No shocking news there. Just another focused, inspiring, generous, and generative blog from Jon Udell.

For people more interested in building civilization than in pushing flavor-of-the-month sensationalism, there’s just no better place to start, or end up, than Jon Udell.

Thanks, Jon.

Konrad Glogowski has written one of the best blog entries on the nature and value of online communities that I have read recently. Maybe ever. It begins with a direct report from a community of practice, and builds to a quotation from Walter Ong that very precisely and movingly expresses the potential for technology to augment human experience and creation. Ong’s words name that haptic potential in which cognition reaches out to incorporate (the word is interesting in this context) the tool into the purposefulness and joy of our shared existence. And Konrad contextualizes, indeed frames, that quotation with breathtaking skill and a heart big enough for two chests.

Thanks, Konrad.

In my interstitial time (thanks for the nomenclature, D’Arcy) I’ve been trying to follow as much of the current Wikipedia controversy as I can. It’s quite a flap. The issues are urgent, but the treatment of them is predictable. Even the truly disturbing aspects of the case are so coated in journalistic sensationalism that it’s hard to see the core truths being debated. After reading the UPI account of Wikipedia’s “at least 1,000 articles” (it’s more like 800,000 and counting) I’m reminded that reasoned authority, never in great supply, is a rara avis indeed these days, even (especially?) in the so-called mainstream media. Unfortunately, no one who knows better can reach into that UPI account and correct it. No, it’s not a libelous falsehood about a public figure, but if it were there’d be no correcting it except by the authority who let the mistake get in there in the first place.

I don’t by any means want to minimize the potential for harm in an online resource like Wikipedia. I don’t want to maximize it either, though the current media coverage I’m seeing online doesn’t encourage much careful reflection. (Can’t say I expected it to.) I’ll simply note that Wikipedia is in many respects, as Alan Levine notes, a mirror. Or perhaps it’s a time-lapse photograph of civilization itself. That sounds grand, even grandiose, but had I world enough and time I’d at least make the argument.

Until that day, it’s interesting to consider that the antiWikipedia movement includes both those who believe it’s dangerously anarchic and those who believe it’s one vast elitist conspiracy.

In a word, Wikipedia is the latest effort in the new leftist attempt to consolidate representative knowledge for the masses. It represents the migration of the old left into the field of cyber-information. Now programmers get to play at cyber-revolutions…

In a word, amazing.

Now, more than ever, we need clear thinking, rigorous reasoning, about authority: its nature, purpose, and relation to justice and democracy. Teachers are of course vital researchers in this area, or should be. We conserve authority. We interrogate authority. We create authority. And we urge and encourage those capacities in our classrooms every time we convene a class.

I think we must have faith in reason to make any headway in this endeavor. Turtles all the way down just won’t work, even as a pragmatic approach. But of course that’s only one point of view. Reasoned, but probably not neutral.

EDIT: I’ve blogged several times about Wikipedia. Two particular entries may be of interest in this current controversy. One is on Wikipedia’s plan to “freeze” certain articles once their content has become stable and uncontroversial. Another is a more philosophical jotting on what assumptions underlie all of our conceptualizations of the nature and meaning of the quest for knowledge, with Wikipedia as merely one example.

This word just in (sorry) from the New Oxford American Dictionary, who seem to have made the first such annoucement this year. Last year it was Merriam-Webster Online who got all the press for picking “blog” as their 2004 Word of the Year.

This year’s story is the especially poignant tale of a little portmanteau word that attracted some notice from the NOAD folks in 2004, but wasn’t quite ready to be thrust into the harsh lexicographical glare radiating from flat-panel monitors around the world. Yet like the little engine that could, “podcast” thought it could until it knew it could, and 2005 saw its triumph over such intimidating contenders as “IED” (improvised explosive device), “squick” (you could look it up), and “persistent vegetative state.” First runner up was “bird flu,” and the second runner up award went to “rootkit,” which is of course what “Dance to the Malware” Sony/BMG will be voguing to for some time to come.

Thanks to Anand for the heads-up on this story.

It’s an honor, and a delightful surprise, to have made the shortlist for this year’s Edublog Awards. I didn’t know nominations were being solicited; if I had, I would have sent over a list of my favorites. I didn’t know the shortlist had been announced until I saw the Technorati link. Voting started yesterday, but I just now saw the page for the first time. So much ignorance on my part! And yet someone was gracious enough to nominate Gardner Writes for the shortlist.

My thanks to that someone, or perhaps someones. My thanks also to Josie Fraser and all the folks who’re working on this project. I’m not too much on popularity contests, but in this case the more I think about it the more I’m convinced that it’s a worthy way to draw attention to worthy writers (even if I am in the bunch). For me it’s already been of great value: simply checking out my fellow nominees has introduced me to many splendid sites I had not seen before. More folks to add to my suite of trusted and inspiring experts … what’s not to like about that?

And those shortlist sites I have seen before? Humbling, and as with the sites that were new to me, high standards to aspire to.

Much, much more to say (and respond to) on the Collaboration in the Humanities thread, but I need to note the current Wikipedia controversy over an inaccurate biography. Many fascinating and urgent issues raised by these events, with the best talk about them occurring on Wikipedia itself, especially in the discussion pages.

In case the article I linked to above is deleted by the Wikipedia admins, here’s another description of the controversy. This account trumpets the value and accuracy of traditional media in ways that seem a bit self-serving to me, especially since traditional media don’t always get it right, either. It’s also worth noting that the vigorous and thoughtful discussion of the issue on Wikipedia doesn’t get a mention. No surprises there–this is an economic competition, after all, and I’m sure MSNBC wants us to get all our information from them.

I was going to leave all this as a comment on Techfoot’s latest blog entry, but the comment got so long that I figured it’d be better to house it here. For best results, please do read Gene’s entry first, then come back to this long and winding post.

Perhaps given the terms of the discussion at Gene’s meetings, “collaborative” and “communal” are not really the same. I keep thinking we need to put the products of individual reflection and creation in a conversation that, as it augments each individual contribution (conversation is an augmentative process, though I confess that meetings often seem like conclusive proof that that’s not true), becomes a truly collaborative environment that stimulates more individual creation and reflection.

The Mythical Man-Month talks a good deal about conceptual integrity as a sine qua non, and perhaps the humanities will always get after that goal differently from the sciences, since so much of our work in the humanities does consist of fact-finding (or evidence-finding) mingled with deeply considered and informed reflection that strongly represents an individual mind’s perspectives and sensibilities. The capacity to articulate strongly individuated and informed reflection is, I think, one of the primary goals of education in the humanities. But even so, we need to do much, much more to foster deep, serendipitous, multi-voiced connections among those individual creations.

The blogosphere is one model of individual voices collaborating, not on each piece of writing, but within an environment that fosters the kinds of connections I’m describing. The blogosphere is inherently collaborative–we are laboring together–but my blog is my blog and my voice carries my utterances even as my utterances are shaped through my agency and filtered through my sensibilities but created out of the other utterances that surround and inform me. “Utterance” is a term from Bakhtin’s linguistic philosophy. For a fine brief overview of Bakhtin’s thought, see this Wikipedia article. (Thought: perhaps the Wikipedia’s greatest value as a reference work is as a detailed glossary for the blogosphere.) For me, Bakhtin’s thought offers an essential way out of the connection vs. content debate–but more on that below.

I think our classrooms can also foster silence and speech, individual reflection and intellectual community, personal agency and authority as well as strong examples of the way culture potentially augments every human voice, allowing it to carry far beyond its immediate sphere of utterance.

I guess for me the bottom line is that the design of “real school” can and should foster both individual agency and cultural ferment. In my mind’s eye I see the spaces in which this happens. The classroom starts to look more like the campus, and the campus starts to feel more like a giant classroom. The classroom can very naturally support both massed attention to single compelling prompts and scattered, even serendipitous meetings, group work, project-based “pods,” etc. And the campus is not a set of purpose-built buildings so much as it is a giant learning commons that supports discovery and creation in multiple ways, some of them quite surprising.

It’s much easier not to do this, of course. We would never make our own living rooms, or studies, or rec rooms, or bedrooms into large closets with bare walls and anchored seats. But classrooms, like hospital rooms and prison cells, tend to be designed around principles of replication, interchangeability, and ease of maintenance. Those are not bad goals in and of themselves, and they do contribute to economies of scale, but I think they also interfere with the notion of compelling experiences shaped out of communal or collaborative intellectual experience.

Heresy time: I’m not against the sage on the stage, as long as she or he is genuinely sagacious and the stage is genuinely interesting, provocative, compelling, or enchanted. A great sage on a great stage can become an internalized “guide at the side,” and the reverse is also true. But now I’m onto another dichotomy–perhaps not unrelated. The key, it seems to me, is to have a city of learning with all sorts of spaces. Perhaps that’s the ecology John Seely Brown is describing. Perhaps it’s something like a giant movie set that supports reconfiguration as well as a rich infrastructure. (Seems to me wireless makes that circle more square-able.)

(It’s material for another post, really, but I’ve been meaning to blog for some time about the connection vs. content debate that’s been going on at George Siemen’s “Connectivism” blog. It’s a real dilemma, and perhaps it’s a real dichotomy (I remain skeptical here), but it’s also an instance of how difficult it is to keep one nail from driving out another.)

Great little nugget from Karen Hyman’s “Customer Service and the ‘Rule of 1965′”:

Choosing New Services: five easy questions
Do you have the skills? No.
Do you have the time? No.
Do you have the resources? No.
Is it difficult to manage? Yes.
Can it be abused? Yes.
None of the above is a reason not to do something, because the answers are always the same for any significant change.

From the October, 1999 American Libraries, but timeless and … ah … widely applicable in contexts other than libraries. A quick Google search reveals that Karen Hyman is still knocking ’em dead. I wish she blogged. She’d be a great asset to the blogosphere.

Catching up on my oook-learning, I found this little doorway into a secret garden where the inside is much larger than the outside.

Hugh Blackmer’s Nova Scotia Faces collection is a marvelous primer in close observation and the delicately timed articulation of commentary. If one wants to teach close reading and distinguish that art from the deadening habit of paraphrase, Hugh’s work here would be a great place to go.

He says he’s in no hurry with this project, but as one of the World’s Most Impatient Men I hope he won’t dawdle too long in his splendid New England otium.

I don’t mean to be greedy or gluttonous. No, that’s wrong: they’re exactly what I mean to be. More please!

I was all set to blog about “Semasiology,” a truly mind-expanding IT Conversations podcast from OSCON 2005, when I noted (via my Bloglines reader) that Hugh Blackmer of the always rewarding “oook blog” had beat me to it. So now my pleasure is doubled, as I get to point you to the podcast and to Hugh’s great blog. In addition to his characteristically smart and thoughtful commentary, Hugh has also provided some key snippets from the podcast to pique your interest.

Sometimes, things work out.

And what is semasiology? In the podcast, it’s defined as the study of the way words change their meaning over time. In this case, the specific word is actually the infinitive “to read.” I confess I like this definition from Princeton’s Word Net even better: “cognitive semantics: the branch of semantics that studies the cognitive aspects of meaning.”

Enjoy.

EDIT: Almost forgot to mention that the speaker sounds like a cross between Star Trek: The Next Generation‘s “Q” and Tom Lehrer. Most entertaining.