In a recent L. A. Times column, linguist Deborah Tannen explores gender differences in the context of a) the sciences and b) public discourse. I’m not convinced by all of her argument, some of which relies on reductive West vs. East cliches about modes of thought, and some of which extends that easy and misleading dichotomy into similar gender dichotomies. If men and women are significantly different, and the research at this point indicates they are, I don’t think it’s helpful to say one or the other has a “better way.” (I recognize that those words belong to the editor, not Tannen, but they’re a fair inference, at least in the context of Tannen’s discussion of journalism.) It’s also ironic that her very argument relies to some extent on the “agonistic” discourse she’s trying to characterize and counter. That said, Tannen usefully reminds us that rhetoric includes much more than argument, and that discourse may be thoughtful, deeply analytical, and persuasive without presenting itself as a “fight.” And I’m delighted to see that Walter Ong, whom Tannen calls a “cultural linguist,” is a focal point for these ideas.

EDIT: I was so distracted by the gender lead that it was only a few hours later I realized that there was a much more important point in Tannen’s article, one that didn’t really emerge until the end: one isn’t necessarily complicit just because one isn’t attacking. In fact, once the attack has begun, it’s pretty clear that the possible outcomes are few: defeat, victory, or uneasy truce. Tannen’s conclusions remind us that these are not the only possibilities, and that advocates of inquiry and cooperation are not necessarily just “company men” (or women).

A face-to-face talk with young filmmaker (and former student) Andrew Stone brings cool stuff to light for me today: Metaphilm. I’ve only just glanced at it, but what I’ve seen looks like catnip already. Film lovers, beware. Time to take the phone off the hook (an expression that will be meaningless in five years, if it isn’t already).

I learned many fascinating things today, both on my way to Ferrum College and after my arrival there. I’m at Ferrum to deliver the keynote address for the 2005 Virginia Humanities Conference. My topic is “Tools For Thought: The Humanities In The Age Of Technology,” and my shameless crib from Howard Rheingold’s life-changing work was meant to invoke his spirit, and the spirit of the thinkers he chronicles, as I composed and then delivered my address.

So what did I learn? On the drive down, I learned that Gordon Bell is working on a lifetime personal archive portfolio project that is nothing less than Vannevar Bush’s Memex realized. I learned about Virtual Leader and lessons learned from creating educational simulations. (More to come on that one, since I have found a fellow traveler in the “don’t make the interface transparent” journey I’ve been on for some time.) I learned about NeoNet, a new peer-to-peer technology, and I learned that The Grey Album, probably the most famous mashup to date, was done in two weeks using a cracked Sound Forge Acid download. (Danger Mouse later popped for the legit purchase.) At Ferrum, I learned of Martin Heidegger’s essay on “The Question of Technology,” which I blush beet-red to admit I had not read, but which I am delighted to know about now. Heidegger’s remarks are eerily apt for what I want to say tomorrow, and I’m greatly indebted to Radford University’s Kim Kipling for the citation. The lovely Internet allowed me to become slightly more educated in this area this evening. I will speak under correction tomorrow, as always, but if I understand what Heidegger meant I am more convinced than ever that computer-mediated-communications over the Internet can be profoundly poetic, considered as a emerging whole.

I also learned that the Latin word “copia,” meaning plenty, branches into another meaning by the Middle Ages: transcript. The OED speculates that Latin phrases granting freedom to read or write helped this latter meaning emerge, but I’m haunted this evening by the realization that the God’s plenty provided by our sophisticated tools for thought is etymologically linked to the idea of proliferating exact reproductions.

I apologize for the lack of links in this blog entry. It’s late and I need to sleep, and I’m on my brother’s dialup connection at his apartment in Salem. On the other hand, I grew up in Salem, and I drove by Ferrum regularly on my way to Wake Forest University as an undergraduate there. I love this section of Virginia very deeply and feel both alienated from it and strongly drawn to it, mostly the latter.

Tomorrow right after the address I drive back north to attend a former student’s wedding. A happy day, if the winds are favorable.

Rowan Hooper reports in Wired that researchers at Duke University’s Institute for Genome Sciences and Policy are concluding the human genome is actually two different genomes, one male and one female:

Women (and all female mammals) have two copies of the X chromosome, but the extra copy isn’t needed, and is switched off in a process called X inactivation. Or that’s what scientists thought.
“Our study shows that the inactive X in women is not as silent as we thought,” said co-author Laura Carrel, a molecular biologist at Penn State College of Medicine, in Hershey, Pennsylvania. “The effects of these genes from the inactive X chromosome could explain some of the differences between men and women that aren’t attributable to sex hormones.”

Consider this an enduring blanket endorsement of Jon Udell’s weblog. His screencast on annotating the planet with a GPS device and Google Maps is amazing. His screencast on how del.icio.us is creating the semantic web right in front of, or should I say, alongside us is amazing. In the two weeks or so I’ve been reading his blog, I’ve had one elating lesson after another.

In the hour or so since I first published this blog entry, after I’d done some sound editing for a new series of podcasts, I did my usual click-around-a-bit interval that typically precedes and follows writing or editing, and I found “Primetime Hypermedia,” a column Jon does for O’Reilly Network, and this behind-the-scenes account of how he put together his Umlaut-Band Wikipedia screencast:

Heavy Metal Umlaut: The Making of the Movie by Jon Udell — Jon Udell explains the process of making a documentary screencast, taking a look at the various screencast genres and examining the potential significance of this medium.

I wrote Jon last week to tell him that he was doing work of extraordinary value for all educators interested in teaching and learning technologies. He wrote back and said I had made his day. Hard to believe, but I was gratified. I just hope I’m not the first or last educator to tell him how much he is contributing to our lives.

I do have one complaint: Udell’s Infoworld blogs don’t accept comments. But his email link works.

A professor who loves Big Star and all power pop, who corresponds with Steve Simels (one of the great rock critics ever), and who likes the idea of Paradise Lost podcasts. Now, those are impressive credentials. Visit her power pop site and vote “yea” for a NYMary podcast. I”ll be in line with you for number one.

Is there a Wikipedian National Anthem? Here’s a story in Wired about Power Wikipedians. I prefer to think of that status in the altruistic sense of “powerful givers” rather than the Foucaultian sense of “circulators of power via discourse.” Their mini-bios sure don’t read like those of career “discourse initiators.” (Yes, today is bash-Michel day at Casa Campbell.) Author Daniel Terdiman has this to say about power Wikipedian Stacey Greenstein:

According to Wikipedia’s lists of most active editors, Greenstein made 1,809 edits during the past month. But she thinks that the timing is off and that those numbers refer to the work she did in December. “I suppose knowing that the 1,800 number was wrong says more about me than the fact that I edited 1,800 during some 30-day period.”

Greenstein’s passion in the real world is the same as it is on Wikipedia: fixing things. She is as likely to put misplaced books back in order in a bookstore as she is to correct a Wikipedia article. “I can’t understand why people would take a book off the shelf to see if they like it, and then put it back in the wrong place,” she said.

Greenstein has covered a wide variety of topics. Her favorites are primates and cephalopods, and recently, New York City subways. She considers it her mandate to be as good a Wikipedia citizen as she can, especially as the project has grown up. “I care a great deal about … Wikipedia,” she said. “The concept of ‘freedom to do as we please’ has finally begun its maturation to ‘responsible to do what we need.'”

Could this be the return of the philosopher kings and queens, except that this time anyone who wants to be one need only volunteer for Wikipedia duty?

I apologize for the title’s lack of creativity. I haven’t thought of a pithy or enigmatic label for the connections I want to outline here, so I resorted to what amounts to a list of keywords. I don’t even have a picture for you today. C’est la blog.

Yesterday’s New York Times ran a piece by Elizabeth Van Ness asking “Is a Cinema Studies Degree the New M.B.A.?” (The article ran in the Arts section, and you’ll have to register to read it. My thanks to Alice for spotting the story.) This morning on the way to work I listened to a podcast in which Jon Udell of Infoworld was interviewed about podcasting, blogging, and rich media on the web. There are rich connections here I want to explore just a little.

The Udell podcast (about thirty minutes long) is an elegant primer on podcasting and would be an extremely useful teaching tool for anyone trying to understand the phenomenon at a conceptual and user level; in fact, Udell tells a story of his own experience listening to podcasts that perfectly expresses my own experience with them, and hence my enthusiasm (at least for the listening end–producing them taps into far deeper enthusiasms for me). But that’s only the first level of this interview. On a deeper level, Udell brilliantly summarizes the converging factors that are leading to what many believe to be a communications revolution. He also identifies blogging as the primary point of leverage in this revolution. He’s not alone here either. What’s exceptionally useful about Udell’s podcast is the way he very plainly but comprehensively explains the pattern of influences and convergences, ending with another elegant primer on RSS and how it has changed his life.

The NYT piece says nothing about blogging, podcasts, RSS, or even the Internet per se. Instead, it’s about a deeper kind of media literacy, one that not only trains students to sit back and dissect the rhetoric of, say, television commercials, but provides the deeper training in expressiveness within these media that we in the academy have long taken for granted in the realm of English composition. Dating back to the humanist revolution in education that occurred in the European Renaissance, the idea here is that merely reading isn’t enough. Deep skill in reading cannot be attained without deep skill in writing. Thus we teach not only attention to others’ words, but adaptive skills and strategies in creating those words ourselves. Now, students are going to film school not simply to land a job in the film industry, but to master the skills and strategies of sophisticated visual and aural communications. Moviemaking 101 sits right alongside English Comp.

What strikes me this morning is how closely Udell and the NYT piece agree on the fundamental importance of acquiring these skills and strategies for the new era of rich media on the World Wide Web. Udell points out that we no longer have people type for us. Instead, the word processor means that we all have to learn typing. The gain is that we are more productive. Similar new skills and new literacies–in modes of multimedia writing, not simply in reading–will be essential to success in this century.

Podcasting as such is only about seven or eight months old. Blogging is only a few years old. These changes are coming at us very quickly. Will higher education be able to respond in a meaningful way? I hope so. In fact, I believe that the most creative and smart thinking about education has always concerned itself with the deep understandings of learning and expression that the new century clamors for. We need not start from scratch. What we need to do, I think, is to be honest about the ways in which education has been distorted despite our better knowledge, whether by ideology or by the more insidious effects of scaling along industrial (read: factory and assembly-line) models. (Though I take issue with some of the points and analogies, “Going Home: Our Reformation,” a challenging and inspiring piece Martha blogged about last week, arrives at many of the same conclusions.) Taken together, Udell’s podcast and the NYT piece help us imagine a better way.