Queen Elizabeth II meets Web 2.0. A nice symmetry, and a great treat for Boxing Day.

The Queen’s 2006 Christmas message is available as a podcast. I find this turn of events uncanny. I am also struck (deliberately vague word) by the British Monarchy website, which I had not visited before. I’ll be exploring. (Note to other explorers: don’t miss the Royal Diary.)

To get the Royal Podcast, I subscribed via iTunes (one-click simplicity, for which I thank Her Majesty’s Web Chamberlains). Looking in iTunes for the Christmas message, I found that the Chamberlains had thoughtfully provided another podcast: the Queen’s 80th birthday speech.

Calling it “The Royal Podcast,” as the web site does, brings a smile: the term sounds a little like “The Holy Hand Grenade” (of Antioch, if I recall correctly). But I don’t mean to be churlish. I welcome Her Majesty (a pretty nice girl, though she doesn’t have a lot to say) to my portable media device, and hope she will find herself at home there with IT Conversations, poetry, Phil Keaggy, and the Firesign Theatre.

I love this picture. An unseasonably warm day for Richmond in December, and we’re walking our way back from the department potluck.

So a quick Christmas Eve shout-out to two of my favorite elves (and to one I put up with, not without affection, i.e. me): Eric Palmer (left) and Terry Dolson (right). Working with them has been a tremendous gift.

Note that there’s an elf not pictured: Mark Nichols. Someone had to take the photo. Mark was the elf with the smart phone. Like me, Mark appreciates a good gadget, and though the North Pole workshop hasn’t got VoIP yet, he’s living proof that they’re fully in the cellular age.

Don’t forget to track Santa’s sleight tonight through NORAD, everyone!

Or, second verse, very much but not exactly like the first. Call it “theme and variations.”

Longtime readers of my blog know how important Jon Udell has been for my thinking and leadership over the last two years. Two years: it’s hard for me to believe I’ve been reading him no longer than that. (In fact, it’s not quite yet two years; the anniversary comes in late February, 2007.) The intensity and scale of what I’ve learned from Jon make me feel as if he’s been my teacher and colleague for much, much longer. Once again I note that when teacher and student meet at the right time and in the right context, the two-way connection doesn’t take long to ramp up to pretty high bandwidth. Perhaps part of the art of learning, for both teacher and student, is to broaden the scope of “right time” and “right context” so those connections occur more frequently–and more effectively.

Now Jon is moving from InfoWorld to Microsoft. I have many, many thoughts on this transition, and on Jon’s continuing role as a free-lance infotech professor. (Question: who will be the first university to give this man an honorary degree?) As I get back into my sadly neglected blogging groove, I want to explore some of Jon’s public statements about teaching and learning, about the academy in which I ply my trades and the businesses in which he plies his. Jon’s devoting his second life (or perhaps he’s on numbers five or six?) to educating millions of netizens about the rich augmentation resources that surround them, resources of which most netizens are completely unaware. Jon’s discovering and creating a whole new set of rich materials for all of us to build with. It’s sandbox time. Fortunately, I already have a golden pail and shovel.

I’ve called Jon an “artist of the possible.” He is indeed a master of that art, and a true doctor of philosophy: a teacher of the love of knowledge. As such, he is on the leading edge not only of practice, but of articulation, itself a kind of practice. Oook and I like to quote Jon whenever possible. Here’s my Udellism of the day, quoted from Jon’s last blog at InfoWorld, a post in which Jon writes a brief apologia pro vita sua, and in doing so, beautifully expresses what I believe to be the calling of all educators:

To me it’s all part of a pattern. I use commonly-available technologies in unexpected ways to tell stories that make connections, distill experience, and transmit knowledge.

The “it” in Jon’s first sentence refers to his own vocations. If Jon doesn’t mind, I’ll claim that pronoun for mine as well. I too hear a pattern in my callings.

In January, I travel back to my post as a Professor of English at the University of Mary Washington, where I look forward to a season of teaching and learning and writing, and to many joyful reunions. That said, there are many difficult partings at hand here in Richmond. There are also many conversations I hope will continue and grow. I’ve learned a great deal here and I’m grateful for the opportunity to have done so.

It will be good to take stock as I move back. Time to trace the patterns of those callings once again.

Though in general I agree with e.e. cummings and Terry Dolson on the priority of feeling over syntax, there are exceptions. Case in point: yesterday’s Washington Post article discussing medical firsts, in which a timeline featured this doozie:

2001: First implantable replacement heart. Robert Tools is given the first artificial heart that functions without a permanent attachment to a power source in Kentucky. He lives 151 days.

From Gary Taylor’s indispensable website:

As a way of beginning, one might compare the art of photography to the act of pointing. All of us, even the best-mannered of us, occasionally point, and it must be true that some of us point to more interesting facts, events, circumstances, and configurations than others. It is not difficult to imagine a person – a mute Virgil of the corporeal world – who might elevate the act of pointing to a creative plane, a person who would lead us through the fields and streets and indicate a sequence of phenomena and aspects that would be beautiful, humorous, morally instructive, cleverly ordered, mysterious, or astonishing, once brought to our attention, but that had been unseen before, or seen dumbly, without comprehension. This talented practitioner of the new discipline (the discipline a cross, perhaps, between theater and criticism) would perform with a special sense of grace, sense of timing, narrative sweep, and wit, thus endowing the act not merely with intelligence, but with that quality of formal rigor that identifies a work of art, so that we would be uncertain, when remembering the adventure of the tour, how much of our pleasure and sense of enlargement had come from the things pointed to and how much from a pattern created by the pointer.

John Szarkowski,
from Atget and the Art of Photography
an essay in “The Work of Atget Vol. 1: Old France”
Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1981

So much to savor here. This early morning, I savor in particular the idea that the “quality of formal rigor that identifies a work of art” comes from

a special sense of grace,
sense of timing,
narrative sweep,
and wit.