Web 2.0 is a heuristic, not a genre.

Among other things, this is why Web 2.0 is Web 2.0.

More on the way.

Here’s the second of the Donne Seminar podcasts from the class I led last semester. In this one, Emily Williams reads “A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning.”

I don’t want to comment on any of these readings in particular: the students already know my evaluation of their work, and listeners can form their own judgments. I will say, however, that producing the audio is proving to be quite poignant for me, as it brings back very vivid memories of each student and her or his part in this extraordinarily passionate and insightful class.

I can hear in the original raw audio some of the conversation I had with each student just before she or he began the recitation: my coaching and their nervousness and most of all the energy they were bringing to this moment. It reminds me how much commitment this seminar demonstrated throughout the term, and how at this moment most of the students were thinking more about John Donne than they were about either me or themselves (or, in fact, the grade). Some of the readings are quite breathtaking in their commitment. The audio, particularly the stuff you won’t hear (maybe we’ll save it for The Complete Donne Sessions), recreates the moment very, very vividly for me. If St. Augustine were still alive, he might well bring podcasts into his famous chapter on memory in his Confessions.

I’m also struck by these readings as capstones. We had spent a long time with one author, ranging over many texts, drinking deeply of the heady and disturbing brew served up by William Empson and other critics (but especially Empson), and pushing twice a week to see into the very heart of cognition in time, for Donne asks nothing less of us. The moment of recitation often became an uncanny combination of speaking through Donne and, at the same time, back to him, doing what intimates do when they repeat the words back to the beloved, puzzling, constant companion who uttered them.

Finally, I was intrigued to hear words that Donne himself attributed to his own “masculine persuasive force” coming at times from the lips of women, women who spoke them without a trace of irony. The experience reminded me of both the boundaries between the sexes and the intense commonalities of human experience. It was an experience of both alterity and deep community.

It was a privilege, is what it was, and it’s an honor to share it with you.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (1.1MB)

Last fall I led a seminar on the poetry and prose of John Donne here at the University of Mary Washington. As part of my preparation for the seminar, I began my “Donne a Day” podcast series in the summer. As part of the culmination of the seminar, I recorded student readings of Donne’s work for later distribution as podcasts.

“Later” sometimes means “much later” with me, unfortunately, but here just before the academic year ends, I begin daily distribution of my students’ readings. I’ll begin with Anna de Socio’s reading of one of Donne’s most famous lyrics, “The Sun Rising.”

I wish now I had thought to have students talk just a little about why they picked the poem they did, but that’ll have to wait for the feature set of Donne Seminar 2.0. Good to have something to look forward to.

If you’d like to see something more of the class’s work, take a look at our seminar wiki. I’ll have more to say in future blog entries about how that little gem came about, and how what it became was what it needed to be for this class, not simply what I had envisioned. One of the things that fuels my passion for wikis is that they are uncanny reflectors of the group that produces them. I should mention that the students in this seminar were an inspiring bunch to be among. I had a wonderful time, and learned a ton from them. Sometimes I was so inspired by them that I couldn’t sleep at night–no kidding. Thanks, folks.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (1.3MB)

We’re in full-on mode in preparation for Faculty Academy 2006. It’s our 11th annual Faculty Academy (“turn it up to 11!”), and this year we’re welcoming the New Media Consortium’s Rachel Smith and EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative Scholar-in-Residence Cyprien Lomas as our two special guest facilitators/presenters/workshop leaders (read: VIP cool folks). Bryan Alexander and Brian Lamb (or as we call them here, the Bri*ans) had these roles last year, and we’re excited to be able to continue that tradition of excellence with Rachel and Cyprien.

Did someone say “tradition of excellence”? To continue the winning string we began last year with Diana Oblinger’s inspiring keynote address on the “Net Generation,” we’re bringing in Jon Udell (“Saint John,” as oook calls him) to rock the house with a talk on “21st Century Literacy.” Read more about Jon’s presentation and follow the preparations for Faculty Academy on our DTLT projects blog, The Smooth Elephant.

Interesting piece today in the Chronicle (article available only to subscribers, unfortunately) about multimedia dissertations and the challenges they present. Usual suspects, few surprises: format, storage and retrieval, citation (that one’s pretty well under control), and copyright. Still, a very interesting set of examples and a useful overview of the state of the question. These dissertations will only become more numerous as time goes by. Sooner or later we must have some definitive rulings on fair use. Larry Lessig’s and his colleagues’ work at the Electronic Frontier Foundation is more important than ever in this respect.

The one wrinkle that I didn’t see coming was the authoring platform for this particular multimedia diss. The author had used TK3, but agreed to port the work to a truly open-source/open-standards platform currently under development called “Sophie.” As it turns out, the same folks who developed TK3 are also developing Sophie.

Perhaps librarians will save the day again, as they have so often in the past. If the archival standards mandated by official academic repositories specify open-source/open-standards platforms and public accessibility, uniform authoring platforms and fair-use claims will follow. Perhaps one day the materials with which we aggregate, shape, and present our digital creations will be as ubiquitous and interoperable as paper and ink–or close to it, anyway.

Another window, another world.

This is my father’s family, in a photograph taken near Jennings Creek in Boutetourt County, Virginia. Near as I can figure, it must have been taken around 1917. My father, the little boy right between the mother and father, was born in 1907, and I’m guessing he’s about 10 years old in this photograph. If that’s right, then my grandfather, born in 1867, would have been about 50. He doesn’t look that old, but sometimes those Scots will fool you.

My father was 50 when I was born. All my aunts and uncles on his side were older than he, some of them considerably older. (My aunt Bertha was already married or nearly so by the time of the picture: the tall gentleman in the left rear is her husband Roy Mays.) When I was growing up in the 60’s, all but one of them were already retired. Many of them had worked at the American Viscose plant in Roanoke before and during WWII, making rayon (“artificial silk”) and pretty good money, too, for a set of hardscrabble farmers.

In some ways, I grew up in the 1960’s and the 1930’s simultaneously. When our families gathered and folks started talking, most of the stories were several decades old. All the playfulness–and for Scots, they could be pretty playful at times–was from an era that had vanished from most social currency and was being erased from the very architecture as Roanoke continued its development. For my dad’s people, a childhood without electricity or running water came vividly and easily to mind, and was the source of much hilarity.

The adventurous ones in the family moved to Roanoke to find work in the big city. My father stayed on the farm to help his father and mother. He eventually came to Roanoke, too, in the early 1950’s, several years after his father died of a stroke, but he never really made his peace with the city. We took several trips to his old homeplace when I was a child. The house where he was born and raised was not much more than a shack, planted athwart a hill a few hundred feet from a riverbank. The house where his mother made her home after his father died was a real frame house, but it too was not much more than four rooms and a roof. Out back and up a gentle slope, however, was a spring, the first I ever drank from. The mountain water I drank from that hollowed-out gourd was the most delicious I have ever tasted.

Sunday winsomeness. Just got the scanner working again, and Alice handed me this window onto another world for a test scan.

This photograph from 1986 (as near as I can remember) offers ocular proof of my distant kinship with Bryan Alexander. (Who knew?) It also offers merriment, at least to me. 1986 was not an easy year; in fact, 1986-1989 was quite a bumpy ride. But when I see this photograph, and that brainy fox who for some reason thought it was worth hanging around me (and for some reason still does), I feel merry. I made it out of the trough. Plenty of troughs and mountains since then, of course, but also the knowledge that I made it out–and with that brainy fox still at my side.

Hello, brother from twenty years ago. Be merry! You’ll get your degree, you’ll get a job as a professor, you’ll find more interesting people to learn from than you ever would have imagined (and you could imagine meeting lots of them). Some of your close friends in 1986 are still there, still pushing you to be your best self. New friends, vital companions, keep coming. In three years you’ll be learning computer animation on an Amiga. In four years you’ll have your first email account, and meet the first friend you’ve discovered online (over a bulletin board called the Blue Ridge Express). Later that year, your son will be born. In six years you’ll get your degree and move to San Diego for two years to teach at the University of San Diego. In eight years you’ll move to Fredericksburg and begin your career at the University of Mary Washington (nee Mary Washington College). Two months after your arrival in Fredericksburg, your daughter will be born. Things get even wilder from there–and then wilder still.

Troughs ahead. Mountains ahead. Be merry!

Photograph by Michael Thomas

EDIT: The photographer contacted me with the following corrections:

The B&W photo you blogged was from the fall of 1987, from your and Alice’s first visit to meet Helen [Michael’s daughter]…. The same B&W sequence, of which I believe you have a full set of copies, includes one of you introducing Helen (in her swinging bassinet) to electric guitar.

Apparently even in the full throes of late grad school fugue I was doing something productive for the next generation, although history will record that Helen became a drummer, not a guitarist. I think the principle holds anyway.

And now my friend Michael has made a guest appearance on my blog.

The blogosphere keeps leading me to more wonderful things. Dorine Ruter (I’m sorry to omit the umlaut) linked to my post below. I saw the link as a trackback, and went to Dorine’s blog, where I read her fascinating account of experiments by Christine Brons in using video to facilitate analysis of teaching and learning. It will be no surprise to any parent, but still a wonder to all human beings, to read that the brain of a two year old is so complex that one must freeze the video frame every three seconds to take stock of the rich responsiveness of that toddler in a learning situation–even when the learning is indirect because the teacher interaction is happening with another child.

My own learning took several leaps forward by reading Dorine’s post. Her use of my own post in an even richer context helped me learn a great deal about my own experience and questions. Her meditation on those questions resonated very powerfully with my own mulling, but took it all forward another step, just as a rich conversation will do. She introduced me to Christine Bron’s work, which I will now investigate (though to date there is no English version available–time to learn Dutch). And by going to Dorine’s Bloglines blogroll, I found yet another blog that I have added to my own desultory reading list.

And of course Dorine lives in the Netherlands, and I have never met her, though on this day she was a true colleague and mentor. Astonishing.

In some respects, the indirect commentary, the distributed conversation, the citation paradigm of blogs that quote and link to other blogs and the trackbacks that make the citations immediately visible, all pry loose some things that might otherwise stay stuck. Or to put it another way, the distributed conversation is less about back-and-forth and more about building toward something we will all have created. In that way, it actually feels more permanent. To see some of my own ideas not just replied to, but actually used in another context, is a very powerful motivator and deeply satisfying. Scholars have always found these satisfactions, but they’ve never come so quickly–or with such creative energy a consistent part of the experience.

Sometimes it’s hard not to be awestruck by what blogs enable.

My friend and colleague Claudia Emerson received some thrilling news this afternoon: her third book, Late Wife, has been awarded the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry. The Pulitzer site doesn’t permit easy linking to specific pages, so here’s the Arts and Letters list as published this afternoon:

Letters, Music and Drama Awards

FICTION March by Geraldine Brooks (Viking)
DRAMA (No Award)
HISTORY Polio: An American Story by David M. Oshinsky (Oxford University Press)
BIOGRAPHY OR AUTOBIOGRAPHY American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin (Alfred A. Knopf)
POETRY Late Wife by Claudia Emerson (Louisiana State University Press)
GENERAL NON-FICTION Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain’s Gulag in Kenya by Caroline Elkins (Henry Holt)
MUSIC Piano Concerto: ‘Chiavi in Mano’ by Yehudi Wyner (Associated Music Publishers, Inc.)
Premiered February 17, 2005 by the Boston Symphony Orchestra.

I’ll blog about this wonderful, happy event more fully later on. For now, let me simply say that it has been one of the great privileges of my life to have been in conversation for nearly a decade with this extraordinary artist. That this award means a greater public will share this pleasure makes me feel that there is, after all, some justice in this world.

I am also delighted to say that there is a podcast available on UMW’s Profcast site of Claudia reading from her new book. [EDIT: the Profcast site is no longer active. I have left the audio link, however, as there may be other sites that link to it.] So far as I know, it’s the only recording of her reading from Late Wife, though I know that will change very soon now. If you’d like to hear Claudia read before her home audience, though, here’s where you’ll find it. The link means the file will also podcast from this blog, which is just fine by me! I’m in a mood to shout it from the rooftops.

Bravo, Claudia!

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (26.0MB)

I figure anyone who reads my blog is probably already (I almost wrote “always already” but that’s just too arch, and too many modifiers) reading Bryan Alexander’s blog, but just in case: today Bryan blogs on Pulse, a Web 2.0 compliant networked book. I’ve only had time to skim over the site, but already I can tell I will have to spend some serious time there.

This project is very exciting.

So go read Bryan’s blog, and understand the significance of this project in a larger context. Then click on over to Pulse. If like me you want a rousing preface to give you a framework for the whole experience, be sure to start with the “Why is this Web 2.0 compliant?” page. It’s a short course in the Web 2.0 meme, all by itself.

Kudos also to the designers. I find Pulse enjoyable to read onscreen. I can’t say that about all my online reading.