What if you were the guy who had the idea for optical storage of digital audio and video, and who made the idea a reality by recording a television show on an optical disc in the mid-1970s … and you couldn’t even take a sip from the gravy train that rolled through once the rest of the world caught up to your boldly imagined innovation?

Sometimes I’ll get on a bit of an information-wants-to-be-free kick. In fact, I’m having a great time experimenting with open-source php scripts at work right now. But just when I start to get big utopian thoughts, I read an article like this one, and I think that I must never, ever lose sight of basic issues of intellectual property and fair compensation.

Hollywood director James Cameron admits he made Titanic because he wanted an excuse–and funding–to take a submersible down to the wreck itself. He builds on this story to make the case for sending humans on a Mars mission. Why not just send machines? In his Wired article, Cameron writes:

Exploration is not a luxury. It defines us as a civilization. It directly or indirectly benefits every member of society. It yields an inspirational dividend whose impact on our self-image, confidence, and economic and geopolitical stature is immeasurable.

The idea of an “inspirational dividend” doesn’t have much traction with David Appell, though, who thinks Cameron is being merely “romantic” with no real argument beyond “exploration is worthy for its own sake.”

I’ll admit that Cameron doesn’t assemble a compelling logical argument, which for me would have something to do with the value of shared human experience. Nevertheless, so long as the argument is about data, not inspiration or meaning or all those other warm, fuzzy, crucial words, the case for human exploration will seem weak. Ah, but the heart has reasons of which reason knows not.

I’d sign up for the trip in a heartbeat.

I read Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead over the Thanksgiving holiday. I don’t often buy a contemporary novel solely on the strength of positive reviews, but Michael Dirda’s review (blogged on below) stuck in my mind for days and I found myself yearning to read the book for myself.

The holiday was an apt time for this book. My family and I were visiting Grandma and Grandpa in Harrisonburg, joined by my sister-in-law and her new husband and her stepdaughter, and amid much eating and hilarity and shopping and loving talk I found several hours in which to read the book. The surroundings and family warmth made the book even more resonant than it would have been anyway, so much so that at times I had to put the book down for fear I would return to the festivities with my face streaked with tears. They might have been tears of happiness or sadness–the book has plenty of both–or they might have been tears of wonder, which are the hardest tears to explain. In any event, I didn’t feel it proper to intrude my own reading ecstasies on everyone else at the table (or elsewhere), though I did read a couple of passages aloud as I went along, and there was a fine moment when I got to a passage on predestination in this household of staunch Presbyterians (sister-in-law and father-in-law are both Presby ministers, don’t you know). Mostly, though, I read the words and pondered them in my heart.

This really is a remarkable book. It reminds me of Sir Thomas Browne, of Flannery O’Connor, of George Bernanos (whose Diary of a Country Priest is mentioned in the book), even of George Herbert, a strong presence throughout whom Ames specifically discusses at one point.

But this is not a derivative book by any means. The voice of John Ames, the book’s protagonist, is unique, and compelling. There is equal power in his introspection and his narratives, a difficult trick that Robinson pulls off brilliantly. She also does something else brilliantly: she manages to convey the multiple levels of Ames’s self-reading while at the same time she suggests patterns apparently invisible to Ames that the reader may sense without feeling at all superior to the protagonist. Dramatic irony of this sort is rare, and is usually reserved for tragedy. This book, however, is not a tragedy.

I can only echo the praise others have given this book. The writing is limpid, wonderful. It’s a novel of ideas, a great character study, a great book about America. It’s something like a psalm, finally. One of the many things I’m grateful for this Thanksgiving is that I had the opportunity to read this book–and that Marilynne Robinson had the courage and skill with which to write it. Thank you.

Interesting article in today’s Technology Review on “big science” collaboration. The National Science Foundation is funding a “Science of Collaboratories” project. And what is a collaboratory? Gary Olson at the University of Michigan defines it this way:

an organizational entity that spans distance, supports rich and recurring human interaction oriented to a common research area, and provides access to data sources, artifacts and tools required to accomplish research tasks.

It’s easy to see that this definition can work for all sorts of collaboration in higher education and elsewhere, which is why the article’s seven principles for successful collaboration are useful for anyone trying to use online learning effectively. The eighth principle is also very important, though it isn’t given its own number and is mentioned only at the very end: “social glue” among participants is vital, and one of the best ways to get “glued together” is by face-to-face interaction.

There’s that blend again.

Simson Garfinkel of Technology Review blogs about Dan Klein’s presentation on this topic. Lots of links from the blog to the presentation: a streaming webcast, as well as PowerPoint slides and a PDF collection of those slides. It’s actually an interesting intellectual exercise to try to imagine the presentation based only on the PowerPoint slides–almost a translation exercise. I think I get the gist of it, though I had to get all the way to the end to understand what was up with the vultures and emus. Well, understand is too strong. Let’s just say I can guess at the general point Klein seems to be making.

I suppose it’ll take the webcast to clear up all the mysteries. Better, but less fun. (Spoken like a true English prof.)

That’s the title of the new novel by Marilynne Robinson, whose only other novel to date is the well-loved Housekeeping. I’ve not read Housekeeping yet (though I have seen the movie), but I have a feeling I may need to read this latest novel first. Michael Dirda’s review in today’s Washington Post was very stirring. He quotes this excerpt from the novel, a passage of extraordinary beauty and resonance:

I feel sometimes as if I were a child who opens its eyes on the world once and sees amazing things it will never know any names for and then has to close its eyes again. I know this is all mere apparition compared to what awaits us, but it is only lovelier for that. There is a human beauty in it. And I can’t believe that, when we have all been changed and put on incorruptibility, we will forget our fantastic condition of mortality and impermanence, the great bright dream of procreating and perishing that meant the whole world to us. In eternity this world will be Troy, I believe, and all that has passed here will be the epic of the universe, the ballad they sing in the streets. Because I don’t imagine any reality putting this one in the shade entirely.

Here’s the complete text of Dirda’s review (registration required).

I just ran across an interesting essay by Simson Garfinkel on “The Myth of Doomed Data.” It’s not the whole story, of course, but it is a powerful rejoinder to those who insist that the digital future will simply erase the digital past, over and over.

Here’s a taste:

Some argue that it’s impossible to look into the future and determine which of today’s formats will survive and which will go the way of the VP 415. Poppycock! As a society we have a very good understanding of what will make one file format endure while another one is likely to perish. The key to survival is openness and documentation.

It’s a two-hour session. It begins (it seems) with a film showing, The Forgotten Faces (1961). Then Jim Welsh presents on Images of Budapest. Ken Nolley ends the session with a paper on Fahrenheit 9/11. In between I’m doing a paper on The Fog of War.

And here we go! Ack.

Later edit: What a privilege it was to be on this panel. Jim (and Ken, in later discussion) did a great job of exploring the fascinating work of Peter Watkins. Ken’s paper was a deeply thoughtful and inspiring look at the responses to Michael Moore’s latest film. And the response to my paper was thoughtful, sharp, and encouraging, even (especially?) when the discussants took issue with some of my points. I’ve got to be careful here, or soon I’ll be insisting that academia can actually work the way it’s supposed to….

Thanks to everyone involved in this session for a splendid experience. It was as seminar through and through, planting seeds for fruitful investigation in many directions.

Not a new off-off Broadway play, but a quick and partial summary of yesterday’s event at the University of Mary Washington Teaching, Learning, and Technology Roundtable.

In a fit of last-minute inspiration, I had asked the six Instructional Technology Specialists in the UMW Division of Teaching and Learning Technologies to present a brief and interesting overview of new and new-ish tools for learning. They rose to the challenge beautifully. Jerry “Running With Scissors” Slezak brush up on his Hawaiian and took us on a tour of wikis. Kate “Baby Blue Punch Bloggie” Cooke shared her experience with IM and Chat. Andy “And He Blogs” Rush did a cool meta-demo of Visual Communicator. Lisa “Trek Blog” Quinton explored the wild wide world of blogs. Martha “The Fish Wrapper” Burtis walked us through the powerful integrative tool variously called “Content Managers” or “portals,” specifically an online community she’s built for DTLT on a platform called PostNuke. And Lisa “Learning To Sail” Ames integrated the entire showcase by means of an online evaluation tool called Zarca which she’s using to gather feedback from the showcase attendees. You can visit each of these ITS sites by following the links in my blogroll on the right.

What happened as a result of this torrent of facts, creativity, and perspectives? What happens as the result of all great teaching? Some people immediately catch fire with ideas and inspiration. Some people’s eyes glaze over. Some people wonder how they’ll ever find the time to experiment with even a small portion of these new tools. Some people want a complete build-out of an immersive PostNuke environment for their classes next spring. (The guilty party will please raise his hand. Thank you.) And some people wonder, with some justice, why all the emphasis on technology when teaching is primarily an exercise in human interaction. I myself think the technology exponentially augments the power, pervasiveness, and endurance of that human interaction, but even I will admit that yesterday was, by design, mighty techy.

But one other thing always happens when great teaching takes place: seeds are planted. This was the hardest lesson for me to learn when I began teaching at the college level nearly twenty-four years ago. I was a new graduate student at the University of Virginia, enrolled in my second semester of classes, and I was taking a class in Southern Literature from the man who was my most important mentor at UVa, Alan Howard. Alan’s Crossroads web project, an M.A. program in American Studies, represents an extraordinary comprehension of the power of the Web, and it continues to be an inspiration to me and to American Studies scholars everywhere. Just like Alan, in fact, though he’d no doubt deflect my insistence on saying so.

So there I was, young and green as a shallow sea, being a kind of teaching assistant for Alan’s class as I and my cohort led discussion groups for undergraduates who were taking that version of the course as we were taking our graduate version. Not by nature a patient person, I was continually exercised by the lack of strong, immediate responses to what I saw as almost unbearably exciting material. Alan had sized me up early on and was patient with my impatience. He took me aside and told me that teachers did their work because they had something they wanted to share, but they had to learn that the responses they sought might not come for years and might never be visible to them at all.

So I swallowed hard and became a teacher anyway.

Yesterday, more seeds were planted by more teachers, or to call us by another name, fellow learners. For that I am very grateful. And I’ll take this opportunity to announce that one seed sprouted very quickly indeed: our student rep to the TLTR, Charmayne Staloff, was so inspired that she immediately went home, opened up an account on Blogger, and joined the blogosphere by blogging.

Twice.

The conversation just got significantly richer. Welcome, Charmayne.

The site’s title is rather off-putting (“Mustard Gas Party”?), but the photographic essays on Modern Ruins are superb. The artist has a very strong sense of the uncanny. Thanks to Bryan Alexander for blogging this site.

Here’s one of my favorite images from the site so far:

<img src="http://gardnercampbell.net/blog1/wp-images/creeping evening_01.jpg"