For the curious, the sleepless, and Claude who asked, here’s a podcast that Explains It All. Or tries to, anyway.

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I apologize for being silent so long. I’m told by a reliable supervisor that the California strain of influenza, probably the strain I hosted last week during my ‘flu festival, was a) particularly hard-hitting and b) impervious to the flu vaccine that I didn’t qualify for anyway. Since I am a scholar, I am somehow comforted by this knowledge. And I believe I am on the mend. So without further ado, a gadget:

Lots of buzz in the aether about DEMO, the innovation/demonstration revue that just concluded in Scottsdale, Arizona. The press coverage I’ve seen has focused on blogging and wiki applications, which of course pleases me, but I’m even more pleased to see an old friend from my Amiga days still in play. NewTek brought the Video Toaster to market in the late 80s , and the era of affordable desktop video production was born. Now it looks as if NewTek may have another ace to play: the BlackBox.

BlackBox is a portable live production switcher/Web streaming appliance. For under $5K, BlackBox allows the user to produce a live event, including switching multiple cameras, graphics, pre-recorded video material, PC screen shots, etc. (eight simultaneous video and graphic sources) and stream the output to the Web in real time. There is no other similar product in terms of price range, range of functionality and portability, on the market today.

Live TV for five grand: just add cameras and event. I can imagine plenty of illicit uses for this gadget, but I can also imagine a revolution in webcasting for education, and I know some enterprising undergrads will start doing some deeply cool campus TV shows, coming soon to a desktop near you.

Actually, BlackBox is part of the product (or “solution,” as the buzz goes) called TriCaster, which NewTek bills as the world’s first portable live video production suite. I bet they almost called it a TriCorder, but sober heads intervened. In any event, this may turn out to be the Portastudio of the video world. I’m intrigued.

Today’s Technology Review has an interesting blog from Henry Jenkins on recent developments regarding “fansubbing,” in which American viewers (or at least viewers in America) translate and subtitle Japanese anime that hasn’t yet been released in the US. Jenkins’ earlier article on this phenomenon, “When Piracy Becomes Promotion,” discusses the practice (and its intellectual property issues) in detail. The latest news is that a major anime studio called “Media Factory” has asked some fan sites that distribute fansubbed anime (mostly via BitTorrent, to the tune of ninety terabytes per day) to stop handing out or linking to copies of its works.

Following the easily visible threads of this story has led me from the MIT Anime Club in the late 1970s to the poignantly-titled Anime-Faith website (“Anime-Faith is chill,” it proclaims), where this morning one can download eighteen of these fansubbed productions. One title on the list is not available for download, however: Anime-Faith simply notes that it is “now available from Pathfinder Pictures.” This little notice is at the heart of the fansubbing community’s ethical understanding of itself. Once the title has been made available for retail purchase, ethical fansubbers take it off their sites–or at least that’s the promise they make.

Fansubbing, like fan fiction, is a fascinating example of learning communities that spring out of entertainment phenomena. (That may be a distinction without a difference, but bear with me.) To put it another way, the distance between a fansubber or a fanfic writer and a scholar may, in certain instances, be nil. One could make the same argument about creative writing, but writers I’ve known always have favorite writers whose work serves as touchstones for their own creativity, so there’s no news there. To flip the idea around, however, is to consider whether fandom, mutatis mutandis, might be a useful paradigm for understanding and encouraging learning communities.

I anticipate some early objections.

Q: Doesn’t a fan simply lose him- or herself in a kind of superficial hero worship? Won’t fandom be another opiate for the masses?
A: Not necessarily. Fans are not necessarily infatuated or fatuous. And the idea of fandom might encourage a sense of personal agency, commitment, and community in the learning enterprise.

Q: Can fandom coexist with critical thinking?
A: Insofar as critical thinking means an habitually ironic, distanced, self-excusing skepticism, I suppose not. But it’s obvious from that definition that I don’t believe such critical thinking should necessarily be at the heart of the educational enterprise. Nor do I think such “critical thinking” is even what its name promises. But that’s another blog.

Q: Can fandom coexist with critical thinking?
A: As fandom approaches the condition of a maturely loving relationship (modulating distance and devotion in a cycle of ongoing understanding) with ideas and their expression in human utterance and praxis, yes.

Q: Isn’t this all rather Dead Poets Society?
A: The idea at the heart of that film is worth exploring, despite the sentimental narrative that surrounds it. Or because of it.

The fact is, fan communities flourish and generate astonishing energy, whatever our official attitudes and strictures, and they will continue to do so. That energy can obviously fuel great personal commitment and creative output. It’s a renewable and communal source of energy that education would do well to explore more thoroughly.

Love is not all you need. A clear head and a light bulb are also handy, as Bob Dylan once said. But without love, where would you be now?

I just updated my Word Press installation to version 1.22 and it killed the WP 1.2 enclosures hack. Or at least it wounded it: my SQL database still had the extra tables, as I discovered after much trial and error (sometimes it’s good to assume you’re wrong, and sometimes it isn’t), but the new admin files overwrote the blog forms so I didn’t have the enclosure fields I had before. Ah well. Now I think I’m ready for a test ‘cast, which will be nothing but a banal impromptu version of what I’ve just written, which is a banal impromptu version of what I’ll say in a moment. But I’d better stop before I descend any farther into “I’m the world’s worst self-deprecator” mode.

A Washington Post article led me to the 2005 Bloggie Awards website. It’s an appealingly modest award competition–prizes seem to be in the $25-50 range at most–and very much in the blog spirit. I was pleased to see the inspiring South-East Asia Earthquake and Tsunami Blog is a finalist.

A new program at William and Mary will require students students to purchase notebook (aka laptop) computers. The program, called My Notebook, will begin as an optional pilot in the fall 2005 term; it will be required the following year.

Here’s coverage from a local TV station’s website that’s basically the AP story; it includes comments from W&M’s Gene Roche, Virginia Tech’s Larry Hinckler, and Diana Oblinger, Director of EDUCAUSE’s National Learning Infrastructure Initiative. The William and Mary My Notebook FAQ has detailed information on the program.

Programs of this kind almost always require that schools standardize on a single platform if they want to get the full business benefits. One can also argue, as W&M does, that single-platform computing is necessary to realize this program’s full educational benefits. At W&M, the standard platform will be MS Windows. Students who elect to purchase a Macintosh, or any other laptop not offered by the school, will not have the convenient and fast support the school will offer. They’ll have to get their support elsewhere. They’ll also need to be sure their computers can run the applications they need to complete the assignments their instructors give them; for Mac users, this could mean purchasing software to emulate the Windows OS on their machines. In other words, instructors will assume a common platform and a common configuration and create their classes accordingly. Anyone not buying a laptop from the school will have to meet those requirements on their own–not a daunting task for the computer-savvy, but an inconvenience that will probably motivate most students to buy through the college.

I’m not myself an advocate of campus-wide single-platform computing. I understand all the reasons it makes sense, but something in me resists this step, partially because I’ve had pretty good luck as an outlier in most things and I don’t want to eliminate or even curtail that possibility for others, and mostly because I don’t think one platform fits all uses. And as long as diverse careers require diverse computing platforms, I think we need to support multiple platforms in the campus computing environment.

But there’s a larger point to W&M’s program, one that I hope doesn’t get lost in the platform wars. We’re all waiting for information technology to transform teaching and learning in higher education. At this point, mobile and wireless computing hold great promise for this kind of transformation. William and Mary already has a robust wireless network and plans to have full coverage in the very near future. The laptop requirement and its associated benefits pretty much complete the infrastructure required for this transformation. (The only thing missing is Tablet capability–a significant omission, in my view, but not a dealbreaker at this point.) Then it will be up to the professors and the administrative leaders in academic computing to create imaginative and effective uses for these resources.

That last step’s a doozy.

Good luck to our neighbors to the east. We’re taking notes.

Never mind Look Who’s Talking. Now it’s Look Who’s Blogging. Joshua Pohl’s proud parents have bought him his own domain and outfitted him with his own Baby Blog. Only three entries so far, and only one in Joshua’s “voice,” but that’s not bad for a one-week-old.

I’m sure this is not the first blog/domain bought for a baby, but it’s the first I’ve seen, and it’s fun to think about. I hope Joshua’s parents have considered the security issues. On the other hand, I’m pleased they’ve already locked up Joshua’s name domain in the .com arena.

A reader left an interesting comment on my “I Can’t Help It If I’m Lucky” entry below. I was going to reply in a comment, but I think the comment deserves a full blog entry to itself, because I imagine the writer speaks for many concerned parents and taxpayers, and because it gives me the opportunity to clarify some things that I obviously got muddled in my original entry. Here’s the comment:

Interesting…the financial state of public education is, at best, abysmal, yet there seems to be an abundance of money available for blog registrations, conference fees, suites, etc.. I am glad to see that the tuition I pay for my son to attend UMW is going to better HIS learning.

Comment by TGAMM — 1/25/2005 @ 9:49 am

First, thanks for reading the blog and commenting.

I certainly understand TGAMM’s concerns and I’d like to reply to them briefly, hoping that he or she will return to see this. It would be even easier to have a dialogue with a name and email address, but perhaps this comment will suffice. I hope the information will be helpful and perhaps address some of TGAMM’s criticisms.

I pay for this blog out of my own pocket. Even if I didn’t, the cost is minimal: about 100.00 a year for a domain and space on a web server. This particular blog is part of a entire suite of applications I also use to support my teaching. Last semester, 80 students used a discussion forum on this website, and it generated 2700 posts–pretty good investment for a lot of student engagement. This semester, I’ve got 35 students blogging elsewhere on this site and 15 in a discussion forum on this site. Eventually, I’d like this capability to be part of a suite of online services we offer all faculty, staff, and students at the University, as some institutions already do (see the University of Minnesota’s “U-Think” blog site for an interesting example). And many blogs are free: those on Blogger or Blogspot, for example, though these are harder to administer for classroom use.

The conference fees are included in UMW’s membership in the National Learning Infrastructure Initiative. By taking five faculty and one Instructional Technology Specialist to this conference, UMW provides crucial faculty and infrastructure development in a very cost-effective manner, and exposes some of our best teachers and staff to the very latest, most cost-effective means of providing high-quality education to all our students. For a school with minimal resources such as ours, the 5000.00 per year we pay to belong to the NLII, which includes five free registrations for this annual meeting and three free registrations for each of the three annual focus sessions, is a great way to maximize the few dollars we have and spend them where their benefit is greatest.

The suite was an accident, as I tried (and obviously failed) to make clear in the blog entry. The upgrade was in accommodation, not in price. I paid the same rate I would have paid had I been in a standard room. In fact, that suite cost about 60.00/day less than standard rooms in the official conference hotel. I felt the entire situation was faintly ridiculous, and that feeling inspired the blog, but tax- and tuition-payers should be assured that there was no extra charge involved.

And yes, the tuition you pay for your son is, in part, going to better my learning. As my expertise increases, the value of your tuition dollars goes farther, and the education your son receives is, at least potentially, better: better because I’m up-to-date on vital developments in the profession of higher education, better because I’ll be more informed about information technologies and thus help prepare your son to be a vital contributor in an increasingly technology- and information-driven world, better because I meet talented professionals from all over the world whom I will invite to interact with my classes (as I already have), and better because any time I learn something, I’m going to share that with my students, and we’ll both benefit. I’m happy that part of my hospital fees go to educating doctors and surgeons, and that part of my lawyers’ fees go to educating lawyers, because their benefit directly translates into my benefit. I’m paying for their expertise, and expertise needs constant development because knowledge is increasing and changing. When my wife and I send our children to college, I hope their professors’ ongoing education is a high priority for the institution. Otherwise, our children won’t be prepared for the world and the lives that await them after graduation.

Thanks again for the comment, TGAMM. I welcome further dialogue on this topic!

Interesting session going on right now at the NLII meeting: Beauty and the Beast: Bringing Blogs into Higher Education. Take a look–there are session comments on the blog questions.

Also: Segue is Middlebury’s CMS, available for free at Slashdot.

The next session starts in 25 minutes. I want to blog about some sessions I saw this morning. There’s no time to write it out, so this podcast will have to carry the load here. Load of what? Ah, dear reader/listener, that will be up to you, and posterity, to decide.:)

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (4.5MB)