This afternoon I helped returning students at my university get their computers configured and back online on the campus network. There were changes this year that meant the process was substantially more involved than it was last year. This year students had to install a suite of software to ensure their computers were up to date on OS patches and antivirus software before they could log onto the network with full privileges. There were snafus aplenty as students made their way through the new requirement. I and a small army of other IT folk were on hand in the dorms–excuse me, residence halls–to offer help when help was needed. I was waylaid about seven times during my three hours on duty, and each computer took me an average of twenty or twenty-five minutes–not because I’m so slow, necessarily, but because the difficulties were so tangled and interrelated: multiple catch-22s like getting antivirus updates even as new viruses are coming over the unprotected wires.

And viruses there were in plenty. I fancied I could also feel them coming through the CAT-5 cables as I did my work. I imagined they were coming in through the suspended ceiling, just the way the monsters did in Aliens. At the same time, however, I was aware that another set of creatures was trying just as hard to get through those cables: the fellow human beings who were trying to contact the person whose machine I was working on. As I worked to restore the Internet connections to full life, I could gauge my success by how quickly the screen would light up with Instant Messaging contacts, outgoing and incoming. It was as if the computer’s virtual eyes opened, blinked, and began to see again.

So I worked through the afternoon, beating back the viruses, welcoming back the great wide networked world, and being thanked by student after student for restoring an old friend and the essential connections it enables.

It was a good day to be good with computers.

I like aphorisms, if they’re thought-provoking and not pat. Good aphorisms are like good melodies: they tap into the inevitable without being at all predictable.

One of my favorite aphorists of education is a man named Jerome Bruner. I’m not sure what he’s doing now, but in the mid-1990’s he was Research Professor of Psychology and Senior Research Fellow in Law at New York University. He’s certainly a member of my Secret Societry for Real School. I’ve long been in love with his book The Culture of Education, and long intended (as I pave the road to Hell, alas) to read his other books as well. In any event, here are a few choice quotations that are short and pithy enough to qualify as aphorisms by my standards. And if the quotations are really too long to be aphorisms, then I claim blogger’s license.

I’m very grateful Bruner wrote them down, and that I can share them with you.

Indeed, the very institutionalization of schooling may get in the way of creating a subcommunity of learners who bootstrap each other.

Nothing is “culture free,” but neither are individuals simply mirrors of their culture. It is the interaction between them that both gives a communal cast to individual thought and imposes a certain unpredictable richness on any culture’s way of life, thought, or feeling.

School … [is] both an exercise in consciousness raising about the possibilities of communal mental activity, and … a means for acquiring knowledge and skill.

[E]ducation is a major embodiment of a culture’s way of life, not just a preparation for it.

[T]he metalinguistic gift, the capacity to “turn around” on our language to examine and transcend its limits, is within everybody’s reach.

The chief subject matter of school, viewed culturally, is school itself. This is how most students experience it, and it determines what meaning they make of it.

[E]ducation is too consequential to too many constituencies to leave to professional educators.

Finding a place in the world, for all that it implicates the immediacy of home, mate, job, and friends, is ultimately an act of the imagination.

It wasn’t easy. I wanted to be an astronaut but the astigmatism was a problem. So I wanted to be a rock star, or at least thrash about in School of Rock poses in a garage band. The money to buy the instruments never coincided with the right opportunity to play, unfortunately, and finding musicians you really want to play with is a delicate business. Being a DJ could give me a little taste, but it was definitely a wanna-be job in that respect. So lately, surprise! I found a bunch of musicians I liked playing with, and I had the instruments I wanted, even a P.A. and a garage to practice in, and now I find that a) I don’t have the time and b) I really want to play tightly-arranged power pop/rock, and that kind of music takes lots of rehearsal that I don’t have the time for. Nor do my bandmates–and they don’t quite have the Badfinger/Beatles/Beach Boys/XTC/Who/Big Star/Fountains of Wayne bug that I do, anyway. I bet some of them think I made up “Big Star,” though of course I didn’t.

So, dear reader, I don’t guess you or I will ever know if I had a “Strawberry Fields” or even a “Come and Get It” in me. I suppose it wasn’t meant to be, but at least I did shake a tailfeather, or something, a couple of times before I got too old. And there’s still the Todd Rundgren trip in my home studio. Or maybe that would be the Beck trip nowadays.

No, I don’t mean the IPO that a Playboy interview almost derailed. I mean the growing sophistication of Google and other WWW search engines. I used to have to think carefully about my search terms, remember my Boolean operators (I’ve always loved that phrase–“call now, Boolean AND operators are OR standing NOR by–all the librarians just hit the floor laughing), try to match my sense of what I wanted with a sense of the likely indexing scheme the engine (or, in earlier days, the book) would have adopted.

Now, however, I just type in something like “what is a vortal?” and Google takes me to a list of sites with answers. And that’s not all, Ginsu knife fans. Because I haven’t done my search with indexing in mind, the associative trail is littered with more opportunities for serendipitous discovery, at least so far. Case in point today: “what is a vortal?” brought me eventually to Word Spy. What’s Word Spy? Here’s the way the site defines itself:

This Web site is devoted to lexpionage, the sleuthing of new words and phrases. These aren’t “stunt words” or “sniglets,” but new terms that have appeared multiple times in newspapers, magazines, books, Web sites, and other recorded sources.

Now, of course, I need to look up “stunt words” and “sniglets.” “Lexpionage” I think I can figure out. Ironically, none of those words is defined on Word Spy, though in finding that out I did happen onto the definition of “Google Bomb,” which I blush to admit was a new term for me.

Time for another search.

Another school year looms, I mean beckons, and I regard it with my usual mingled dread, fascination, awe, and excitement. (That list is in no particular order.) I look forward to being pushed harder by native-born citizens of cyberspace, by which I mean incoming students. These folks were around eight years of age when the World Wide Web appeared, so they’ve spent some of their childhood and all of their adolescence in an increasingly robust and ubiquitous online environment. That heritage represents a huge challenge for higher education. I don’t think we should adopt all the aspects of the culture students live in–there’s a strong countercultural obligation in higher education, I believe–but at the same time, college shouldn’t be the place where information technologies don’t really matter. We need to create a robust network of our own that connects the work of teaching and learning to the world beyond the classroom. Or to put it another way, we should encourage students to view the world as a learning space that asks for reflection, persuasive argument, and committed interaction. I think information technologies have a crucial role to play in that encouragement.

Seems that an estimated three million Americans blog and that publishing people are now scouring blogs to spot new talent.

Hey Mr. DeMille, we’re all ready for our close-ups … though “Gardner Writes” is an escapade-free zone.

Why all the titles with “secret” in them? Maybe I’m still recovering from my anniversary trip to the International Spy Museum?

In any event, I was talking to the birthday boy at a birthday party yesterday and discovered we both were big fans of a British rock group called XTC. The band got started as part of the punk/new wave movement in the late 70’s, flourished during the 80’s despite a moratorium on touring caused by the front man’s stage fright, and continued through the 90’s and into the 00’s with a small handful of great albums, some record label litigation, personnel upheavals, the usual art rock-n-roll story.

What’s interesting to me about XTC is that it’s rare to find someone who sort of likes them. People have either never heard of them or are quite passionate about them. I suppose there is a middle ground there, but I don’t see many people living there when it comes to XTC.

So why not call XTC a “cult” band? One certainly could, but the other tell-tale cult signs aren’t really there. Folks don’t wear XTC t-shirts (though I see they’re now available, so the handshake may become a cult after all). They don’t write fan fiction about XTC. They don’t try to emulate the band members. (I’m not sure they could emulate the lead singer-songwriter, Andy Partridge.) That is, fans of XTC don’t really behave differently because of their devotion to the band. They just love the music. And when you meet someone who says they love XTC, you can bet they love the music i-n d-e-t-a-i-l.

Hence the idea of the secret handshake, the “oh, you too?” response when someone else says they love the Swindon Beatles.

Time to crank up the stereo again.

Strange things are happening every day, as Sister Rosetta Tharpe once sang.

The essays by Vannevar Bush and Douglas Engelbart I wrote about below have been teasing my mind with more connections over the past couple of days. Since I’ve been thinking about Bush I’ve been haunted by a sense of deja vu. I just knew I’d heard the name somewhere before. Then, while reading a tenure file, I saw the name … and realized that I’d heard it from my junior colleague “mentee,” Dr. Tim O’Donnell, speech professor and director of debate at the University of Mary Washington. He’d written his dissertation on Bush and the rhetoric of science.

So I call Tim up, all in a lather about this connection, and the next day Tim brings me a box full of books (including his diss) and articles. One of the books is G. Pascal Zachary’s biography of V. Bush. In the biography I read this:

Among those smitten by the memex in the summer of 1945 was a 20-year-old American radar technician, waiting for his ship home from the Phillipines.
One muggy day, Douglas Engelbart walked into a Red Cross library on the edge of the jungle on Leyte Island and found Bush’s article in the Atlantic. Infected with memex fever, Engelbart returned to the U.S., finished his bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering and set off “along a vector you had described,” he later wrote Bush. Within a few years, he was harboring his own notions about how to turn intimidating digital computers into intimate amplifiers of the human mind.

Now let’s think about that last phrase for a moment: “intimate amplifiers of the human mind.” I think that’s a pretty fair description of school, as well as of personal computers and their networks. That’s why I say that Bush and Engelbart are not just IT visionaries. They’re extraordinary members of the Secret Society for Real School.

As is Jerome Bruner, a philosopher of education whose The Culture of Education has been a major influence on my own thinking and practice. Of course I need to return to that book now, go to the index, and look to see if either Vannevar Bush or Douglas Engelbart is in there. I’ll make sure I’m sitting down before I look.

The Internet Cracker Barrel, that is.

Okay, maybe it isn’t spam, but what exactly do we call the jokes that get forwarded around the Internet by friends who believe, often rightly, that thirty of their friends and acquaintances would also get a big chuckle (or a ROTFLMAO) out of the email they just received? And who exactly writes that stuff in the first place?

Not that I mind reading it. Even true spam has its own entertainment value, at least the first two or three times you get one of those emails with a cryptic evade-the-spam-checker subject heading that turns out to be just another Viagra solicitation. And I confess I still get a snort out of the “I’m the heir to the throne of Genovia but I need you to help me with the 20 million dollars I can’t find a safe place for in my kingdom” emails, especially because most of them are so full of good wishes and kind words; they’ve got more “God Bless”es than Red Skelton. But the cracker barrel spam, as opposed to true spam, isn’t about money. It’s about finding a room full of people who’ll all laugh together at the same joke. Sometimes I feel honored to be thought of as being in that room, and sometimes I wish the cracker-barrel spammers thought of me as in a neighboring bungalow instead, but often there’s good fun to be had even if the joke itself is either a) lame or b) one you’ve seen three or four times in a week.

For me, the real interest is in looking at the list of folks who got the email I got. That’s even more fun than tracing the path from the first CB spammer to the one who forwarded it to me. Tonight, for example, my 81-year-old father-in-law, who loves email (and what’s not to love?) and has a spiffy-diffy Dell computer with good horsepower under the hood, sent me some CB spam called “The OTHER Rules” that spell out the rules men want the women in their lives to know. That my dad-in-law sent that along was interesting enough, but I could see he’d also sent it to my brother, which means that at our next family gathering I can look at my brother and my father-in-law and merely say, with a significant tilt of the head, “Rule Number One,” and we’ll all fall about laughing hysterically. Well, my brother and I will. My father-in-law doesn’t do hysterics. Someone’s got to stay sensible at those mad gatherings.

And folks worry that computers depersonalize our lives.

Feeling my bona fides as a film studies person slipping away because I’d seen only one movie in the theatres this summer, I decided tonight to catch Collateral, the new Michael Mann movie. Attendance was delectably sparse in the THX house where I saw it, though the hardy few around us still managed to be distractions: the folks in back frequently talked to each other, the patron to the left got so excited at one point that she began slapping her thighs–loudly and with real vim–in time to the music (couldn’t fault her too much for that, I guess), and the patron in front decided to use an emery board on her nails during one of the film’s many quietly intense moments. Yes, an emery board. Rubbarubbarubba. That was a new one for me, and I thought I’d experienced most every form of patron rudeness short of a fistfight.

This, dear reader, is why watching a movie on DVD is often more involving than watching it on the big screen.

Not even my antic fellow citizens, however, could leave a mark on the moviegoing thrills tonight. And the most thrilling moments were not the crashes or the gunshots or even the suspenseful waiting for the hammer to fall. The deepest thrills tonight were aesthetic, ethical, metaphysical. Aesthetic, because Michael Mann has an extraordinary eye for beautiful, arresting images that are never merely pretty. His frames are dynamic, yet painterly; carefully considered, yet loose enough to be full of the energy of discovery–his, and ours. (This time Mann uses digital filmmaking as a way to make the night come alive: see this article for more details.) Ethical, because the entire movie revolves around the question of how and why one ought to act in a universe where the idea of meaning itself is just another riff in the cosmic jam session, no more or less: brownian motion on the bandstand at the Universe Club. Metaphysical, because the questions behind this question are posed with great glee and even a kind of tenderness that makes them all the more terrifying. Who notices our actions? What difference can they make? If our actions are insignificant–literally, pointing to nothing–how can our choices have any weight or value?

Interestingly, the action of the movie does two things: it keeps those questions alive and urgent, and it steadfastly refuses to give us any satisfaction as to their answers. It doesn’t even allow us the comfy distance of the agnostic materialist. Even agnosia, finally, is made to feel like a cheap escape. We know too much already.

So we’re left with a movie whose nihilism is nearly pure but in which we still find ourselves rooting for a hero. We’re not made to feel like chumps for doing so, either. But we are denied any final satisfaction for doing so. There’s a kind of intellectual rigor here that combines with a pained awareness of shared suffering to implicate both head and heart. Yet for all that, the movie never pats us on the head or throws its arm around our shoulder. Instead, the movie’s questions ride in the back seat all the way home, talking to us, involving us, and not letting us go, even after the long night is over.

A fine and unusual movie, in my judgment, despite being saddled with a few pat moments in the storytelling. You owe it to yourself to see a mainstream movie with Tom Cruise that is anything but ordinary. Highly recommended.