Last night I spent some time reading back entries in Pete Townshend’s online diary. It was time very well spent. Pete has been doing a lot of writing these days, and while his online writing has always been wonderful, it seems to me there’s a new level of inspiration, fluency, and uncanny power to what he’s doing. And for Pete Townshend, that’s saying something.

So much of Web 2.0 is anticipated by Pete’s Lifehouse vision, and we’re all very blessed that Pete’s still here to reflect on that vision and its manifestations in 2005, including a deep understanding of the power of blogging. An even greater blessing, though, is Pete’s ongoing curiosity about all facets of life and creativity, and his apparently bottomless capacity for inspiration–both giving and receiving. Case in point: two online diary entries from late summer 2005 in which Pete first reflects on just now reading Kerouac’s On The Road for the first time, and then includes an excerpt to entice us to read more of Kerouac ourselves. These entries moved me to my soul. I hope they resonate with you as well.

Thank you, Pete. Again.

Middlebury College’s Alex Chapin provides an interesting analysis, quite technically detailed, of how podcasting via iPods and iTunes could be part of a robust student-centered knowledgebase. Alex shared this information in a recent presentation at NERCOMP.

Some of the information is a little out-of-date, not surprising given the rapid pace of change and development in this area: after all, we’ve gone from version 4.9 to version 6.x of iTunes in about four months, during which time two major iPod product introductions have also occurred. I also want to explore more thoroughly the issues surrounding display of metadata on the portable device. There are HCI issues with density / quantity of information on the small screen as well as sheer usability concerns when the layers of operability grow beyond a certain point. That said, the real value here is the depth of Alex’s thinking on mobile audio as a campus-wide learning platform. The audio capture ideas are particularly inviting, especially now that the new video iPod can record at redbook CD quality (16 bit / 44.1 khz), a fact I learned from Adam Curry, not Apple.

Thanks, Alex. Recommended.

via Infocult.

What a mug. And doesn’t it do his famous nose proud?

In the wake of his 2003 arrest, Pete Townshend got pretty quiet on his website, Petetownshend.com. Thankfully, he was also busy with his music and writing elsewhere. Today I was inspired to catch up with Pete. To my extreme delight, I find he’s posting a serialization of his novella The Boy Who Heard Music on a Blogspot site. And he’s allowing comments on the chapters as they’re published. He’s even filled out his Blogspot profile. Time to get back to Goedel, Escher, Bach, which I started on a trip to Williamsburg and put down when the term started.

As the kids say, OMG.

I have no time just now to follow this up, but you can bet I will, and soon. Extraordinary!

Podcasting News continues to bring eight or ten fascinating items to my Bloglines account each day. Today’s haul includes notice of iPREPPress.com’s new study guides for the iPod. (The debate is over: the iPod is a platform.) The capsule description is interesting:

Read study notes directly on the iPod’s screen. Use the scroll wheel to navigate. Underlined text is hyperlinked to audio annotations and other text passages that provide more detailed explanations when pressing the iPod’s select button. Or just listen to your favorite tunes in the background while reading on-screen.

The last item is piquant. There used to be a craze for playing Mozart to babies in utero to make them smarter. Maybe there’ll be a booming market, or at least a fad, or perhaps a special section of the iTunes store, for music to study by. As a headphone listener from way back, I’m not being entirely facetious here, though I always found it a little too crowded to have text and musical voices in my head at the same time. Nevertheless: if you’d like to try it for yourself, there’s a free download of The Declaration of Independence on the iPREPPress site. Kate Smith or Green Day?

And speaking of music (segue time), Podcasting News also reports on Liz Phair’s new podcast, “The Liz Phair Podcast.” (Witness the complex irony of the straightforward at work.) Liz is playing music, reading original fiction, chatting with friends, and experimenting with soundseeing tours. I hope more musicians go in this direction. Pete Townshend, one of rock’s best writers, was a pioneer in Rock Star blogging and videoblogging: his account of The Who’s 2000 tour was consistently fascinating and often quite moving. Some of the populist intimacy rock promised at its 60’s zenith could reappear in interesting ways in Web 2.0. Or it could just be more effective supply-chaining and marketing. Or both.

I have a soft spot in my heart (not head) for poetry podcasts, as my “Donne A Day” podcasts attest, so when I saw Jo McLeay’s blog on “Poetry and Podcasting,” I needed to know more. Ruminating on her quest to find the heartfelt connection that can catalyze moments of deep discovery in the classroom, Jo hits upon a podcasting idea:

I have asked [my students] to choose a poem that appeals to them and to write a reflection which tries to express just what it is about the poem that speaks directly to them. Then, during class two or three students each class will read their poem aloud and speak about their poem. I have thought that we could record these and any discussion that ensues and think about making a podcast.

It’s a lovely idea and I hope Jo will pursue it. I also hope that some students will find that something about the way a poem is made speaks directly to them.

I’ve been thinking a good deal lately about why working in information technologies reminds me so strongly of the experience of reading, analyzing, and mulling over poetry. The connection is counterintuitive at first. IT is about precision, instructions, disambiguation. Poetry is about emotion, suggestion, rich and troubling ambiguities. True enough. But there are deep commonalities as well. In both cases, pattern recognition is vital and endlessly rewarding. The idea of the icon and the idea of the symbol are not too distant. The very malleability of both mediums is itself striking, an idea I was surprised and pleased to find ratified by The Mythical Man-Month, a book I’ve just begun reading. And for all its emotional potency, poetry is every bit as much about analysis, scrutiny, and precision as IT is. Poetry’s capacity for powerful intellection is one of the things I love most about it.

Finally, there’s something Orphic going on in both IT and poetry. Orpheus was the most famous poet of antiquity. His fabled artistic abilities included writing poetry (songs, really) so beautiful that even inanimate nature would be moved to tears. For many poets, Orpheus stands as the ultimate expression of magical language, language that is both abstracted symbolic discourse and a means of awakening the animistic forces within the material universe. More even than a connection between beauty and truth, poetry provides a connection between contemplation and action, between thought and will, between identity and love. As I said to my Donne class this semester, metaphor itself is a metaphor for love.

So when I think about digitization, a global Internet, graphs of acoustic waveforms, and the GUI I’m working in right now, I also think about stanzas, rhymes, syllables, homophones, scansion, and the ways symbols both gather meaning into themselves and radiate it outward at the same time. The Mythical Man-Month describes the pleasures of programming in terms of magic: a string of instructions (in a programming language) crafted by thought out of experience, and lo, there is action and endless possibilities of connection, perhaps even a poetry podcast borne out of a thoughtful classroom. To borrow ideas from Nicholas of Cusa, the poet’s philosopher, complication and explication (or gathering and sharing) become two aspects of the same thing.

None of this is new. Much of it, however, stands out in peculiar strong relief from the light this networked community now shines upon it.

On my radar and pinging more loudly after a brief chat about it with Brian Lamb at EDUCAUSE: Feedbook. Imagine a textbook made up of experts in conversation throughout the blogosphere and WWW generally. One that continues to provide opportunities for serendipitous moments throughout the semester … and travels with students after the term ends, still talking to them and inviting their own responses. I’m thinking that college is now the opportunity not only to begin one’s personal library, but also to build one’s personal suite of trusted and inspiring experts. That of course is what already happens to some extent, but now it need not be confined to the campus. The campus is where the beloved local professor simply starts the ball rolling.

Come to think of it, that’s pretty much the mission, or at least the heart of it.

And how was I reminded of Feedbook, with my head all crammed with EDUCAUSE, Milton, and UMW goodness? By seeing it in Brian Lamb’s Furl list on his blogsite. Time to get my own del.icio.us feed back on my site. Crucial miniblogging add-on, that.

Putting the “nightcap” before the main course may be backwards, or the start of a new trend; these days, I’m believing almost anything is possible. At any rate, here’s the formal interview Matt Pasiewicz and Vidya Ananthanarayanan did with me at EDUCAUSE 2005. Both Matt and Vidya knew exactly what questions would get me going. Thanks to their expert interviewing, I’m sure you’ll hear the excitement in my voice as I warm to my topics here. Thanks also to Brian Yuhnke for ace audio engineering and some well-judged post-production.

You can subscribe to all of EDUCAUSE’s podcasts very easily at connect.educause.edu. Two recent interviews you should not miss: one with my friend and mentor Brian Lamb of “Abject Learning,” and one with Clifford Lynch, Executive Director of the Center for Networked Information. Cliff won a Leadership award at this year’s EDUCAUSE, and his talk on the “Data Deluge” was certainly one of the high points for me at this year’s convention.

Martha got upped to beta developer status at Ning, with a comment left by Marc Andreessen (no less). And I just got email today from Odeo that pointed me to a special audio feed for early sign-up folks. (Note to self: sign up for all beta Web 2.0 apps the day you learn about them.) That audio feed cleverly pointed me to my new capability as creator on the Odeo site.

This is an exciting and deeply interesting development. Odeo has a web interface that allows me to record audio directly to their website by taking a real-time microphone feed from my computer and storing it in mp3 format in a “channel” I create for that purpose at the Odeo site. It also allows me to republish my main audio feed from this blog/podcast site in a dedicated Odeo channel. Finally, it also allows me to aggregate those and any other feeds I select and republish them in a dedicated aggregate channel.

What else? I can either make the feeds public or share them with a private group. I’m not sure yet whether the groups can be saved–I just did my first test about ten minutes ago, so bear with me as I get the tool together. I can publish the feeds as RSS feeds or as m3u mp3 playlists. I can tag each channel and each individual show. Listeners can tag the feeds and shows they subscribe to. Listeners can leave comments (and there’s an RSS feature for these). They can rank the shows and feeds. They can email friends with a share-the-feed box. (Sounds like flickr for audio? You bet.) We can all see how many times each show has been played. (All the audio controls live within the web interface, complete with an easy-to-read audio level meter. Thank you, Flash.) Content creators can put links and images with their shows/feeds. Listeners can queue the files they want to listen to, creating a playlist within Odeo for later or current listening.

More:

Listeners can subscribe to their Odeo queues via iTunes.
I can store a list of contacts.
I can export my subscription list as OPML and put it in my public subscription list (Bloglines for me) or display it on my page. All will be updated automatically, of course; this is OPML.
I can publish audio feeds from a telephone (an important legacy from the developers’ audioblogging heritage)
The “may we control your computer” message that comes up when I hit “create” asks if it can control my microphone and my camera. Can we see where this is going?
There’s a tab for “upload media” that isn’t live. Yet.

I have questions, of course. What’s the “native” format of an Odeo-created feed? Any way to edit the audio besides erasing it? My hunch is “no,” as Odeo specifically says it’s for casual use–i.e., do-it-in-one-take, although you could do multiple tries until you got one you liked. What are the limits on recording times? How long will material recorded to the Odeo site be saved? Is there any way to dump the Odeo audio onto my local machine without “re-recording” it by capturing the streaming/downloaded audio?

Odeo has come up with a spiffy interface, a well-targeted mission, and a bunch of useful tools. I wish them well. And with multiple channels, I’ll be able to be the broadcasting magnate I’ve always yearned to be. That raises another question. Does Odeo have any plans a la Podshow.com to incorporate commercial development in their site? They do have the following item in their Terms of Use :

We encourage users to contribute their creations to the public domain or consider progressive licensing terms. Accordingly, we will offer the ability to mark your content as belonging to the public domain or as licensed under a Creative Commons license.

There’s even a charming footnote to the Terms of Use:

“These terms of service were inspired, with permission, by Flickr.”

Which raises the question of whether inspiration may be copyrighted. That is, do you need my permission to be inspired by me? Or is it simply good manners to say, “Excuse me sir, you’re inspiring me. Is that okay with you?”

Please do not adjust your sets:

We live in interesting times. Oh, and don’t overlook the Odeo blog. I almost missed it in all the excitement….

Actually, it was late in the afternoon when Vidya, Brian, and I talked about Croquet, Second Life, cognition, Star Trek, and lots of other exhilarating topics. They called it a “nightcap” because a) it was informal and b) it was intended to be a late-night chat experience for the listener.

For me, it was great fun. I hope it’s enjoyable for the listener as well. You can hear that I was in full EDUCAUSE-energy mode, jazzed by a great day of sessions and conversations, including a podcast interview with Matt Pasiewicz that I’d recorded just a few moments earlier. The “nightcap” came about because Vidya, Brian, and I didn’t want the conversation to end. The formal podcast interview should be up in the next few days.

I’m very much looking forward to our next chat, podcast or not. It’s always inspiring to talk to such bright, dedicated, imaginative people.

eSchool News reports on a new Intel/Center for Digital Education survey that indicates continued strong growth in wireless infrastructure deployment on US campuses. We’re just putting the finishing touches on our own initial wireless rollout at the University of Mary Washington. Given the data I’m seeing, it’s none too soon.

There’s also a list of the top 50 “unwired” campuses, and I’m pleased to see that my alma mater (Wake Forest University) makes a strong showing, just ahead of DePauw University, where Dennis Trinkle exercises his visionary, agile IT leadership. It’s also great to see two Virginia schools on the list: Hampton University (whose CIO just spoke at the EDUCAUSE closing session) and The College of William and Mary, where Gene “Techfoot” Roche, the inspiration for Gardner Writes (though he bears no responsibility for its contents otherwise), continues to be one of the most thoughtful and generous academic computing specialists I have met. Kudos as well to Courtney Carpenter, the W&M CIO whom I was privileged to meet over the summer. Their accomplishments keep the bar raised for all of us, and for that I am very grateful.