It’s worth six hours in a tin can to trek to this event, and not just because of the lovely weather in San Diego or the trippy corridors at Chicago’s O’Hare airport (above). No other meeting has been as catalytic and inspiring for me as the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative. The meeting this year promises to be the best yet. Lunch with Alan Kay? I’m there, friends.

This year’s UMW team once again includes faculty and staff from both campuses. I’m especially thrilled that Steve Greenlaw, one of last year’s team members, is a presenter at this year’s meeting–and he’s brought two recently graduated students with him as co-presenters. It’s been an honor and a privilege to see the way my colleagues have been energized by the ELI. That energy has already made a difference at UMW. I’m sure this year’s team will only add to that energy.

I reflect on what ELI has meant to me in terms of knowledge gained and shared; friendships and enthusiasms kindled; passion, inspiration, and vision nurtured. I’m humbled. At the 2004 meeting in San Diego, I came by myself to scout out the territory. This year as I checked into the conference hotel, the same one we used two years ago, I felt an enormous sense of gratitude as I thought about how quickly my initial solitude was transformed into community at that first meeting. In the two years since then, that community has grown deeper, more extensive, and in truth more precious to me than I ever could have imagined. I talk a lot on this blog about what I call “real school.” ELI keeps that vision alive for me. There’s no end to wondering.

Kickoff for me is this afternoon: I’m in an e-portfolio pre-conference workshop. Then it’s newcomer orientation, the welcome reception, and another luminous San Diego evening. Bring it on!

One spammer gets a free ride from me today. The spam comment (I’m 99% sure that’s what it was) lodged on a post that was marvelously appropriate to my experience at a staff meeting earlier today. My own thoughts returned to me with an unalienated … well, if not majesty, at least dignity and purpose intact. (Apologies to Ralph Waldo E.) Following on from Martha’s thoughts on how blogs re-mind you–that is, give you your mind back again by returning you to earlier thoughts and stages of your own thinking–I see that I am spiraling upward (I trust) over a set of consistent concerns.

That’s reassuring. I can see some kinds of deep learning taking place that would be too slow or too delicate for me to track otherwise. Gives me hope. Gotta keep hope in the e-portfolio.

This will be far too (but perhaps mercifully) brief, and it may also be too late, but I did want to put my groat’s worth of wit to work on Brian Lamb’s social software presentation in Vancouver tonight.

* What is most significant about the emergence of blogs and/or wikis?

Blogs: the implicit narrative in the organization, the way they look good out-of-the-box, the presentation-followed-by-Q&A (comment) rhetorical model, the system of trackbacks and cross-linking, the idea of the blogroll (this merits further discussion, I think), the human-face-of-the-corporation angle, the idea of the blogosphere

Wikis: Distributed, persistent, worldwide authorship focused on particular topics or projects, evolving very rapidly and thereby demonstrating the process of civilization and the flowering of discourse communities the way a time-lapse movie shows the blooming of a rose.

* In your mind, what is most misunderstood (or little understood) about these tools?

I think many people believe blogs are a genre the way (bad) pulp fiction is a genre: they’re all the same, their goals are the same, they’re trash, they’re just personal bleatings. Blogs are a medium, and while to a certain extent the medium is the message, it’s also true that blogs need not be personal or controversial, etc. If they inhabit a genre, it’s narrative, broadly considered.

Wikis are us. I think that fact is very poorly understood, though the latest Wikipedia scandal may have helped educate some folks in this regard.

* Are blogs and wikis evolving into something else?

I’m not sure we’ll know until they have.

* What are the implications of these publishing tools on ideas, public opinion and free speech?

Oh my goodness. No brief answer possible. No broad answer valuable. I will note that the implications are remarkably like the implications of the emerging print culture of the Renaissance. (Cf. terrific “In Our Time” (BBC Radio 4) podcast this week on 17th Century Print Culture.)

* What are a few of your essential blog reads or wiki communities?

Yours, of course. 🙂

* Anything else?

Everything else, but tempus fugit and so must I…. I’ll make it up to you in enchiladas in San Diego.

One of my heroes.

He’s got a new album on the way in March, and the first single has already been released: “H Gang.” Not much melody, but killer grooves and plenty of those sneaky altered blues modulation strategies that the Dan has always deployed to stunning effect. Plus a bell tree and a groovin’ sax solo and a nicely skanky electric guitar solo. All your major food groups, right there.

Given that Fagen has long been an aficionado of SF and digital culture generally, I imagine he got a lot of pleasure from being alive and kicking in 2006 so he could put the following sentence in his email announcing the single:

“H GANG” DIGITAL SINGLE

Look for the title track and the debut single “H Gang,” available now at all digital retailers.

Yep, I bought mine at iTunes.

Now where’s the key to my Kamakiri…?

D’Arcy Norman points out that publishing content in iTunes U is better than not publishing it at all, and that in the end Apple doesn’t own exclusive rights to the content, so institutions are free to put the content up in any other way they want and in any format they want.

I respect D’Arcy, and I wouldn’t accuse him of being an Apple apologist. In fact, the non-exclusive nature of the deal is one of the arguments the team from Michigan offered at EDUCAUSE when I asked them about the dental school project. It’s a key point. Nevertheless, I stand by my alarm, and ask that skeptics peruse (again) the iTunes U announcement page. This is a commercial venture with clear designs on vendor lock-in. (As Jon Udell has noted, iTunes is a podcatcher with an axe to grind.) If we lock ourselves in voluntarily because the deal (for now) is so sweet–school logos and colors on the front page, volume discounts on music, revenue opportunities, cool factor–we’re still locked in. This is the path of least resistance. Higher education should be stronger than that. I expect Apple is gambling that we are not. And once we’re on that path, we will only get weaker.

Much of the buzz I see on Technorati about iTunes U is how cool and easy it is, how our development woes are over, how our work has been done for us. Will institutions, especially starved-for-cash public schools, be willing to fund home-grown open alternatives when they can make money on a home-branded, outsourced, turn-key operation like Apple’s? I doubt it. Apple doesn’t need de jure exclusive rights. We’ll essentially give them away, de facto. Much better PR that way, and the company gets to express its astonishment at any dissent, for after all no one forced us to put all our content in iTunes U.

I don’t mind persuasion, but coercion is another matter, and coercion takes many forms.

Perhaps Apple’s reasoning goes like this. Apple believes that they are in the best position to empower education. Therefore, what’s good for Apple is good for education. Q.E.D.

I remain unconvinced.

This situation is getting mighty worrisome. The thoughts below are fresh, fluid, and perhaps an over-reaction. Or perhaps not. I’m not the only one who’s worried.

Apple has announced a free service called “iTunes U” that allows schools to restrict content generated at the institution to authenticated members of that institution by setting up a school-specific iTunes store. (Chronicle story here.) The authentication system can be tied to the institution’s own identity management systems. Now we can all have what Stanford and the University of Michigan’s Dental School already have: the ability to strengthen the walls of our gardens by locking down content, and the ability to limit our students to one platform with which to access that content (the only mobile devices iTunes works with are iPods). The emphasis now is on audio content, but iPod now supports video, and Apple’s plans are clearly about more than just recorded lectures–which is not to say that recorded lectures are any small thing.

An interesting excerpt from Apple’s announcement:

It’s the most powerful way to manage a broad range of audio or video content and make it available quickly and easily to students, faculty, and staff. And it is the only application that supports the overwhelmingly popular iPod. iTunes U also offers you the simplicity and mobility you expect from Apple because it is based on the same easy-to-use technology of iTunes Music Store.

Yes, it is. In fact, iTunes U is the iTunes Music Store. It’s just the part you can use for free while you’re in the store, so long as you’ve paid your tuition and you own an iPod. To be fair, you can also listen to content within iTunes at your desktop, but the real augmentation comes with the mobile device, and that’s got to be an iPod. (Note that the Music Store menu item is selected in the Stanford iTunes U screenshot above.)

And if you go to the iTunes U web page, take a close look at the sidebars on the right. There are enough branding, revenue-generating, and courseware-integrating hooks here to land Leviathan without a splash. I look at them and part of me thinks, “I get an outsourced content management/courseware system for free? I don’t have to worry about tech support, server maintenance, interoperability, or any of those back-end troubles? And I can make money and earn cool points with music- and video-hungry students while leaving the driving to Apple? Where do I sign?”

The other part of me looks at those come-ons, and the mention of Blackboard and WebCT (and even Sakai, alas, through no fault of its own), and recoils. I think of the serpent and the fruit it offers. I look at the bite that’s an integral part of the Apple logo. I remember that he who sups with the devil must have a long spoon. Are our spoons long enough for dinner with iTunes U?

Obviously it is not enough for Apple to win market share based on mere excellence. Their larger strategy, perversely admirable in its cleverness, is to leverage popular culture from within the institution (all those iPods we have–and “we” means me, too, for it is truly an excellent product) to lure institutions into a) helping them generate a monopoly and b) giving in to their own worst impulses with regard to locking away the knowledge and expertise they generate. As one observer noted (I’ve lost the reference), Steve Jobs understands that the key to changing the world is popular culture, not computers. Trouble is, this iTunes U strategy isn’t changing the world at all. This strategy simply shifts advantage within the status quo.

We will see more of this, I’m sure. Some campuses will become Yahoo-centric, others Google-centric. We’ll find AOL getting into the campus portal business, and they’ll protect us from spam and malware for free. The idea will be to generate brand loyalty, to lock content (our work, our students’ work) into proprietary systems so we can’t shop around or assemble a best-of-breed solution, to turn higher education into a machine to foster life-long consumption of this or that product. Nothing new there, of course. I suppose I had just hoped for more from Apple. Their marketing certainly encourages us to hope for more. Perhaps hope is the most addictive drug of all, especially if you can push it while people are in your store.

In this light, Disney’s purchase of Pixar, which lands Jobs a seat on the board as majority stockholder, brings an uneasy image into my mind: the ravens on the playground equipment in Hitchcock’s The Birds. I laugh at my own melodrama. But there’s a catch in my throat as the chuckle dies away.

I distrust instapundits and I don’t want to be one. But I wonder: Think different? When I wish upon a star, my dreams come true?

Over at the Steve Hoffman forum, David Schwartz just linked to an interview with Geoff Emerick, who engineered the Beatles’ records from Revolver on. It’s a fascinating interview, both for Beatles fans and for those like me who think about school as a learning environment and wonder how best to tune and present that environment.

I read Emerick’s remarks and I’m struck by how odd and perplexing human situations can be. Those wacky EMI engineers standing around holding their breath as the four-track machine was gingerly hoisted over the threshold and brought into the control room. No need! Wearing ties and keeping your shoes polished. How does that help? Rolling off all the bass on the Beatles’ singles so the Dancettes and Close-N-Plays of the world won’t mistrack, while Motown got big, beautiful bass on their classic 45s. And yet those same wacky engineers insisted on recording on virgin tape, and their tape formulation has held up beautifully over all these years, so that the best rock-n-roll band ever sounds just as fresh today as they did in 1963. And those big, behind-the-times mono speakers enforced a certain discipline on the engineer and producer that made the stereo sound even better (even if the mix was inferior, as it often was).

Human creativity is such a complex ecology. You’d think that taking out all the wacky stuff and nonsensical, idiotic practices would give us a better environment in which to create, but it’s never that simple. The hard part and the crucial part is assembling the team within the environment. Perhaps the team is the environment. What then to do about the wacky stuff?

I apologize for these ramblings, but I’m fascinated by the complexity of these questions and situations, and I’m struck by the mischief that’s been generated over the years by the many simple answers we offer to complex educational questions. From the whole-language vs. phonics debate to the back-and-forth on cultural literacy and standards-based learning, the goal seems to be to identify the antigen and eliminate it, rather than to weave a complex text as alertly, sympathetically, and creatively as possible. Why should this be, when the results are so patently failing us and our students?

From Making Stories: Law, Literature, Life, by Jerome Bruner:

Stories are like doppelgangers, operating in two realms, one a landscape of action in the world, the other a landscape of consciousness where the protagonists’ thoughts and feelings and secrets play themselves out…. It is part of the magic of well-wrought stories that they keep these two landscapes intertwined, making the knower and the known inseparable…. A narrative models not only a world but the minds seeking to give it its meanings.

Yes.

Strange experience last Friday: I was explaining Skype to colleagues in Admissions who want to set up some kind of chat capability in their recruiting efforts, and I stopped making sense when I began to use the word “call.” I made sense to me, but I could see that I had lost the other folks in the conversation.

Finding that I’ve stopped making sense is not so strange, of course. What’s strange is that common verbs don’t usually pose a problem in my conversations. In this case, though, I discovered that “call” now means something different to me than it did even a year ago. When I say “call,” I mean “initiate electronic contact via a medium that emphasizes voice but includes other modes as well.” The modes have begun to blur for me, and I hadn’t even recognized that they had. I do say “text” as a verb when I mean “send an SMS message over my cell phone,” and I can distinguish between chat and VoIP and video and so forth, but the catch is that when I’m in one of those convergent environments, such as a cell phone that does SMS or a Skype that does voice and chat and video, I use the word “call” in ways that are not entirely intelligible to folks who are not used to that environment.

Memo to self: remember non-convergence is still the rule. Slow down. Sometimes.

I’m getting ready to go home for the evening, but tonight before I left I needed to walk around the department.

I was elected to this department in 1994. When I came here for the on-campus job interview, I met Taddesse Adera. In the 11+ years that followed, I worked with him on committees, shared moments like the Toronto MLA drink with him and one of his childhood friends in celebration of our birthdays (both Taddesse and I were born in December), laughed and agonized with him over professional and departmental matters, and greeted him whenever I saw him, which was nearly every working day. My office door is open as I type these words, and I can almost see the closed door to his office from where I sit, two doors and a corner and, now, a lifetime away.

Taddesse died, quite unexpectedly, two days ago. Since that time, all of us in the department have been trying to come to grips with his loss. After the first shock of the news of a death, the hardest thing for me is always simply trying to comprehend the loss. I don’t mean “comprehend” as in “why or how could this have happened?” I wonder that, too, but the hardest thing for me is simpler. I am suddenly compelled to list for myself what has been lost. That list is always, always staggeringly long, and Taddesse’s death has been no different in that regard.

Except that Taddesse’s quiet dignity, his insistence on wearing both his learning and his accomplishments lightly, his very private nature, his courtesy, and the strength of his presence among us were so much a part of my daily life that I am troubled by how easily I expected them, and him, to last. In some respects, Taddesse’s gift to us magnanimously concealed its own extent, its own magnitude. And now that he is no longer here, that magnitude reveals itself in ways that I hope would please him after all.

There is no one in the department this evening. All my colleagues have gone home. I hear no voices in the hallway. It is time for me to go home, too. When in a moment I switch off the lights and lock my door, I will turn again to face the door to Taddesse’s office, a door closed and locked (it was always open when he was here, and he was here what seemed to be 12 hours a day), a door covered with photocopied poems from Whitman, Auden, Tennyson, O’Searcaigh, and Shelley, a door with wilting flowers in its plastic pouch. At the top there is a picture of Taddesse in full teaching stride. The photograph is captioned: “He gave us the courage to share our beliefs and to stand up for what we believed in. He will be sorely missed.”

Yes.

How far from then forethought of, all thy more boisterous years,
When thou at the random grim forge, powerful amidst peers,
Didst fettle for the great grey drayhorse his bright and battering sandal!

–G. M. Hopkins