The University of Mary Washington just joined the National Learning Infrastructure Initiative, a strategic arm of Educause devoted to transforming teaching and learning through the intelligent use of information technologies. It’s been just about a year since I first learned of the NLII. At that time, during a focus group at the 2003 Educause convention in Anaheim, I met one of the 2003-2004 NLII fellows, a man named Cyprien Lomas. I got to know Cyprien a little more during the NLII meeting the following January, and I saw him again at the NLII focus session on designing formal learning spaces just a couple of weeks ago. Cyprien’s a creative and interesting person and I hope to get to know him more as the years go by.

To my delight, I’ve just discovered that the NLII has a blog section and that Cyprien is one of the bloggers. He’s on the lookout for new and interesting ways of using IT in teaching and learning. Call him an intelligent agent–a most intelligent agent. I’m looking forward to benefiting from his expertise and curiosity.

Why blog?

Sharing stuff is fun.

For example, Ernie Ackermann’s blog (which I try to read regularly, and which I have linked this blog to-see the links column on the right) shares cool stuff. Yesterday’s blog hipped me to a site here at UMW that a colleague has put together to help his students prepare their research papers, and to a particular page explaining plagiarism. Who knew? (I didn’t, and I’m not sure when I’d have found out.) Ernie also shared an entire site devoted to issues of plagiarism, as well as the site (Neat New Stuff) that led him to the plagiarism site.

That sharing could have happened any number of other ways, but the connectivity of the Internet makes the particular act of sharing have greater immediate ramifications, and potentially greater depth. And it’s one more occasion to make that sharing happen.

Thanks, Ernie.

Why blog?

It’s an easy way to write down one’s thoughts in a more focused way than casual conversation permits. Blogs also have more “voice” than more formal writing, though that doesn’t mean they should degenerate into rants (though they can and do). If you rant, you lose your voice.

Why write down our thoughts?

Because we want to know what’s on each other’s minds. We can share this in conversation, but see above. We can share it in any number of ways. Blogs are one. Right now, they’re a particularly interesting one.

Why do we want to know what’s on each other’s minds?

Because we should know and enjoy as much of the full personhood of the people we work with as possible. This makes our collaboration richer, more interesting, and more rewarding.

Whom do we work with?

Everyone.

I just dashed away for a lunch-hour purchase. I bought two copies. Even the packaging is a thing of beauty and wonder. Can this be happening?

I’m not sure the world deserves something this good. I’m pretty sure I don’t. But here it is, and I’m listening to it as I type: “Cabinessence,” with the rougher-voiced 2004 Brian, and it’s just astonishing. He’s got every bit of what he had, and more–because now the whole thing is more precious to him and to us than it could have been in 1967. It doesn’t matter that his vocals are rougher. They’re still supple and expressive, and on some tracks (some–not all) they actually suit the music better than they did in 1967. Best of all, they’re fully committed performances. Brian has once again let this music matter to him. That’s an act of bravery that takes my breath away.

Thank God this has happened at last.

Tomorrow’s release of Brian Wilson’s SMiLE is for me the most important day in popular music since the release of Tommy.

SMiLE is not a rock ‘n roll album per se. “Heroes and Villains” and “Good Vibrations” rock, yes, but this is not a rock album. At the same time, the album doesn’t shun rock. It does something more radical than either shunning or embracing it. SMiLE simply accepts rock as a given and a good, just as it accepts America as one gigantic, inspiring, flawed, wicked, marvelous concept/experience.

And SMiLE goes still farther. It explores the essential connections between comedy and epic and tragedy, between the lyric and the dramatic, between the heroic individual and the heroic community, between the introspective lover and the introspective historian.

This is an extraordinary work.

I’ve heard most of it, in its 66-67 incarnation, through bootlegs and the precious half-hour officially released in the Good Vibrations box set some years back. That music is fragmented, trippy, dreamy, lost in its own sweet poignance yet clear-sighted in its vision of its many subjects. The music on the new CD, which has been completely re-recorded and which I heard courtesy of a friend (thanks, SH), doesn’t have the hash-and-youth sweetness of the original. In its place, the new SMiLE has a certain edge, a welcome ferocity at times, a sense that something urgent must be communicated even as the self communes with itself, all wrapped up in the most beautiful music I can imagine. (Nothing beats “Wonderful” and “Surf’s Up” and “Our Prayer” in my book, and “Wind Chimes” is a very close fourth.)

I don’t know if SMiLE will heal America, as protagonist Ray Shackelford thought it might in the magnificent Lewis Shiner novel-ode entitled Glimpses. But I can tell you that in its singular glory, this album is one of the most splendidly and gorgeously defiant gestures I believe I have ever heard. Thank you, Brian. For everything.

“What I do I am, for that I came,” writes the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins. Behold an immortal diamond, resurrected, complete: Brian Wilson.

I love you, Brian.

Great metablog yesterday from Martha Burtis (metablog=a blog on blogging). Martha works through plenty of questions/concerns about blogging and its relevance to a) teaching and learning and b) anything at all. I want to take some of those issues up myself in future metablogs here (you have been warned), but for now I want to comment briefly on the first issue Martha raises, the conflict between narcissism and perfectionism. I’ll quote Martha:

The narcissist in me likes the idea of being able to make my every whim and musing available for the whole world to see. But the perfectionist in me feels funny about making those whims and musings available in anything less than brilliant prose. Consequently, hitting the “Save!” button in my blog admin panel is often more an act of ambivalence than empowerment.

My strong belief is that narcissism should always trump perfectionism, which is of course very tricky indeed when perfectionism is one manifestation of narcissism and vice versa. I have certainly found these connected manifestations to be, um, ah, cough, present in my own life. (I cannot speak for Martha!) The outcome is that I get to beat myself up, no matter what. Not Good–but not uncommon, especially in education, where one’s vulnerabilities are magnified in almost every genuine teaching and learning encounter. At any rate, in self-defense if nothing else, I say, “Let Narcissism win.” A blog a day keeps the paralysis away?

Perhaps blogging offers a space–a genre?–in which some thoughtfulness is expected or at least acceptable, but also in which everyone understands that the tradeoff involves more spontaneity and less deathless prose, more quick and hopefully pithy observations and less sustained argument. The idea for me, then, as a teacher and a writer, is that the blog is a bridge between chat and a fully polished essay, a bridge that might encourage me, and perhaps others, to keep crossing that bridge despite the N and P obsessions, and thus to become a better (more powerful, flexible, and evocative) language user.

I’d also want to insist that each genre has its own excellence, and that blogging as a genre has rewards that other writing genres do not.

Thanks for that blog, Martha.

Forget the sheep and the goats. This distinction is much more critical, at least for the here-and-now.

The Sept. 6, 2004 New Yorker had a fascinating article on mustard and ketchup. In addition to the Four Basic Tastes I already knew about (sweet, salty, bitter, and sour), I learned there’s a fifth taste, umami, which author Malcolm Gladwell describes as “the proteiny, full-bodied taste of chicken soup, or cured meat, or fish stock, or aged cheese, or mother’s milk, or soy sauce, or mushrooms, or seaweed, or cooked tomato.” Umami comes from glutamates, which is why MSG livens up foods. You can read more about the origins of umami here, and you can read about the Society for Research on Umami Taste (SRUT) here. And from the World Wide Words website, we learn of the higher consciousness implicit in the concept of umami:

Both the word and the concept are Japanese, and in Japan are of some antiquity. Umami is hard to translate, to judge by the number of English words that have been suggested as equivalents, such as savoury, essence, pungent, deliciousness, and meaty. It’s sometimes associated with a feeling of perfect quality in a taste, or of some special emotional circumstance in which a taste is experienced. It is also said to involve all the senses, not just that of taste. There’s more than a suggestion of a spiritual or mystical quality about the word.

But the real kicker in the article, for me anyway, was the comparison between mustard and ketchup. Mustard is not a high umami food, apparently, and the best marketing success comes from tailoring a variety of mustards to a variety of food preferences. Ketchup, on the other hand, perhaps because it has achieved not only high umami but high “amplitude” (Gladwell again: “the word sensory experts use to describe flavors that are well blended and balanced, that ‘bloom’ in the mouth”), is a food that does not succeed in tailored or multiple versions. Heinz Ketchup has apparently achieved a Platonic state that’s just not shared with many other foods. Shoot, even spaghetti sauce thrives in multiple versions–but not ketchup.

These facts are interesting but not earthshaking, until one sees the moral Gladwell draws.

Happiness, in one sense, is a function of how closely our world conforms to the infinite variety of human preference. But that makes it easy to forget that sometimes happiness can be found in having what we’ve always had and everyone else is having.

In those two little sentences there are worlds of implications, for lawmakers, for teachers, for parents, for information technology folk, for everyone.

My thanks to Malcolm Gladwell for finding the universe in a seed of mustard and a squeeze-bottle of ketchup.

A chance airport encounter with a magazine called Computer Power User (CPU for short, wink wink) has led to a more serious involvement–i.e., I’ve subscribed. One nice thing about subscribing is that I have access to all the content over the web as well as in print, which makes it easy to get to the vast quantities of useful news, offbeat opinions, and links to utilities, firmware updates, and other great downloads. This is the way all magazines should operate. I don’t always have the print issue with me when I want to get back to the content I remember reading. In fact, that’s the principal use I make of the web feature. I rarely read the content there first; instead, I go back to it to retrieve stuff I’ve already read.

In the “offbeat opinion” department, the magazine features several quirky columnists from the last three decades of computing history, and the writing is unusually literate and thoughtful. In the October 2004 issue, for example, there’s a fun column on “organic computing” by Alex St. John, identified by the magazine as “one of the founding creators of Microsoft’s DirectX technology.” The subject is not making computers from carbon, but rather the human brain and body considered in terms of computers. The last paragraph is a zinger:

To summarize, you are made of proteins; proteins are little programs that are the computational byproducts of RNA transcription. RNA functions like a system bus, and DNA is RAM that stores everything about YOU as 6-bit sequences of nucleotides. Most organic life is made out of 21 amino acids because 21 is the number of building blocks that can be efficiently encoded in organic RAM with error correction. You are a giant, walking, talking Lego construction assembled by proteins from trillions of little amino acid building blocks and sea water whose sole purpose is to compute new copies of yourself before the inevitable accumulation of calculation errors causes you to crash permanently.

Fascinating metaphorical flight there, though I suspect that “copy file” isn’t quite as rewarding or fun for the silicon machines as it is for us. So there!

My son and I listened to Pearl Jam’s Ten as I took him to school this morning, and I realized I had forgotten how much I like that album. I also realized that I never bought a Nirvana album, though I think “Smells Like Teen Spirit” is right up there with “My Generation” in the Discontent Derby. It’s interesting that so much of our lives is now preserved and, occasionally, revivified by digital storage and retrieval. I sometimes feel as if I’m surrounded by time capsules, some of them half-buried, some of them in unmarked graves that patiently wait for the day they’ll give me a shovelful of shock.

They say if you live long enough you’ll see the return of everything.

So it is that I’ve been trying to explain to my two kids, who have never known anything but cable and satellite TV feeds, that with our new (budget!) HDTV there are actually over-the-air signals we can simply pluck from the airwaves with a good antenna. (The Zenith Silver Sensor in this case–highly recommended.)

My son looked at me with a very puzzled expression.

“Do you mean we can get all these channels for free?”
“Sure.”
“So if we lived even closer to a big city we could just take down the satellite dish and watch all this stuff without paying for it?”
“Yep. We wouldn’t get Nick and Cartoon Network and all the cable channels, but we’d get all the networks on the local channels.”
“But how can we do that without paying for it?”
“That’s what the commercials are for. And that’s how we used to watch TV all the time.”
“Cool! But this stuff just comes in from the air?”
“Just like the radio.”
“Cool!”

So it’s back to the future, my friends.