Computerworld story here. Andy blogs about RC2 here.

I’ve been a satisfied Firefox user since Andy delivered his impressive oration two years ago on “10 Reasons to Use Firefox.” Thunderbird is my email client of choice for my home ISP email account. It’s interesting and satisfying to see how Mozilla has kept on plugging away, patiently leading us into this open-source, collaborative world. The Mozilla wiki gives us all, even non-coders like me, a chance to give back. I’m grateful.

For the past few days I’ve spied Jack Frost on the grass around my house. The tang of fall is in the air, and in honor of the season, I read “To Autumn,” by John Keats.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (1.7MB)

To quote Pete Townshend, “can’t pretend that growing older never hurts.” But hey, he made it to his 60’s and he’s still rocking, “My Generation” notwithstanding. 🙂

From xkcd, a site I picked up from Robin Sloan at Snarkmarket.

My boss very casually (or was it slyly?) sent me a link to something truly mind-blowing this afternoon. I hope she enjoyed the sound of my world being transformed. 🙂

Lyric poetry is very dear to me, as is writing generally, as is music. Imagine an idea that unites parts of each joy into a truly new whole. A simple idea, expressed elegantly, analyzed in depth and with great articulation in the supporting materials, but in its presentation to the user so simple that almost anyone could get a handle on it, from elementary school students to a grizzled Ph.D. like me.

Go take a look for yourself. I feel like a glider in an updraft just thinking about it.

There’s a prize of one million dollars for solving the Poincaré Conjecture. The yellow brick road to that payoff leads past many of the usual and important milestones in academia: conferences, papers, peer-reviewed journals. As a recent article in The New Yorker makes clear, it’s also important to circulate early versions of a proof strategically, to be sure the flaws are caught before you stake your claim to a discovery.

Russian mathematician Grigory Perelman went through many of the usual processes, according to the article. There was a Berkeley fellowship, contact with many distinguished mathematicians, job invitations from all over, and the like (if there is a “like” when one gets to those heights). But at age twenty-nine, Perelman chose to move back to Russia, to a low-paying university post and physical isolation from the very thinkers he had sought out.

Home. Alone. But not quite alone. Here’s the sentence that even in 2006 retains its power to astonish–and I hope it retains that power for a long time, though the article makes relatively little of it.

The Internet made it possible for Perelman to work alone while continuing to tap a common pool of knowledge.

Individuality and community, enacted at one of the higher reaches of human intellectual accomplishment. But it gets better:

On November 11th, Perelman had posted a thirty-nine-page paper entitled “The Entropy Formula for the Ricci Flow and Its Geometric Applications,” on arXiv.org, a Web site used by mathematicians to post preprints–articles awaiting publication in refereed journals. He then e-mailed an abstract of his paper to a dozen mathematicians in the United States … none of whom had heard from him for years.

Within seven months, Perelman completed the trilogy of Internet postings that seem to have proved the Poincaré Conjecture.

Questions of temperament aside, Perelman’s choices illustrate some of the enormous potential consequences of the Information Age and its media. Scholarship and the communities that form around it will be slow to change, and that’s not all bad. Education is conservative as well as liberal in senses that have nothing to do with partisan politics. Yet I look at the Perelman story and I’m struck by two things. One is that we are at the very outset of these changes, and many of us alive today will live to see dramatic and far-reaching shifts in higher education involving not only learning but also the community of scholars. That’s pretty obvious. The second striking thing, however, is that the New Yorker piece spends almost no time considering this revolution. I speculate that that’s either because that fundamental paradigm shift hasn’t registered on the authors … or because they’re already taking it for granted.

I’ll close with a small troubling thought. It is entirely possible for us in the scholarly community and in higher education generally to take something for granted before it’s actually registered on us. If that happens, we will be blown before the wind instead of steering by it.

How should we keep that from happening?

From MIT’s Technology Review, a story about design spaces and serendipity fields, explored and gathered by evolutionary algorithms.

The site says it’s in beta, but no matter: everything’s beta nowadays, so the word’s meaning is obviously shifting. I’m starting to think that beta is the only condition for a wiki … but I digress.

Wikiversity is up. Here’s the welcome statement:

Wikiversity is a community for the creation and use of free learning materials and activities. Wikiversity is a multidimensional social organization dedicated to learning, teaching, research and service. Its primary goals are to:

* Create and host free content, multimedia learning materials, resources, and curricula for all age groups in all languages
* Develop collaborative learning projects and communities around these materials

Learners and teachers are invited to join the Wikiversity community as editors of this wiki website where anyone can edit the pages. The community portal lists information about many aspects of Wikiversity.

Fascinating. Where will this initiative sit alongside the myriad other online learning initiatives? Will it co-opt them, take notice of them, co-exist with them, ignore them, re-invent them?

Wikiversity begins its work with two main categories: learning projects and learning groups. Here’s how they stand:

Learning projects involve the creation and development of Wikiversity pages that describe and facilitate the learning experiences of learning group members. Learning projects provide activities for learners.

At Wikiversity learning is by doing. Often this involves editing webpages and creating Wikiversity content. Sometimes this involves reading or engaging in activities in the world and writing about those.

A basic unit of community within Wikiversity is the Learning Group. Wikiversity learning groups are groups of Wikiversity participants with a shared learning goal. Learning Groups participate in Wikiversity Learning Projects that are relevant to achieving a group’s learning goals.

Someone’s obviously been reading up on how people learn. What’s interesting to me is how the doing is tied so closing to the reflecting and describing and the writing about. How rich can these projects be when there’s no face-to-face component, at least none that’s required? An interesting question, especially for anyone involved in e-learning.

The really dense reading right now, however, is on the Management page. I’ve had time only to skim it, but it looks like a cross between a worldwide faculty meeting, a PTA, and a university strategic planning session. Given that Wikiversity is guided by Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales’s mission to “to help make all free human knowledge available to all humanity,” I’m not surprised. My 64K question (and who would ever need more than 64K, or was that 640K?) is whether Wikiversity can do for teaching and learning what Wikipedia did for, or to, encyclopedias. Yes, time will tell, but something tells me that Wikiversity is even more ambitious than Wikipedia.

This is going to be very interesting.

UPDATE: I don’t know why I’ve never seen this page before–I’m certain there’s an analogous page on Wikipedia–but I must say that I admire the sentiment, at least in this context. Greatly. Be bold, not radical, and be bold in a context of civility. A fascinating set of socializing norms, and an interesting paradox. Boldness and civility are personal, that is, they are embraced and exemplified in human agency, one person at a time. Yet the goal is selfless collaboration. Much to think on here.

At the “Lunch on the Lawn” after church today, my son and I were talking about one of his favorite pastimes: playing Star Wars: Battlefront online with his friends from all over the world. “You should play it, Dad,” he said. I replied that I was certain to embarrass him and his clan by being such a noob (newbie). “That’s okay,” he said. “You’d get better quickly. Plus it’s a very friendly group. Most of us play just to hang out. We also have a birthday alert that lets us know when someone’s celebrating their birthday.”

I paused for a moment to mull over this new bit of information. A birthday alert for a bunch of guys flying X-Wings around and running scrimmages with other guys? Interesting. Suddenly Star Wars: Battlefront started to sound like YASN (yet another social network). Which of course it is … but here was explicit evidence.

To break the silence, my son went on. “Really, Dad, you ought to try it once. There are lots of Yodas in the clan.”

Yodas?

“Sure: guys over 40.”

You know, it could be worse. Ol’ greenie’s not too bad with a light saber, after all.

Next installment, I’ve promised my son I’ll blog about the game of “bowling” he invented for his clan buddies. It seems there’s quite a lot of play-within-play going on in-world.

Disclaimer: I’d say this even if he hadn’t linked to me with characteristically generous encouragement.

Brian Lamb over at Abject Learning has just published a Q&A on Wikipedia that constitutes one of the smartest, clearest, and most humane takes I’ve read on that resource and its cultural context. It’s an extraordinary synthesis of what many voices have been saying, but it’s more than that. It’s actually an essay on knowledge, education, and civilization. How interesting that Wikipedia both represents and stimulates the larger conversations that are often so implicit (or discouraged) in a world of industrialized schooling.

And did I mention the writing? Limpid and focused. A neat trick to manage both at the same time. Fine enough to savor, strong enough to survive the thousand handouts that will reprint it.

As ever, Brian rocks.

On the topic of leadership, this quotation also seems striking to me.

He who loves community, destroys community. He who loves the brethren, builds community. Dietrich Bonhoeffer

With allowances for the androcentric language, which I’m confident Bonhoeffer meant inclusively, the observation is keen and apt. The idea as I understand it is that communities are built out of persons, not out of ideologies, and that one of the most insidious traps a leader can fall into is that of advocating community while evading engagement with persons in all their alterity, all their knotty complexities.

There may be a corollary here having to do with one’s relation to oneself. Perhaps integrity can be understood, in part, as self-leadership emerging from love of one’s own inner alterity, for the sake of being in ethical and respectful and productive community with others.

Possible connections here with courses of study as well. Each class is a particular community formed around a focused, time-delimited experience, but also an exercise in community, in what Bruner calls consciousness-raising about the possibilities of communal mental experience.

Memo to self: nota bene.