Lawrence Lessig of the Stanford University School of Law (and board member of the Electronic Frontier Foundation) and Jeff Tweedy of the rock band Wilco shared a dais last Thursday at the NY Public Library, where they spoke on issues of peer-to-peer file sharing, intellectual property, and copyright. This NY Times story by David Carr reports on the event (registration required). Carr terms Lessig “one of the philosopher kings of Internet law” and calls Tweedy “the crown prince of indie music.” (Is there somewhere we can write to second the nominations?)

Lessig blogs about his dissatisfaction with the NY Times article, saying that it perpetuates a false dichotomy between “supporting piracy” and “opposing piracy.” I understand Lessig’s frustration, though I also think it’s a bit of a stretch to expect a nuanced, reflective essay from a newspaper’s coverage of a public event involving a rock star. I’m also not sure that Lessig’s notion of “remix culture,” one that I find very compelling, can avoid charges of piracy if that idea includes not only fair use but the ability to morph original creations by digital manipulation and resell them for a profit on the open market. Everyone cites The Grey Album as the poster child of remix culture, but even with much-needed reforms in copyright law and a thorough reworking of the DMCA, or even its elimination altogether, do we really think artists should be forced to let anyone with a PC and a sound card (and, as Danger Mouse admitted, a bootleg copy of Sound Forge Acid) take the music they’ve crafted over a lifetime of devotion to their art and treat it merely as raw material for a “remix”?

I’m still thinking over all these issues, as is Lessig (just one of the reasons I admire his work). In a blog yesterday he asks, “is there a way to protect the legitimate IP interests of the copyright holders, without polluting remix culture?”

Apparently an archived webcast of the NYPL event will be available at some point.

I’m sure I’m one of the last people in the blogosphere to discover this site, but just in case I’m really only the next to last, I’ll pass along this link to a remarkable section on the the Edward Tufte site called “Ask E. T.” Tufte is the author of the classic The Visual Display of Quantitative Information as well as the enormously entertaining (and a little reductive) pamphlet on “The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint.” Tufte’s website has gotten a lot richer than it was two or three years ago when I last visited. At “Ask E. T.,” Tufte runs a rather unusual discussion forum:

At this moderated forum, I will answer questions dealing with information design. Others can then extend the discussion. I will try to answer questions that have general interest or where I have something to say. Not all questions will be answered, usually because I don’t know the answer.

*** = 3-star threads

Best, E.T.

And yes, Virginia, there’s even an RSS feed. Also, why am I not surprised to see such tight conceptual connections on this site between Tufte and Richard Feynman?

eSchool News Online reports that Duke is scaling back on its iPod deployment for the 2005-2006 academic year. No longer will all incoming freshmen receive an iPod; instead, iPods will go to students and faculty who are making specific use of the devices.

The eSchool article details the good and bad outcomes of the year-long iPod experiment, most of which are predictable, although that doesn’t mean the experiment wasn’t worth doing. What’s more interesting, however, is that Duke is repositioning the iPod experiment as a “jump-start” for the new Duke Digital Initiative. Provost Peter Lange’s memo to Duke faculty specifies rich media authoring, alternative input devices such as tablets, and social networking applications as areas the DDI will investigate. I applaud this plan and look forward to learning from Duke’s experience as it moves forward.

The world of Flash animations on the Internet provides interesting meeting-places. My son and I bonded one day over the Badger animation, one I find weirdly compelling. Those badgers are so doughty, and the menace in their world is drawn with a sinister rhythmic whimsy: “Snake!” As way leads on to way, there’s a charming soccer version of the Badger animation. And I’m confident there’s more where they came from, had we but world enough and time.

One badger-morphed animation leads the pack, though: Bananaphone. (Thanks to Larisa for this recommendation.) Gundam banana meets badger, all set to music that’s insanely catchy. Far too many people on this campus could sing along to “Cellular, Modular, Interactive-odular.” Next year it’ll be so 2005, but for now, it’s the Burma Shave of the University set. We can all play in its happy world.

I recommended that happy world to a colleague with young children. Several days later at a department retreat, he reported that the animation was sinister, bloody, and threw several f-bombs around that his kids remarked on. My colleague is a specialist in the avant-garde, so on one level he was mightily intrigued by this radical short film and not terribly worried it had warped his children forever, though he was clearly also puzzled that his mild-mannered Renaissance colleague would recommend such a thing to him to share with his kids.

I was puzzled too, since the Bananaphone I had seen and recommended was nothing like what he described.

A moment on Google solved the mystery: a search turned up the most common Bananaphone, but it also turned up a South-Park-style revision of the animation in which a character suffers spontaneous hemorrhages because he can’t get the song (in its original Raffi incarnation) out of his head. I don’t care too much for this bitter bloody version, myself, and I certainly wouldn’t recommend it for kids, though it does have its own strange interest.

Here’s the real interest for me, however. No longer will I casually say “oh, just Google on x” when I’m recommending Flash animations. They mutate too quickly. I’ll send a link instead. I’ll link to the Wikipedia, too, since to my delight and wonder I found that it has a Bananaphone entry that explains the origins and derivations of both Bananaphone animations. Astonishing to find the encyclopedia keeping up with the mutations–or perhaps that’s simply the relative perspective of an observer on another, slower train (i.e., me). Ah, red-shift! Ah, humanity!

Links to the fun stuff on Ian’s House Of L33t Pancakes.

The 2005 Educause Policy Conference is in full swing, and Chip German, the University of Mary Washington’s CIO and VP for IT, is attending on our behalf. Via email, Chip files this report:

I’m detecting among governmental relations people (as well as the IT folks here) an interesting theme that, if not new in this arena, is newly and accessibly phrased:

America’s competitiveness in the future depends on everyone’s recognition that the next generation’s natural means of interacting with information and of learning is changing at an astounding rate — far faster than it has before (perhaps in all of human history) and clearly much faster than the folks who are currently delivering information and education are perceiving it.

That simple statement (admittedly, my words, representing an amalgam for thoughts from the day) is both thrilling and chilling: there is a plaintive cry here from folks looking to the future for us — higher education — to recognize this and adapt to it (that’s the good part), but as I look around the room, I’m not sure I see significant understanding of the implications even among many of the higher ed IT leaders.

I think the piece that has dawned on me here (dense as I am) is that this argument is one that educators can’t dismiss as current trendy hype. It is an early anthropological observation that anyone who observes the current generation of adolescents knows is not exaggerated one bit. The point is not what it is today, but that it is clearly part of a permanent change that is unfinished — this genie isn’t fully out of the bottle yet (by a long way).

Adding to that feels impertinent, but why should that stop me this time?

I really do believe, as I’ve tried to say many times in this blog, that Doug Engelbart’s notion of third-stage augmentation, in which we improve our processes for improving, is at the heart of what we mean by education, metacognition, “critical thinking,” “empowerment,” and all the other words we use to describe this vital cultural enterprise in which we as a species are engaged. These augmentation efforts are not new, but information technologies extend and intensify them to an unprecedented degree. And it breaks my heart that the institution of education lags so conspicuously behind other human endeavors in coming to grips with these new instruments. Can it be that the failure of information technologies to revolutionize education is not about the failure of information technologies at all? Has the institution of education become an obstacle to “garnering compound interest on … intellectual capital”?

Time to change the metaphor. We should not struggle with innovation, or come to grips with IT, or engage new paradigms, or push the envelope, or be on the cutting edge or the bleeding edge or on edge at all.

We should be virtuosos of augmentation.

This is what I’d call interdisciplinary education.

Two days ago, video- and film-maker Michel Gondry (Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind) expressed his mind at a free public lecture at MIT. As a follow-up in the not-too-distant future, he’ll come back as an artist-in-residence “to visit classes and labs, investigate research on sleep and memory, give workshops and share meals with faculty, staff and students.” I hope screenwriter Charlie Kaufman will drop by for a visit.

I’ve been a huge fan of the movie ever since I saw it, for many reasons. I taught a class on the film at St. Catherine’s School in Richmond just a few weeks ago and came away more excited about it than ever. From the perspective of information technologies, the film reveals even more layers of meaning. I’m looking forward to seeing it again.

Is the Massachussetts Institute of Technology the newest liberal arts powerhouse?

(Thanks to Vanessa Bertozzi at MIT’s Technology Review for the initial link.)

Pioneer podcaster (and former MTV VJ) Adam Curry has a new Tablet PC, and he’s describing it and trying it out in his April 3 Daily Source Code podcast. He’s pretty candid about its advantages and disadvantages, but in general quite enthusiastic.

It’s not surprising that Curry’s Mac user fans (Curry’s been a Mac-only operation up to now) flooded the comments section of his weblog with cries of “betrayal!” and “sellout!” To be fair, the sound quality was not up to scratch at the beginning of the podcast, but in my view and experience that’s more the fault of the headset/mic he was using and his inexperience with Windows than with any limitations in the machine or platform. And of course I’m happy to see the Tablet PC get a high-profile notice, despite the fact that a) its debut was not auspicious and b) Curry described the tablet as “kind of gone out of vogue,” though he hastens to add that the new chief of technology at Amazon.com uses one. If Curry’s now using one himself, has the tablet come back in vogue? Where’s William Gibson’s Cayce when you need her to do some cool-hunting?

Dave Winer at Scripting News reports on a new Pew Internet survey indicating six million American adults have listened to podcasts so far. The survey does not include Americans under 18. (I’d bet we could add another million or two of these users to the total.) Along with this interesting news, the Pew report is also valuable as an accessible explanation of podcasting. As way leads on to way, I note the Pew report also cites the podcasting article in Wikipedia, further evidence of that resource’s growth in public stature and perceived value as a reference source.

Scripting News also reports that Peterson’s, the college admissions advising and information service, has added podcast-enabled audio to its pages.

Yesterday I upgraded my Word Press script from 1.2.2 (modded for podcasts/enclosures) to 1.5, which supports podcasts “automagically”: I simply link to a media file and it automatically generates the RSS feed with the enclosure tag. I tested the new installation yesterday, including a new test podcast, and everything seems to be working well, but if any of you have difficulties with the RSS feeds and/or the podcasts, please let me know. I’m going to put up another podcast sometime today, if the creek don’t rise.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (48.5KB)