From Making Stories: Law, Literature, Life, by Jerome Bruner:

Stories are like doppelgangers, operating in two realms, one a landscape of action in the world, the other a landscape of consciousness where the protagonists’ thoughts and feelings and secrets play themselves out…. It is part of the magic of well-wrought stories that they keep these two landscapes intertwined, making the knower and the known inseparable…. A narrative models not only a world but the minds seeking to give it its meanings.

Yes.

Strange experience last Friday: I was explaining Skype to colleagues in Admissions who want to set up some kind of chat capability in their recruiting efforts, and I stopped making sense when I began to use the word “call.” I made sense to me, but I could see that I had lost the other folks in the conversation.

Finding that I’ve stopped making sense is not so strange, of course. What’s strange is that common verbs don’t usually pose a problem in my conversations. In this case, though, I discovered that “call” now means something different to me than it did even a year ago. When I say “call,” I mean “initiate electronic contact via a medium that emphasizes voice but includes other modes as well.” The modes have begun to blur for me, and I hadn’t even recognized that they had. I do say “text” as a verb when I mean “send an SMS message over my cell phone,” and I can distinguish between chat and VoIP and video and so forth, but the catch is that when I’m in one of those convergent environments, such as a cell phone that does SMS or a Skype that does voice and chat and video, I use the word “call” in ways that are not entirely intelligible to folks who are not used to that environment.

Memo to self: remember non-convergence is still the rule. Slow down. Sometimes.

I’m getting ready to go home for the evening, but tonight before I left I needed to walk around the department.

I was elected to this department in 1994. When I came here for the on-campus job interview, I met Taddesse Adera. In the 11+ years that followed, I worked with him on committees, shared moments like the Toronto MLA drink with him and one of his childhood friends in celebration of our birthdays (both Taddesse and I were born in December), laughed and agonized with him over professional and departmental matters, and greeted him whenever I saw him, which was nearly every working day. My office door is open as I type these words, and I can almost see the closed door to his office from where I sit, two doors and a corner and, now, a lifetime away.

Taddesse died, quite unexpectedly, two days ago. Since that time, all of us in the department have been trying to come to grips with his loss. After the first shock of the news of a death, the hardest thing for me is always simply trying to comprehend the loss. I don’t mean “comprehend” as in “why or how could this have happened?” I wonder that, too, but the hardest thing for me is simpler. I am suddenly compelled to list for myself what has been lost. That list is always, always staggeringly long, and Taddesse’s death has been no different in that regard.

Except that Taddesse’s quiet dignity, his insistence on wearing both his learning and his accomplishments lightly, his very private nature, his courtesy, and the strength of his presence among us were so much a part of my daily life that I am troubled by how easily I expected them, and him, to last. In some respects, Taddesse’s gift to us magnanimously concealed its own extent, its own magnitude. And now that he is no longer here, that magnitude reveals itself in ways that I hope would please him after all.

There is no one in the department this evening. All my colleagues have gone home. I hear no voices in the hallway. It is time for me to go home, too. When in a moment I switch off the lights and lock my door, I will turn again to face the door to Taddesse’s office, a door closed and locked (it was always open when he was here, and he was here what seemed to be 12 hours a day), a door covered with photocopied poems from Whitman, Auden, Tennyson, O’Searcaigh, and Shelley, a door with wilting flowers in its plastic pouch. At the top there is a picture of Taddesse in full teaching stride. The photograph is captioned: “He gave us the courage to share our beliefs and to stand up for what we believed in. He will be sorely missed.”

Yes.

How far from then forethought of, all thy more boisterous years,
When thou at the random grim forge, powerful amidst peers,
Didst fettle for the great grey drayhorse his bright and battering sandal!

–G. M. Hopkins

We had our first annual Division of Teaching and Learning Technologies retreat last week, January 9 and 10, and I found it a wonderful experience. We didn’t do much “business.” Instead, I tried hard to keep our attention on the macrocosm: strategy, a sophisticated awareness of the university environment and our place in it, inquiries into the meaning and purpose of our work here and in the world of education and information technology generally, and so forth. I have to say that it took a real effort for me to stick to that vision for the retreat. There’s an amazing and astounding amount of business to take care of, as is true in every academic IT department I know of. Planning the retreat, I felt slightly delinquent. After the retreat, I felt just fine. It was more than worth the stretch.

Three major components, and an optional bonus round, anchored the schedule:

1. Now, Discover Your Strengths provided a profile instrument and a set of useful heuristics to get us talking about individual talents and team co-ordination. Even those who weren’t finally as enthusiastic about this book as I am found it helpful and generative.

2. We spent a good deal of time on a mission statement, still a-borning. The discussion was built on a set of nouns (what do we want to deliver to the University?) and verbs (what actions characterize our work in this environment, especially in support of the nouns?). The mission discussion, like the strengths / team discussion, was very rich.

3. We met with several senior leaders at the University for informal presentations and Q&A. Obviously stemming from my experience at the Frye Leadership Institute this past summer, the idea was to have these leaders talk to us about their role at the University, how that role supported the University’s mission, and (if they were so inclined) how they saw information technologies supporting that mission. I am proud and grateful to say that every one of the leaders we contacted agreed to speak with us, and every one of them brought us a valuable perspective that informed the entire retreat very productively.

4. The bonus round (a late inspiration from yours truly) was the feature film for our optional movie night on Monday, Errol Morris’s Fast, Cheap & Out of Control. I thought these interwoven stories of obsessive, creative individuals who are trying to understand themselves and their work might feed into some of our other discussions during the retreat. And so they did.

My special thanks to our team of Instructional Technology Specialists: Lisa, Jerry, Jim, Martha, Patrick, and Andy. They rose to each challenge beautifully and exceeded all my hopes for engagement and spirited contributions. Now down to business, and chins up.

Hugh at the indispensable oook blog is experimenting with presenting his terrific Nova Scotia Faces project on a service called Squidoo. I’ve just signed up and looked around a little, and a few things strike me immediately about Squidoo:

1. It’s a kind of bloggy personal Wikipedia, i.e., a set of rich media AJAX enabled web pages that allow one to present expertise in a kind of self-publishing model. The result is somewhere between a brochure, a web site, and a self-published book. (The web is starting to look like a giant Mandelbrot set to me, in which microcosm and macrocosm keep repeating each other, but usefully, so that part and whole begin to be implied in each other in very inspiring ways. It’s the One and the Many all over again.)

2. The main metaphor is visual and an appealingly playful riff on Dungeons and Dragons. What one does on Squidoo is create lenses, and creators of lenses are called lensmasters. Digression: one of my favorite writing assignments is to ask students to read one essay in terms of another essay, as if the second essay is a lens through which one views the first, causing some things to pop out and some things to be hidden. It’s the most daunting essay assignment I’ve ever cooked up for freshmen, and the most valuable one. So I’m tickled and encouraged to see Squidoo using this metaphor as well. The cool thing, of course, is that by constructing a lens for others to view your particular interests and expertise, you’re also constructing a lens for yourself, on yourself.

3. Plenty of Web 2.0 goodies present: RSS feeds (I don’t see Atom, and Patrick‘s raising my consciousness about that), tags, community ratings, “about” info, search, clouds, easy links to del.icio.us, etc. Haven’t seen commenting yet, but then it’s designed as a starting point, not an end point. The idea is to drive traffic to your other sites. Actually, what this is, is a front end for an e-portfolio, with dynamic updating and subscribeability. The portfolio doesn’t just aggregate my stuff, though; it showcases my work, which is the idea, right? And won’t it be ironic if e-portfolios become a ubiquitous network-effected instance of social software around the world before higher ed gets around to widespread adoption? I’m thinking a robust e-portfolio system would and should be a prime recruiting tool for admissions departments at every US college and university. But I digress.

4. Here’s a kicker: the whole site is ad-supported. Once the Squidoo folks make enough money to cover their costs and give a little back to charity, whenever that may be, they plan to divide revenue among their lensmasters by lens traffic. If you create a great lens or set of lenses, you get royalties. All the details here. An intriguing idea, not wart-free, but intriguing nonetheless.

5. I’m also intrigued by the two free ebooks that Squidoo founder Seth Godin has made available as a way of educating Squidoo users: Everyone’s An Expert (About Something): The Search For Meaning Online, and its predecessor Who’s There: Seth Godin’s Incomplete Guide to Blogs and the New Web . I’ve skimmed the first bits of each and noted a couple of things. Godin’s a good writer and cares about good writing, his notion of “Incomplete” books is smart, and the free content these books represent is a very savvy part of his business model. Education drives choice and creativity, and what he’s built in Squidoo aims to be a platform for the presentation and empowerment of choice and creativity (“knowledge” is too inert a word here). Who knows how or if it will all work out. I’m not swallowing or advocating its claims here. But the ideas are very, very interesting.

5. Here’s another neat thing about these ebooks. Because they’re about general Web 2.0 topics, they can be repurposed easily. Because they’re free and digital, they can be shared widely. Because they’re licensed under Creative Commons, I have a good and encouraging sense of what use Seth considers fair. I’ll be looking at these ebooks very carefully, with an eye toward using them in my own work at the University of Mary Washington.

6. Stephen Powell blogs on interesting points of comparison between Squidoo and ELgg. Another reminder for me (thanks also to Martha) that I need to learn more about ELgg.

Clicking around I learn more about Seth Godin, and see as always that I have a lot to learn. But that’s a lens, too. I’m still not sure what to make of all these compelling ideas being aggregated in the service of marketing, but this is hardly the first instance I’ve seen over the last 2 1/2 years. Much to mull over. And one sobering reminder of the fragility of our Brave New World: I can’t do a simple “copy image location” to get the Squidoo logo on this blog entry, for while I was writing the site went offline for maintenance. A glitch, I’m sure, but like all such glitches, somewhere between annoying and troubling.

I need to get caught up here.

Reading:
Dream Boogie: The Triumph of Sam Cooke. No one does a music biography as well as Peter Guralnick, and this is a wonderful follow-up to the acclaimed two-volume Elvis biography. So far Sam’s still with the Soul Stirrers, but he’s watching Little Richard burn up the charts with “Tutti Frutti” and wondering if he should put different words to his own gospel songs as well. Fascinating and compulsively readable.

Just before sleep last night, I read and fell in love with David Denby’s piece in the latest New Yorker on James Agee. Two immediate thoughts here. One is that I would love to write like James Agee (I hear my toy-piano version of his Steinway in my head as I write), and I must get the new Library of America collection of his writing right away. The other is that Denby writes the essay like a man possessed, and I wish he wrote more like that in his movie reviewing. The reviews often strike me as tepid, superficial, and overly moralizing, but this essay on Agee, like Denby’s writing about Columbia U. in his piece on Edward Tayler many years ago, is something else altogether.

Viewing: Last night I finished Richard Linklater’s Waking Life. My Donne students, and my colleague Eric, had been after me for weeks to watch this movie. I certainly understand why. I had trouble falling asleep because it thronged my head with thoughts. I was hoping for a lucid dream last night as the perfect complement to the movie, but it didn’t happen. Come to think of it, I haven’t had a lucid dream for years, though they were quite common when I was a kid.

Listening:
Morten Lauridsen‘s setting of “O Magnum Mysterium” leaves me breathless, rapt.
I treated myself to “Astronomy Domine” and “Comfortably Numb” before bedtime. It occurs to me I’ve probably undervalued The Wall and should finally break down and buy a copy. At the time of its release, it was very hard to hear beyond the notoriety and celebrity. Now that “Jessie’s Girl” and Hi Infidelity aren’t echoing in my head, I can hear the Floyd’s work more clearly.
I wish I could find something else with Ferdinand Povel besides MF Horn 4 & 5: Maynard Ferguson Live at Jimmy’s. FP’s work on “I’m Getting Sentimental Over You” (one of my very favorite jazz standards) is spine-tingling. I see from this page where he went from there, but tracking it down will be another order, and a tall one. Maybe it’s time to learn Dutch. Thankfully, the fan page very generously shares a lovely “These Foolish Things” mp3 with us.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (3.0MB)

Steve Greenlaw’s finally publishing his fall 2005 series of blog entries on teaching, particularly the experiments he was running in his Economics classes. And what a wonderful thing they are.

Start here, then read all of them. And then join me in wanting more.

Thanks, Steve.

Normally I’d just note this in a del.icio.us sidebar feed, but under the circumstances I’ll say a howdy and thanks to Michelle for the link to Net Vibes, an AJAX-enabled portal that has drag-and-drop functionality. Strange, even uncanny. Break time’s over, though: back to the grading.

A power outage earlier this week has hit del.icio.us very hard. They had restored partial service as of December 14, but had to take the entire site down again last night because of continued problems.

It’s a Web 2.0 moment, when the sparkling idea of grassroots utilities reveals some of its more problematic facets. The comments on both pages, especially on the “continued hiccups” page, are very interesting in this regard. What’s different, of course, is that there’s actually a place for these comments to collect and reveal what’s typically hidden (or only partially revealed) every time a utility goes down. There’s everything here from hostility and contempt to empathy and encouragement. I understand the entire spectrum of response. I’m annoyed that I have to hack my blog template to remove the del.icio.us feed so that it won’t hang the blog itself. I’m anxious to think that my accumulated bookmarks, tags, comments, etc. may be gone, for a little while or perhaps for good. As an IT administrator, I’m sympathetic to what I know must be frantic and hair-pulling times at del.icio.us, and I wish them well as they try to manage the PR problems at the same time that they’re working to get this giant back on its feet.

Most of all, I’m hoping that the idea of grassroots utilities remains viable. The alternative is familiar and depressing, as big capital creates an infrastructure that sets all the telecommunications rules we live by. Can grassroots utilities also make the trains run on time?

UPDATE: Looks like the data is (are?) safe:

Still waiting for the last remaining index to build. No data has been lost — we just need to fix the tables so the databases can find things quickly. This appears to be largely due to a RAID failure after our power outage earlier in the week – one of the indexes became corrupted and crashed the master database; for some reason the slaves replicated bad data from the master and then ended up crashing infinitely.

Another nice departure from traditional utilities: frequent updates with information that’s more useful than “your call is important to us.” Good luck del.icio.us.

I’m behind in blogging and reading, and not likely to catch up until my grades are in and the term is put to pasture. But Andy sent around a note to our division about Alan “Cog Dog” Levine’s latest post on wikis, and asked us not to miss the ensuing comments either. No time to write about it just now, but I’ve been mulling all this over (along with the whole “connectivism” content vs. node question) pretty fiercely lately, and the most recent bit of ferocity in my achin’ muller is this fascinating and provocative IT Conversations piece from James Surowieki, author of The Wisdom of Crowds.

Highly, even urgently recommended.

More on this anon.