In the last couple of months my attention has been caught by a succession of virtual-world developments that, taken together, seem to be changing forever the landscape of teaching and learning. By now I shouldn’t be surprised that educational institutions scarcely notice the tremors, and are if anything somewhat hostile to even the thought that there might be other ways than the traditional.
Today it’s Skype, which I’ve known about for quite a while. This morning I happened to look at the slipstream of del.icio.us and added a Skype-related link to my own del.icio.us/oook. Ron Nigh has that collection as one of his RSS feeds, and he sent me a “Ron wants to talk to you via Skype” email (with a link to quick setup), so I thought well why not? and within 10 minutes I was talking to him –as he was setting up his class in Mexico City.
A few weeks ago it was Camtasia, thanks to Jon Udell’s postings on what’s now being called ‘screencasting’, and not too long before that, it was podcasting… All of these are facets of, well, what? Ubiquity (the proliferation of devices that are computers, though many don’t look like the traditional idea of a computer) is part of it, lotsa available bandwidth is another, and RSS and USB are other essential bits.
I can sit at my desk computer, at home or at work, and be continuously educating myself about a kaleidoscope of subjects, linked to one another by my interest in them, and my efforts to manage their flow. It’s infinitely varied and fascinating and productive, much more fun than whatever it was I used to do before the virtual tide rolled in.

I’m turning OFF comments –at least I think I am– to stem the flood of foolishness.

RU Sirius interview snippet from BoingBoing:

This non-authoritarian, non-conformist, antic, changeable character, or community of characters, keeps coming up throughout human history.

Alan Howard’s American Studies and the New Technologies: New Paradigms for Teaching and Learning (originally prepared for the Ninth Annual Learning and Literacy Network Learning Conference, Beijing, July 19, 2002) is one of the clearest statements of important pedagogical issues that I’ve read in quite a while. He describes three multimedia projects at University of Virginia (Uncle Tom’s Cabin, The Valley of the Shadow, and The Salem Witch Trials) which exemplify the “new paradigms”, and summarizes their importance in two sterling paragraphs [emphasis added]:

These three projects, then, seem capable of changing the way we see and explain our world. And they share a group of common attributes. They are all large, and getting larger; they are interdisciplinary and multimediated, radically expanding the notion of what a text is. They are aggregative, synthesizing, and virtualized, bringing together in a single digital space materials that otherwise lie impossibly separated and unmanageable, resistant to analysis. They are multi-relational and multi-layered, structures whose complexity approximates that of the reality they seek to describe. They are question based and open ended, beginning with no clear sense of the object of the enterprise except to bring together in one space the relevant data, repeatedly discovering and re-discovering the uses to which they might be put.
Above all, these are collaborative, virtual structures built and extended by real communities. In the future, each enterprise will succeed in rough proportion to the degree that it is able to evolve a new kind of institutionalized intellectual culture in which faculty, graduate students, undergraduates, library staff, technical support staff, school teachers, independent researchers, academics at other institutions, and unaffiliated professionals share authority, expertise, and responsibility. Moreover, the technology argues that, in order to succeed, each project will have to create an intellectual community of teachers and learners of sufficient scale, complexity, flexibility, and durability to develop serendipitously and opportunistically over time. If, as some have said, the modern university is the last rust-belt institution, the last standing invention of the age of industrialization and mechanical reproduction, the model these technology-based projects suggest, ironically enough, is strikingly organic, complex, vital, and dynamic — less like a production line than an incubator.

He continues with a description of the UVa American Studies Program, noting that

the objective is to provide students an opportunity to complicate and clarify their notions of cultural process… The AS@UVA site not only generates a newly powerful pedagogy — it also works as a new form of scholarship. Like the three other sites I have described, it thickens the description of each of its fields of inquiry.

And he concludes:

We are confronted with a series of choices about how we use these new technologies: to expand markets and reduce per-unit costs or to increase the scale and complexity of understanding; to use the technology to put a new front on what we already know and can do or to listen to the technology and hear how it can be genuinely transformative; to build fake communities manufacturing rote learning or to create actual communities, even if virtual, that are actually learning.

I spent several hours of yesterday in exploration of the landscape of podcasting, and the implications are still reverberating. It occured to me this morning that the closest thing in my own experience was the glorious days of “community broadcasting” at KTAO, which emitted the most eclectic stuff from Los Gatos in the early 1970s. I did a Google search for milam ktao. That’s Lorenzo W. Milam –see his Radio Papers: From Krab to Kchu-Essays on the Art and Practice of Radio Transmission (Twenty-Five Years of Community Broadcast) and Original Sex and Broadcasting: A Handbook on Starting a Radio Station for the Community
. Could those halcyon days return?

I’ve been reading Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle, and in the third volume I find something that resonates with my own current frame of mind in respect of mass media and especially the News:

Now, most places did not have newspapers… But London had eighteen of them. ‘Twas as if the combination in one city of too many printing presses; a bloody and perpetual atmosphere of Party Malice; and an infinite supply of coffee; had combined, in some alchemical sense, to engender a monstrous prodigy, an unstanchable wound that bled Ink and would never heal… At first Daniel found them intolerable. It was as if the Fleet Ditch were being diverted into his lap for half an hour every day. But once he grew accustomed to them, he began to draw a kind of solace from their very vileness… Daniel began to look forward to his daily ink-toilette. Immersion in Bile, a splash of Calumny on the face, and a dab of Slander behind each ear, and he was a new man.
(pp. 48-49 of The System of the World)

The concluding paragraph from Tony Judt’s Dreams of Empire ( NYRB 4 Nov 2004):

With our growing income inequities and child poverty; our underperforming schools and disgracefully inadequate health services; our mendacious politicians and crude, partisan media; our suspect voting machines and our gerrymandered congressional districts; our bellicose religiosity and our cult of guns and executions; our cavalier unconcern for institutions, treaties, and laws—our own and other people’s: we should not be surprised that America has ceased to be an example to the world. The real tragedy is that we are no longer an example to ourselves. America’s born-again president insists that we are engaged in the war of Good against Evil, that American values “are right and true for every person in every society.” Perhaps. But the time has come to set aside the Book of Revelation and recall the admonition of the Gospels: For what shall it profit a country if it gain the whole world but lose its own soul?

A nice article [thanks to Ron Nigh for the pointer] by John Crowley (The Happy Place, from Boston Review) reflecting on the republication of the daily Pogo strips, 1948-1960. An essential of their charm and personal significance is their language, and Crowley has it just right:

The constancy of puns and wordplay; the subtle transmogrification of words into unrelated but significant other words that shadow them; the misheard, misremembered, and misspoken—the language not only drives the strips forward but embellishes the corners and backgrounds of panel upon panel with play that is not quite nonsense: Sent under separate cover of darkness . . . Support you in the style to which you are a customer . . . It don’t pay to Tinker for Ever with Chance . . . To corn a phrase . . . Girl of the Limberwurst . . . Never dark on the door again.
…the elaborate and continuous verbal play …was a constant feature of my own household, and seems to me clearly related not only to innate (or at least highly regarded and rewarded) verbal facility but also to a compulsion to put signifiers in doubt where the signified (sex, say, or money, or religion) is hard to approach directly.

I’ve been composing my thoughts about the pedagogical uses of blogging for a presentation tomorrow at a lunchtime meeting. For the last month, most of my energies have been directed toward Anthropology of East Asia, and my blogging activities have been concentrated in the class blog environment.