[This page records a few days of exploring what's at oook.info, which has been the platform for 20+ years for accessibility to files that constitute my distributable digital self: my html writings, and my copies of some of the image and sound and text files they link to. It was this collection that spawned the lifebox project]
The oldest document I quarried was from 1971, when I was articulating how I thought about
proposed dissertation research in Nova Scotia for my Special Exams:
re: General System Theory for a (later) narrative of my engagement
Special Exams Introduction (pdf) 1x1971
Washington & Lee experimented with a "Global Stewardship Program" in the early 2000s
Larry Boetsch appointed me to the Committee, and I tried to keep track
(see also thoughts on Malaria as a topic (1iii01)
and the importance of Human Geography as a constituent)
and I got Ron Nigh to be a Visiting Prof for the 2003 version.
I prepared for the adventure via
Articulatorium (from 23ii03) and we co-taught the course:
Logfile 'Spring Stewardship Institute' 21vi03
Log for Global Stuff 27vi03
course home page for Contemporary Global Issues
The last course I taught at W&L was a 2005 version of
Cross-Cultural Studies in Music 27ix04-31ii05
for example:
Thalassa ... and Musics of Greece
mp3 was beginning to be a common format for digital music
(Istanbul not Constantinople
but YouTube was only founded in February 2005
(this would now be the tool of choice)
The nascent Digital Library was much on my mind:
digilib log 21x03-5vii04 and 9v03
Sabbatical, Fall 2002
and
AT haiku (2002)
...but by 2003 the Bloom was off the Rose, and I was beginning to realize
that I could retire with full dignity in 2005...
Disgruntled 21x03 - 5vii04
on 18ii04 I wrote
if nobody wants it
why am I doing it?(my summary of how it looked 10iii04)
Innovation
at small liberal arts colleges
is all but dead
except for independently/externally funded efforts
and rogue actions.
Administrations have insulated themselves
behind a smokescreen of
'strategic planning'
which privileges risk avoidance
in the name of 'management'.
Add more deans,
institute performance reviews,
emphasize assessment of instructional objectives.
Distrust visionaries.
Reduce creativity and experimentation with unpredictable outcomes. Recline upon past laurels.Faugh
25 November 2003
Excised from the Five Year Plan, 2004-2009 to reduce its 'introspective' slant:
Birthdays ending in zero are particularly cuspy and fraught, and the sixtieth is arguably especially so in the context of a five-year plan, which may be as much exit strategy as onward roadmap. I confess to a rising level of curmudgeonly frustration with what sometimes seems to be flaccid institutional will and tortugal response to opportunities, but I'm also beginning to recognize and accept that many of my notions of reform and evolution of liberal arts education won't be realized in five years, or fifty years.In short, I wrestle with which to continue, which to abandon, and which to adopt as new challenges.In order to 'concretize' ways and means to maintain, continue, and increase, I need to decide how to direct my energies, given that I can't actually do everything I can imagine, and that several avenues I have been pursuing in the last few years are effectively foreclosed by the loss of Skip Williams.
At least in part because of my long-run identity as a professor, I'm in the habit of setting my own agendas, and I'm not particularly amenable to direction by others. Nonetheless, I feel the need for some advice and encouragement. This brings me to several questions, some of which are difficult to know whom to ask for answers. The broadest question is: what use does W&L want to make of me?
- Should I be seeking to teach more, to use the last years of my academic career to develop courses in areas I've been working in over 40-odd years as a scholar, and teach them in the venues that seem to be open to me (Global Stewardship, East Asian Studies, University Scholars)? If so, how should my appointment be structured? Will the reformulation of General Education provide opportunities for my skills and interests?
- Or should I scale back my efforts to the job I am paid to do as a librarian? How will a new University Librarian wish to make use of my capabilities?
- How tempting is it (or might it become) to just cash out, and develop other means to carry on my kaleidoscopic scholarly life?
In the absence of Deus ex Machina to decide these issues, I offer some proposals under the specified rubrics: [the specified headings]
20 November
Awaiting the start of a concert in November 2003, and prompted by reading in Ben Schneiderman's Leonardo's Laptop, this flowed out of my pen:
I think it's a shame that our faculty and students are doing so little to explore the potentials of the information media at their fingertips. And I think it's a shame that we who are in leadership positions in information realms are not doing more to encourage and support exploration. Most of us perceive, quite accurately, that W&L is not interested in being in the innovative vanguard --rather, W&L revels in its traditional strengths, and contents itself with adopting proven innovations once they are stable. Very few people see this as regrettable --faculty or students or staff. And the general attitude of complacency in matters of information is widely shared by our institutional peers in the liberal arts. I see nothing likely to change this situation, and find myself as frustrated with (most of) my students as with (most of) my faculty and staff colleagues.Writers like Ben Schneiderman, Howard Rhinegold, Larry Lessig, Jay David Bolter (and others I've linked elsewhere) are not read in or out of courses, and their models for the future of information and ideas are therefore unknown to most of W&L.
There's a pervasive incuriosity that I find unfathomable; the common justification is busyness, but I see a narrow vision of relevance and an aversion to innovation and risk in teaching and learning by teachers and learners, masked by proliferation of "information literacy/fluency" programs that are lists of student skill requirements, and institutional demands for "assessment" that create vapid "learning objectives" and empty measurements.
The blog went up on 6iii04
in my own space at oook.info
and gradually my W&L digital files migrated to oook.info
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The Old Home Page
is now vieux jeu
but does reflect my W&L persona
The last 20 years have seen many Projects,
and much explaining myself to myself
A few documents that seem worth revisiting to see how things began:
Assembling the Metanarrative 31vii12
Nova Scotia Faces 22viii12
State of the Art 22vi11
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23viii25
Last night it occurred to me to seek a sitemap of oook.info. and this morning I've been discovering html pages I wrote between 1994 and 2005, when I was Science Librarian. The pages are overwhelmed with linkrot but they surely convey a lot of what I was thinking and pursuing and experimenting with under the guise of aspiring to be a digital librarian. As I re-encounter these documents, I recognize myself in them, at every turn.
The list below needs to be ordered in some productive way, so for the moment it's just a heap, with some attempt to present chronologically:
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Gophers and Beyond in Library Instruction at Washington and Lee 1994
A hypertext genealogy project 1997-2007
Freeman Dyson comes to W&L 1997
Iron 1998
Odes to Mnemosyne, or Technologies of Memory Jan 1999
Weblets as Commonplace Books Jan 1999
Learning and Teaching the History of Technology
and Technology and American Frontiers: an exploration of resources 1999
Freshman home pages scheme 1999
envisioning libraries and computing 1999
bricolage May 1999
Napster Nov 1999
Designing a World Music Core Collection 1999?
Report of Site Visits in California and Indiana February 2000
GIS in the Library ca. 2000
Teaching and Learning Resource Group and Passepartout proposal 1999-2000
Designing Human Geography 2001
University Scholars 202: Human Geography 2001
Information Literacy thoughts ca. 2002
for President Burish June 2002
Coffee: a vade mecum example June 2002 (in re: Global Stewardship)
Log, January 2003 and
Log, February 2003 (after the Fall 2002 sabbatical)
and Making room for disruptive and emergent technologies NITLE article 2003
Incuriosity July 2003
Anth 230 log 2003-2004
Early-morning notes to myself, which turn out to repeat some of the above but lay out a more coordinated scheme for subjects:Anthropology draws upon the whole gamut of evidence, is happy trying out different perspectives, prefers the relative to the absolute. In approaching the Problem of East Asia as a cultural region, how should we think about who these people are? Multiple perspectives are a necessity, elements to take into account, parts of the puzzle of comprehending other Peoples.Each of the above has data sources, open questions, classic writings, controversies, yawning gaps... which make interesting problematics for course discussion.First, the biological perspective makes an interesting window, not generally used as a part of the traditional definition of anthropology but now much more a possibility. The Cavalli-Sforza frame lets us think of getting at migrations, isolates, permeabilities of populations.
A linguistic take is also important, including the complexities of orthography, language choice, standardization, borrowings...
And 'myths' are another perspective: who have they said they are? Not just the creation stuff (interesting as that is), but also the culture heroes identified and remembered, the movements and conquests alleged. Who's a Barbarian? How are Ideals defined ("The Superior Man...")? From distant past to here-and-now.
What's the technological history? The inventions, the borrowings, the adoption (and de-adoption --viz Perrin) of innovations, ties to science (Needham, of course)
What are the basic social elements of family and kin, how have they worked and where have the tensions been? (Freeman, the Wolfs)
What's the demographic history --the numbers, the flows (including emigration), the dynamics. Fukien, Canton, Hawaii, continental US, etc.
Evolution of society --including things like urbanization, political development, regional systems, empire, subjection and domination, stratification, modernization, borrowing, high culture and low culture, overseas enclaves and assimilation, etc.
Things change, things continue, things seem not to change. How does this happen? Can we identify some core that's the essence of being Chinese or Japanese or Korean? And once we've identified it, can we really understand it, account for its transmission to new generations? There's a long history of trying to do just that ==> the outsider's perspective. We need to understand that better, since it's responsible for so much misunderstanding BUT it's our only way in. Aesthetics is one useful vehicle for this. The material world's artifacts encode a lot of stuff, and can be "unpacked".
Beginning a census of media and usage
Some texts to illuminate our views of China
on Skip Williams' departure April 2003
Incuriosity July 2003
Five Year Plan, 2004-2009 November 2003
Geography of Human Cultures log November 2003
Winter 2004 log and The Log Files October 2004
For the Technology Forum, on Blogging October 2004
prospectus for CCSinM redux and Cross-Cultural Studies in Music: Ethnomusicology in the 21st century and CCSinM log
emeriti.wlu.edu: A Virtual Geezer Box May 2005
bloggery.wlu.edu : a glorious failure July 2005
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25viii25
Some other rescued links (from oook.info Root) of possible interest:
Turing's Objections from Computing Machinery and Intelligence (1950)
email to Bob Textor 1997
endgame 2005
Freud and 'wishful thinking' 2005
Old Current 2005
r0ml "you keep using that word" 2005
log files history 2006
1365 Paseo del Mar, San Pedro 2006
contents of a CD for Bill Grace listed 2007
introducing 2008 (a LOT of linkrot)
remap 2009
connecting blog to delicious tags 2013
Writing and Reading 2014
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the outrageous and perplexing (wtf.html, could be greatly expanded...)
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...and 25viii25 bits of 'Legacy'
Found while exploring oook.info files