successful in a learning environment in which so much responsibility is placed upon a student. Moira K. Gunn, host of public broadcasting’s Tech Nation, wrote, “I do not now, and have never, witnessed successful benefits in virtual classrooms. While the role of the teacher will change from authority figure with all the information to one-on-one educational coach, the one-teacher-one-student paradigm will remain the most effective.” Indeed, children in elementary school “still need a watchful eye and human attention,” according to one expert.

I’m not quite so pessimistic as Gunn, but I agree wholeheartedly that there’s no substitute for an attentive teacher in close contact with a student, which is why I think the idea of scalability in online learning needs careful consideration. Gains in “productivity” with commodified forms of online learning are in my view chimerical. A cognitive apprenticeship is much more than delivery and mastery of content, though they are important. Real school can’t happen unless one mind is inspired by the workings of another mind as it observes that working in process. There’s nothing like having an expert think aloud when you and the expert are in real-space together and all the channels of communication are open and ready. We need to work together to ensure that benefit is available to all citizens, not just to those who can afford it.

I’m still mulling over the idea of “student-centered learning.” At this point, I’m thinking student-centered learning is not so much about student choices as it is about genuine dialogue in which both student and teacher are invited to learn from their mutual thinking aloud. Information technologies can broaden and amplify the opportunities for mutual thinking aloud by giving us richer access to multiple modes of shared cognition. I guess.

In the spring of 1990 my wife and I were childless and living in Richmond, Virginia. I was a little over halfway through writing my dissertation. I craved a diversion. The warming weather brought just the escape I needed: XL-102, the local FM rock station, sponsored a contest called “A Song For Richmond.” The idea was that listeners would write and record songs featuring Richmond, and then enter those songs in this contest. The prizes were modest but attractive. There was an initial airing of your song if the DJs, Jeff and Jeff, thought it was good enough to play on the radio, a second airing with an on-air interview if you made the finals, and a third airing if you were one of the twenty-four winners who made it onto the official “Songs for Richmond” tape (all proceeds to support Oasis House).

After years of fooling around with my home studio, I decided to put down the diss for a bit, write and record a song, and try my luck in the contest. So I retreated to a back bedroom (it would be the baby’s room less than six months later), set up the equipment, and began to put the tracks together.

This is the result. It’s the first airing, edited to cut out some of the patter, and it includes all the lovely smooshing and pumping that the radio station’s compressor contributed to the sound. The extra compression hides a multitude of sins in the recording and (cough) performance, though I’m sure the ones that remain will be clearly audible (and, I hope, forgiveable).

I did okay in the contest. There were 350 entries and I came in 18th, so I’m on the final tape. Along the way they played my song three times on the radio. (Maybe that used up all my fifteen minutes.) This was the last time I really did anything with that recording rig, the last time I wrote a song–now, a song from the attic.

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In “The Classics in the Slums,” Jonathan Rose writes a fascinating essay about the power great books have to transform lives. He argues that Matthew Arnold was right: the best that has been said and thought can make lives better. That’s an argument contrary to most of the last thirty years or more of literary theory in the West, which insists that “great books” are a) great only for the ruling classes, principally rich men, and b) great for those ruling classes in large part because of the power of “great books” to spread white male hegemony and keep the marginalized safely on the circumference or perimeter.

Rose, whose 2001 The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes (Yale UP) won the Jacques Barzun Prize in Cultural History, understands that his argument will seem conservative to some readers. That’s perhaps one reason he emphasizes the radically transformative power of great art, and backs up his argument with evidence taken from his research into British working-class lives in the twentieth century:

Even more impressive is a 1940 survey of reading among pupils at nonacademic [British] high schools, where education terminated at age 14. This sample represented something less than the working-class norm: the best students had already been skimmed off and sent to academic secondary schools on scholarship. Those who remained behind were asked which books they had read over the past month, excluding required texts. Even in this below-average group, 62 percent of boys and 84 percent of girls had read some poetry: their favorites included Kipling, Longfellow, Masefield, Blake, Browning, Tennyson, and Wordsworth. Sixty-seven percent of girls and 31 percent of boys had read plays, often something by Shakespeare. All told, these students averaged six or seven books per month. Compare that with the recent NEA study Reading at Risk: A Survey of Literary Reading in America, which found that in 2002, 43.4 percent of American adults had not read any books at all, other than those required for work or school. Only 12.1 percent had read any poetry, and only 3.6 percent any plays.

To hear Rose tell it, a passion for radical economic transformation can be awakened even by a Thomas Carlyle. Apparently it has something to do with an intellectual awakening that may lead to political action, but is not itself primarily a political action. His article is also a timely cautionary tale, warning against assuming too quickly what the poorly-educated laborer has inside his or her head.

Interestingly, a similar piece appeared today in the Washington Post: “The Great Books’ Greatest Lesson.”

No, not a teaching strategy, just another of those strange coincidences I’m seeing more and more frequently these days. Last night marked the shaky ascent of my first podcast. Today Technology Review blogs on podcasting.

Maybe coincidence favors the obsessive mind? (Apologies to Pasteur.) Or maybe this is my destiny.:)

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Ton’s Interdependent Thoughts: Blogs as Personal Presence Portal Revisited: Interesting meditation on blogs and their discontents.

See also Elmine Wijnia’s “Understanding Weblogs: a communicative perspective”, which concludes that “weblogs do offer a platform for the ideal speech situation.”

Once again, ladies and germs, John Milton’s L’Allegro. I apologize for the duplicate feed. I’m testing the hacks I just applied to my base WP 1.2 installation.

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