Word association time.

mp3?
iPod

podcast?
iPod

podcatcher?
iTunes

content delivery?
iTunes U

textbook publishing?
iTunes U

course management?
iTunes U

Why else would Campus Technology title its article on campus mp3’s “Is it iTime yet?”

Even the Chronicle gets in the act today, and makes it clear (via Michael Feldstein and others) that Apple’s business plan with iTunes U envisions not only a renaissance of the Mac but also massive inroads in every part of higher education’s content authoring, management, and delivery.

The iTunes U program has the potential for other functions, as well, such as selling textbooks or distributing course documents, according to some college officials who have been briefed on Apple’s plans.

“Another potential watershed is the opportunity to use the iTunes Music Store as a textbook publishing medium,” wrote Michael Feldstein, assistant director of blended learning at the SUNY Learning Network, the online program of the State University of New York, on his blog after attending a daylong briefing at Apple’s headquarters with other campus officials last month. “Apple was explicit about their goals in this regard.”

He said in an interview that Apple officials told him and other academics that the company hoped textbook publishers would sell either whole books or individual chapters online in much the same way that music labels now let users purchase an entire album or just individual tracks. That way professors could ask students to purchase pieces of different books rather than buy entire volumes. Mr. Feldstein speculated that as the screens of iPods get larger, the machines could be used as e-book readers.

At least Brian Lamb is quoted in the Chronicle piece with some salutary cautions.

Cupertino exerts a tremendous, distorting gravitational pull. I remain concerned that higher education is ready to sell its birthright for a mess of iTunes. Those leading the charge give us information gleaned from special tours, insider contacts, etc. I feel a rush of “Apple’s time has come round at last!” from folks who’ve been waiting a long time for this parousia. “Demur, you’re straightway dangerous / And handled with a chain.”

And all this triggered by a small audio/video device. Jobs, like Hollywood, understands (now) that the most powerful CPU is the one inside a dream. As a human truth, that’s one thing. As a business plan, that’s unsettling.

Perhaps I should just take my soma.

Jerry blogs on an amazing and inspiring story. Human beings are such interesting animals. My favorite pull quote: “My first thought was to download the latest version of Winamp, which I downloaded at 255 k/s – less than five seconds! I was so happy; I think this was one of the most beautiful days of my life!”

Such joy from such an apparently small thing! And yet I’m reminded of the Christmas party at Fezziwig’s in Dicken’s “A Christmas Carol.” In its own way, even Winamp represents something potentially awe-inspiring about the human spirit and the human community. All depends on one’s readiness to share in another’s joy and determination. (And one’s addiction to music.)

Just when you think Jon Udell can’t get any more perceptive or articulate, it’s tomorrow and he’s written another column. (Really: he’s almost that consistent. The mind boggles, and the hands turn red from sustained applause.)

Today Udell analyzes one of the greatest security risks of all: the human-computer interface, where digits become sense data. Pull-quote of the day:

… we humans, with our legacy analog-only sensoriums, represent a terrible security risk.

Now as someone who still enjoys vinyl LPs alongside his SACDs and DVD-As and redbook CDs, and who listens to them all through a pressure-sensitive set of analog eardrums, I love my legacy sensorium. I’d love telepathy too, so long as I can post away messages from time to time and keep my mind to myself when I want. But Udell’s points are all extremely well-taken, and the writing, as usual, is as lucid and refreshing as a clear mountain stream.

That man’s writing teachers must have thought they’d died and gone to Heaven when he took their classes.

Sure, but not quite with Andy’s flying colors:

You Passed 8th Grade Math

Congratulations, you got either 9/10 or 10/10 correct!

I choked at the last minute trying to remember the difference between a whole number and an integer. I guessed wrong. Otherwise, take that, oh skeptics of the humanities! I’m at a robust 12-year-old level!

EDIT: I’m trying to discover the difference between a whole number and an integer. Is there a difference? If so, what is it? If not, then the makers of the test may have stumbled. Some sources say whole numbers must be positive. Others say that whole number and integer are synonymous. I tremble to see this kind of uncertainty.

FURTHER EDIT: Ah, I see that I really did get 10/10 on the math quiz. This Wikipedia entry, which I have checked against other sites such as Wolfram, etc., makes it clear that “whole number” can mean the same as “integer.” Apparently the term “whole number” has become so ambiguous–positive integers, nonnegative integers, all integers?–that its use is now discouraged by some (many?) mathematicians.

It’s probably bad luck to start a Monday morning blog with a complaint, but the stately, measured, academic superficiality of this Commentary essay on the Beatles’ music makes me wonder if I really did live through decades of intense, involving popular music only to land somewhere back in 1960 with Chuck Berry in jail, Elvis in the Army, and Fabian ruling the charts. It’s difficult to point to any one thing that’s particularly dissatisfying about Teachout’s piece. It’s all just 25 degrees off the azimuth. Hailing “Yesterday” as the Beatles’ lyrical breakthrough seems utterly wrongheaded to me. Comparing Lennon/McCartney to Irving Berlin is not too bad, but where’s the Brill Building connection? The staid parenthetical note that The Beatles is “popularly known as the ‘white album'” appears to have been written by Mel Brooks’ 10,000 year old man. The implication that the “classically trained” George Martin alone was responsible for their increasing sophistication in the studio betrays a writer who’s apparently never seen or read a single interview with Martin, who insists that while his training was of tremendous use to the Beatles, it was they who pushed him in the studio. Martin has also noted, as have all the Beatles, that the sheer theatricality of much of the music (one of the reasons it still sounds so fresh today, in my view) has as much to do with Martin’s Goon Show heritage as with anything he learned at the Royal Academy of Music.

In short, Teachout’s essay seems to have been written in a vacuum, aside from his obligatory self-referentiality:

As I have written elsewhere:

Such famous albums as Glenn Gould’s 1955 recording of the Bach Goldberg Variations, Frank Sinatra’s Only the Lonely, Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue, or the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band are not attempts to simulate live performances. They are, rather, unique experiences existing only on record, and the record itself, not the music or the performance, is the art object.8

If those words had been written in 1971, I’d have thought them competent but obvious (set aside for a moment the ontological slippage in making “the record itself” so discrete). That they were first published in 2002 is astonishing. For whom, exactly, is this news, or even an interesting observation? Commentary? The Yale University Press?

Now for the larger question: aside from the pain Teachout’s essay causes me as a longtime devotee, even a scholar of this music, why am I so bothered by it?

Because it’s yet another example of the disconnect between a thriving and important culture and the dessicated culture that mediates it to the industry of education. There is indeed a freeze-dried quality to Teachout’s analysis that, coupled with its gobsmacking superficiality, simply betrays the energy and value of its subject. Can this cycle be broken? Will Web 2.0 undergo a similar dessication once our colleges and universities have retooled themselves into engagement factories? Obviously the subject matter does not necessarily transform the approach. What’s especially ironic is that the true sophistication of the Beatles’ music proves elusive for the one-size-fits-all sophistication of a critic like Teachout.

I don’t know what the answer is, but I don’t think the answer is to dismantle the curriculum. Perhaps one answer is to cast a wider rhetorical net that will raise to visibility the rich world of analysis and persuasion that surrounds us, even if it doesn’t originate within the academy.

Or not? Perhaps I’m simply putting too much weight on this example. Monday, Monday. Can’t trust that day.

Those are Jim Groom’s words, and I quote them (with implied ellipses that don’t fit well in a blog title) from his latest blog entry at bavatuesdays. Jim’s an Instructional Technology Specialist here at the University of Mary Washington and, along with five other ITSs and myself, a member of the Division of Teaching and Learning Technologies (the “DTLT” of “DTLT Blogs” on my blogroll at the right).

I quote Jim as a shout-out to a staffer who’s doing fascinating and important work, yes, but also because that quotation is the ethos I try to encourage as a manager and leader. It’s also the ethos I try to encourage as a professor. And it’s the ethos every one of the UMW ITSs lives every day.

For our task is herculean, and sometimes those proportions seem crushing. Often it seems as if we’ve blundered into the role of Atlas, a (I won’t say the) world upon our shoulders, and Atlas on an extended vacation. But of course Atlas had to stand still and take the weight on an immobile torso. He must have had a great view up there on that mountain, but it was the only view he’d ever have, unless he could lure another Hercules into range.

By contrast, we in DTLT are pretty much constantly on the move. We’re constantly finding new horizons, some of them right in front of us. That makes the weight of our tasks feel different, I think, and it makes our work, if not light, certainly joyous and, yes, exciting. At least sometimes. Sometimes, most of the time.

And as is evident from Jim’s post, from Martha’s moving account of the latest developments in the Theatre class project, from Andy’s constantly evolving expertise in multimedia presentation on the Web (he reminds me of the electronics expert in Mission, Impossible–or Q in the James Bond series–), from Jerry’s innovations in podcasting, Flickr, and wikis (and his scrupulous assessment of all the shiny toys), from Patrick’s guidance with all those codes (XML, XSL, RSS, Atom, URI, RDF) and the metadata they can contain, and from Lisa’s work with the College of Graduate and Professional Studies and its ongoing investigation of Web 2.0 tools and strategies, these folks are carrying a lot on their shoulders. They’re also working at some of the other herculean tasks: I seem to remember problems with a Hydra, and plenty of stable-cleaning to go around. But it’s hard to imagine a more rewarding mission: supporting, extending, and augmenting the academic excellence of this University. That excellence is the potential every one of our students and faculty sense, demonstrate, and help to create each day.

It’s a privilege to be part of these exciting herculean tasks. I won’t say we’re unique in facing them. In many respects, the academic enterprise is devoted to scaling those tasks ever upward for the entire community. But look at the strength it can bring us, when we work together.

Interesting conversation over at Steve’s Pedablogy site on what enables risk, and why teaching is such a walled garden even inside the university.

Rodney Brooks likes to take assumptions and negate them, so in that spirit and to play devil’s advocate, what if the problem is not that people aren’t thinking well about their teaching? What if the problem is that people aren’t thinking well about their professional work? Working on narrow topics and publishing things of interest to only a few could be a succinct definition of much of the blogosphere. What’s the difference? Why blog anyway? How do we get a “blogosphere” out of all the “b” blogs?

I’d submit that the difference is the way in which it’s obvious that one-to-few or few-to-few communications over the Internet are still parts of the conversation. It’s obvious that the work we little bloggers are doing is part of something much larger. The apparatus of higher education has managed to obscure that truth about the professional work we do. We can’t even find that “something much larger” on our own campuses, or reflect it in our curriculum, or foster it in our interaction with colleagues, much less find a way to demonstrate it to the world.

Unless we can find a way to demonstrate that “something much larger” to the public, why should we expect the public to offer support for our specialized expertise and labor? And why should we expect students to understand the point of their contact with us? It may be heresy to say this, but I worry that too much emphasis on pedagogy per se addresses a symptom instead of the real illness(es).

I apologize for the duplication of content from the distributed conversation regarding iTunes U, but I thought it might be interesting to post my five “what would it take for me to be satisfied with iTunes U?” items here and invite comment, additions, deletions, etc. to the list. With apologies to Martin Luther, then, here are my five theses.

I will be grudgingly satisfied:

1. if Apple makes it easy to copy URLs from iTunes to other podcatchers.

2. if Apple drops the specious talk of liberation. I’ve too much Orwell in me to think that the words don’t matter. 🙂 I don’t think that the fact we’re all sophisticated enough to recognize their jive for what it is furnishes a good justification for overlooking their appropriation of this language. I resent seeing all the passionate appeals for educational transformation that many tireless and unrewarded visionaries have crafted over many years become nothing more than ad copy. (But hey, I also resent Pete Townshend’s selling “Bargain,” a song he elsewhere calls a prayer, for use in car ads.)

3. if Apple doesn’t allow colleges or universities to configure iTunes for closed, “secure” access to content.

4. if Apple explicitly disavows any responsibility for copyright enforcement for school-generated content.

5. if Apple drops branding services/opportunities to make iTunes U look like “your college or university but act like iTunes.”

EDIT: 6. if Apple makes the Music Store link an “opt-in” item rather than a default link on the standard iTunes U menu. This item is probably the most quixotic of all, probably impossible from a technical point of view, but if I knew the primary interface didn’t promote a store in this way, I’d feel better. I don’t want to deliver teaching and learning materials inside a store, just as I wouldn’t want my reading of a novel to be interrupted on every thirtieth page with an ad. If you tell me that the ads would make the novels cheaper, that they’d help to put quality literature into the hands of more people at a lower cost, that I can just skip the darn things by turning the page, I’d respond that the price for these savings is just too high. When I read, I don’t want the merchants at my elbow. That’s why I paid for the book: to get some time with another human being, not to be targeted by commerce over and over.

Why grudgingly and not completely? Because I don’t want to create a de facto iPod campus, and iTunes U reaches maximum effectiveness as the campus gets closer to being iPod only. That prospect bothers me. Maybe it shouldn’t. There are plenty of campuses that support only one computing platform for students, and for very good economic reasons. (Ironically, that single platform is usually Windows, not Mac.) So far, though, the argument for diversity seems more persuasive to me. It’s important to note that for all its “think different” talk, Apple isn’t thinking different. It’s trying to leverage market dominance into a near-monopoly, just the way “evil” Microsoft is. I’d be less outraged, though no less troubled, if Apple hadn’t dressed itself in robes of righteousness for so long.

One more thought: Alan and Chris and others (I imagine) don’t take the verbiage on the iTunes U page too seriously. Alan writes, “The ad material Gardner finds offensive (and i just find dull and glazing) seems to be totally written by marketing people, not the people behind the program.” But that’s exactly what I’m alarmed by: the marketing people are the people behind the program. The program is, at heart, a marketing program. Thus there’s no distinction between “the marketing people” and “the people behind the program.” But it’s telling that Apple’s marketing tactics are aimed at helping us forget that fact. When I read all the technorati links to blogs saying “yippee, Apple to the rescue!” I see a reality distortion field that’s effective. Worryingly so.

Yes, ma, if D’Arcy and Chris and James and Alex jumped off a tall building, I guess I would too.

Those who know me will have to weigh in on whether I was able to craft anything like a Simpsons’ version of me. At least the locale is right….

As a prelude to the next podcast series on Gardner Writes, here’s a reading I did a couple of weeks ago of poetry by Andrew Marvell. The reading was part of our UMW “Thursday Poems” series, a marvelous tradition begun by now-professor-emeritus Bill Kemp. The idea is to congregate at 5 p.m. on Thursday afternoons to hear someone read poetry for thirty minutes. No lectures, little explanatory material, just a time to share compelling poetry with each other. I recorded several of these “Thursday Poems” readings over the last couple of years and will be podcasting them by and by.

Marvell’s a fascinating poet whose lyrics are often cited as models of ambiguity, philosophical complexity, and stubborn elusiveness (perhaps to the point of evasion). I begin with his commendatory poem on Milton’s Paradise Lost. (Marvell was a friend of Milton, and legend has it he helped spring Milton from prison at the Restoration, when Charles II put to death many supporters of his father’s execution.) I end with Marvell’s most famous poem, “To His Coy Mistress,” a poem that’s at once beautiful and savage.

The reading:
“On Mr. Milton’s ‘Paradise Lost'”
“An Horatian Ode upon Cromwell’s Return from Ireland”
“The Garden”
“The Mower Against Gardens”
“Damon The Mower”
“To His Coy Mistress”

I’m also posting the reading at our UMW “profcast” site, www.profcast.org. There’ll be more readings and lectures there as time goes on. The first UMW Profcast features Claudia Emerson reading from her own poetry. Mine is a poor companion to Claudia’s, but the idea here is to keep the ball rolling, so that we’ll do.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (16.9MB)