Like everyone else in the known universe, I’m finishing up a grant application this weekend. I’m on the last piece, a two-page version of my curriculum vitae, and I’m citing URLs where audio of my recent presentations can be found. As I do so, I realize I need to bring audio from my February, 2007 keynote at the University of Maryland “Innovations in Teaching and Learning” conference over to my site (another good case for Jon Udell’s “hosted lifebits” idea). The good folks at Maryland have had my audio and slides up since I gave my talk there, and I’m grateful. But as Frost says, “way leads on to way,” and I can’t expect that URL to be a persistent URL (do folks still call them PURLs?), so I’ve just moved the audio over here (actually, recorded the stream off their site)–and now it’s a podcast: “Deschool, Reboot, Real School.”

Many thanks, by the way, to the folks at Maryland. They were terrific hosts and I greatly enjoyed the opportunity to be among them.

EDIT 2016: Here’s the PDF of my old-school PPT slides. The game at the beginning of my talk relied on reveals, but I haven’t encoded those here–so spoiler alert, sort of. And oh: the last slide was a movie of my daughter riding an amusement park ride. Time to upload that to YouTube, I think, so you can get the full effect.

[pdf-embedder url=”http://www.gardnercampbell.net/blog1/wp-content/uploads/2007/10/umd_campbell_deschool.pdf”]

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The calm before the storm, as conference attendees settle in and get ready to hear me hold forth on “The Digital Imagination,” my keynote talk at yesterday’s opening of the fourth annual Teaching and Learning With Technology Conference at James Madison University. My thanks to Jim, Andrea, and Mary Ann for being such wonderful hosts, for putting together an enjoyable and thought-provoking conference (they made it look effortless, but I know how tough it is), and for giving me the opportunity to try to work with and share some ideas I’ve been haunted by for some time. The haunting continues, as do the work and sharing.

If you have a chance, drop by the conference–it’s in its second day today.

Full disclosure: I messed up a climactic moment when I was to drop in a devastating audio clip from Chris Dede: I hadn’t pulled the audio over from the folder on my flash drive, only the PPT slides. Typical hasty mistake and I figured it out ten minutes after the talk was done and my adrenaline had begun to subside. Luckily God created a thing called “post-production,” and that clip is restored here. Also, the audio is a little clippy throughout, for which my apologies.

If you want the moment as it originally went down, here’s the original audio from yesterday’s talk as recorded by the folks at JMU. That was fast! It’s great to have conference resources appearing while the conference is still going on. Kudos to the JMU team.

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Not the emperor of ice cream, mind you, though I wouldn’t be surprised a bit to learn his curds were concupiscent….

Going back to the radio daze archives for this podcast. From about 1985 to 1988 (I’m fuzzy on the beginning date), I worked as a DJ at WWWV-FM in Charlottesville, Virginia, where I was in graduate school at UVA. For the first year or so I had my own special show: “Late Night With Gardner Campbell.” Highly imaginative show title. The cool thing about the show, for me anyway, was that by running from 10-1 at night I got to be more adventurous than my non-late-night colleagues. I played some music from the playlist, but I played other music that was off the playlist, and on occasion I would do special shows. My Neil Finn interview dates from this time. So does tonight’s podcast, which features a special guest I refer to merely as the “ice cream man.”

Now it can be told that this man was none other than Eddie Dean, a terrific music writer who’s been published in The Washington Post, The Philadelphia Inquirer, the Washington, D.C. City Paper, and even in Best Music Essays of 2000, a collection edited by the extraordinary Peter Guralnick. At the time Eddie was finishing up his undergraduate career at UVA, where he was my student in the very first college class I taught all by myself: Freshman English Composition.

Eddie was obviously special from the get-go. He’s still probably the single most imaginative and intense writer I’ve ever taught–and I’ve had some fine writers, believe me. Along with our common literary interests, Eddie and I also shared a deep love of popular music. He used to come visit me in my grad-student cubbyhole and we’d argue the merits of everything from Yoko Ono to the Guess Who for hours, just ranting and raving and having a great young time.

I miss Eddie. He followed his muse and I followed mine, and though we still keep in irregular touch through friends and family, I haven’t seen him in a while. But every now and then I’ll see one of Eddie’s pieces in the Post or elsewhere, and he never, ever fails to satisfy and inspire me. Truth is, I probably learned more from him than he ever did from me.

This podcast demonstrates just how zany we could get. I have no idea whether anyone else will find this funny, but as I listen to it again two decades later, it still tickles me, and I hope you enjoy it.

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