Or, more accurately, Hugh Blackmer on a powerful enabler of real school:

It’s not that we need to find the one best way of presenting information, but that the presentation should be easily [re]configurable to suit the user’s needs, preferences, purposes. User Interface is surely as much a conceptual problem as a design problem or a matter of hardware contingencies.

The intersection of pedagogy/cognitive science with UI: X marks the spot, or one spot … a place to start digging, or building … arrange the metaphors like facets in a diamond, both to gather and scatter the light.

Can we find a Theory of Everything that preserves both the One and the Many? That’s the kind of question that makes a few of my readers gnash their teeth, and perhaps even charge me with “being literary.” Well, guilty: You may say I’m a dreamer, but I’m not the only one. (And I’m not even sure that’s a good song–but it’s salutary to have that line juxtaposed with another bit of truthtelling from Lennon’s work: “No one I think is in my tree; I mean it must be high or low.”)

Or maybe I need Walt Whitman: “Failing to find me at first, keep encouraged.”

Or perhaps Doug Engelbart, again, and always:

We do not speak of isolated clever tricks that help in particular situations. We refer to a way of life in an integrated domain where hunches, cut-and-try, intangibles, and the human “feel for a situation” usefully co-exist with powerful concepts, streamlined terminology and notation, sophisticated methods, and high-powered electronic aids.

I repeat myself to remind myself: a liberal arts education ought to be the best opportunity for imagining and crafting, privately and in community, just such an integrated domain.

My son taught me about fan fiction, an Internet genre I find fascinating–although the concept is more interesting to me right now than the examples I’ve seen. Doesn’t matter: if the idea is interesting, there’s bound to be some stellar instances.

Tonight I discovered the intriguing world of recaps, where people write long and detailed accounts of television episodes. These are not summaries or synopses. They’re chronicles. I’m only at the entryway, but it seems as if recappers (no doubt they have a cooler confraternal word for themselves) even compete with each other to see who can craft the most engaging and compelling recaps. One I perused included a running editorial/one-liner/aside commentary within the recap itself, sort of like a Mystery Science Theater 3000 without directing all the sarcasm at the episode. (These are fans, after all, not camp aficionados per se.)

Recaps aren’t remixes. So what are they? Short-story-izations? And how would we use literary theory either to analyze or account for them? (That’s a semi-facetious question.)

One set of recaps: House, M.D. at “Television Without Pity.” Note the report cards and pull quotes.

Steve Greenlaw sends me a link to a fascinating Wired column by William Gibson: “God’s Little Toys.” Here’s my response (query: why doesn’t Wired permit comments on their essays?).

My initial thoughts are two. Gibson’s right about God’s little toys. I feel exactly the same way about the audio work I’ve done with tape and now with the computer, and word processing has always seemed like magic to me. Gibson’s take on recombinant or remix culture is also very compelling. The problem here, as is always the case with remix evangelists, is that a weird implication emerges: in the future, there will be no authors, and no authority. Instead, mass-produced culture will magically be reformed by clusters of users into either compelling or faddish new stuff that we’ll all go “woo” for.

I don’t believe that for a second.

A person’s sensibilities will always be the most potent remix engine of all, and when those sensibilities filter, mix, and reforge a new creation, the world will turn its attention to that person. Not that group or that culture or that demographic. That person. Of course that person will have made his or her collage out of everything else in the world. That’s the way creativity has always worked, and must work. No one invents the material of the world or a culture or a language out of whole cloth. In this respect, remix culture is a sped-up and amplified version of what has been going on since civilization emerged. But it is not something new–and in fact this is a point that Lawrence Lessig always emphasizes when he advocates copyright reform.

The remix always makes something, and that something is not just a remix. The album is not dead. The song is not dead. (Terrible truth: mashups are often boring, and even the good ones are no substitute for the songs themselves–more like an interesting mini-essay on music.) The novel is not dead. The essay is not dead. The author is not dead. King Tubby and Lee “Scratch” Perry are one way to make art; they’re not the paradigm of the new and only way to make art. (The fact that Gibson names them–and that their names mean something in terms of identifiable practice–supports my point.) Audiences are not “passive” (what a very strange idea–where does that come from?), and they’re not going away. Gibson’s enthusiasm is understandable, but his argument is inconsistent with his own practice, and it does not do justice to the complexities of history or contemporary culture. Unless we can think more clearly about these issues, we’re just taking a ride on the Eternal Pendulum. (Like most teachers, I am officially committed to the belief that such pendulum-riding is not inevitable, though I understand its likelihood is always very strong.)

But this essay is still required reading, if only because Gibson blurs the usual boundaries between images, sounds, and text. That blurring may be the most significant practice to emerge from the new digital culture we inhabit. It’s also one that deserves more attention than it’s yet received. I’d like to read Gibson on that topic.

This I like, very much:

Sometimes I share [Perry] Miller’s frustration that the genre of “essay” has so much disappeared from academe. Much could be gained if scholars, drawing on accumulated moments of instruction and reflection, could feel free to venture forth without the fear of loss. Let me venture, with no scientific proof, that academics rarely refer to their shorter works as “essays” any longer. While passing each other in the hallway, colleagues are more likely to refer, alas, to this or that “piece.” They are even more likely to refer to an “article,” which like “piece” is a reifying noun. Both names make scholarship sound like an article/piece of clothing, rather than the nervous but exhilirating process of dressing for a safari.

These are particularly brave words from a grad student in the thick of a dissertation. They also serve as a salutary reminder of the way in which this new (or new/old) genre of blogging may help to shake up the industrial model that currently shapes much of education.

Thanks, Caleb.

Johns Hopkins grad student Caleb McDaniel has written a very intriguing and persuasive essay in Common-Place on historical analogues for blogging. McDaniel’s argument makes a strategic move away from writers and toward readers-who-write, a move I have found very helpful in trying to make sense of canon debates as well. Favorite pull-quote of the moment:

And despite our differences from antebellum readers, the central challenge for us, as it was for them, is not how to gain access to an abundance of information, but how to decide what information to acquire and which associations to make. In real terms, bloggers do have access to more information than nineteenth-century readers did, but there is only so much information that any one reader can digest, so the problem for both still becomes what to read and how to read it.

McDaniel’s essay goes a long way toward explaining the blogosphere’s fascination and compelling power for me, although I’d expand its parameters beyond print culture (as I suspect McDaniel would too). It really is an Engelbartian augmentation of a practice as old as civilization itself. The interesting question that follows, for me at least, is whether the difference in degree made possible by high-speed networked computing amounts to a difference in kind as well. I’d argue the answer was yes in the case of the printing press, and that it’s also yes in the case of the Internet. How to understand and constructively use the difference is then the next question.

McDaniel’s essay is available online, for instant scholarly gratification. Thanks to The Chronicle of Higher Education for the initial story.

The BBC links to video taken by passengers and passersby just after the London bombings last week. There’s some distant footage of the wounded and, perhaps, the dying, but thankfully nothing so clear or sensational that it would be appealing to voyeurs.

Surprisingly, some of the most compelling video is not of carnage at all. Much of the footage depicts people calmly evacuating Tube trains. One clip has audio from the train driver urging calm. I am deeply moved by the shots of people who are simply walking to safety. There’s no panic, just resolution. I’m sure there’s fear and confusion and all the swirl of dread one can imagine. It may be that other footage shows more of this response. The clips I’m seeing, though, offer a humbling portrait of human courage.

The tone in this lyric is tricky. Not because it’s ambiguous: the anxiety and grief are palpable throughout. No, the tone is tricky because even in the keening pitch of sorrow, the poet sends the emotion through very tangled syntax that demands careful attention, and such syntactic manipulation seems somehow antithetical to a rush of emotion. The result is a curious and difficult mix of cerebration, terror, and frantic love, with a dash of anger at the beloved for the death she might well suffer soon.

A curiously and complexly wrought poem, then, that’s also nearly beside itself with emotion. It may reflect Donne’s grief over his wife Anne’s illness, or it may be written for someone else at another time in his life. The fever in question could be the result of childbirth, or infection, or any number of other mishaps. It could all be a dramatic construct, no less authentic for being fictional. But something tells me there’s biography here: “A Feaver,” by John Donne.

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This one’s a toughie. As in “Sweetest Love,” Donne imagines every parting as a kind of death. True to form, he takes that “death” as another chance to analyze what it means to be in love. Parting is a kind of test case, then, that allows him a peculiarly intense opportunity for reflection. And the reflection in this case turns to the confusion of selves within a love: confusion in the sense that the two lovers become one, and in the sense that a certain wounding loss of identity also occurs. Donne’s cerebrations are hard to follow, but with some patience and persistence the reader may find that Donne describes very well the power and vulnerability that accompany love. One feels wholly given over to something greater than oneself. At the same time, one feels disintegrated, open to pain and betrayal, almost helpless. There’s more than a hint of bitterness at the end of the poem, but it comes in so late that the earlier analysis (and, oddly, exuberance) doesn’t get eclipsed by it, at least for me.

Here’s “The Legacie,” by John Donne.

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Interesting survey; I’ll be curious to see the final results in July. Apparently one can change one’s responses all the way up until the end. I don’t believe I’ve seen that feature in a survey before. (Perhaps my survey chops are just not what they need to be.)

You can take the survey yourself by clicking on the graphic above.

I should try to find a musical setting of this poem, if not for the podcast (it’s not “podsafe” music, I’m sure) then for the class I’ll teach in the fall. For all his intellectual fireworks, Donne can be intensely lyrical, as I hope my reading demonstrates. He’s never just lyrical, or not for long, but the moments of verbal sweetness do persuade me that he chooses his more angular, dramatic style deliberately.

This is a love poem that returns to Donne’s favorite playground by the end: the mind, both in the sense of “intellect” and of “imagination. ” This poet might say, “I think, therefore I love.” Or perhaps it’s the other way ’round. In any event, I hope you enjoy “Song: Sweetest Love, I Do Not Go.”

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