Two DTLT blogs merit immediate attention.

One is Jerry Slezak’s blog on a screencast about the Wikipedia article on “umlaut bands.” The Wikipedia article itself is fascinating (“rockdots”–who knew?), but Jon Udell’s screencast takes it to a whole ‘nother level and immediately triggers my devious faculty brain into imagining scads of wonderful assignments, projects, etc.

Another is Martha Burtis’s cris de coeur (I hope I spelled that right; French is not my forte) regarding information overload. Food for thought about, well, too much food for thought.

The BBC is reporting an effort by the Committee To Protect Bloggers to mobilize the “blogsphere” (or as some call it, the “blogosphere”) in support of two imprisoned Iranian bloggers. (The article calls them “cyber-dissidents.”) I’m wary of supporting a cause I know so little about, but when Amnesty International responds to the situation (they’re quoted in the BBC article) I do take it very seriously. Reuters is now reporting that one of the bloggers, an Iranian journalist named Arash Sigarchi, has today been sentenced to fourteen years in prison.

So a one-month old “Committee To Protect Bloggers” can, with one call to action, quickly get the attention not only of the international press but also of UN individuals concerned with Internet governance issues. Reading through the comments on the CTPB blog on this effort is itself an education. One commenter, if he’s for real, offers particularly nuanced advice about how to make this kind of protest most effective. His name–“vb”–leads to what appears to be a preliminary report by the Working Group on Internet Governance that will eventually be submitted to the World Summit on the Information Society. The report is dated February 21, 2005–i.e., yesterday.

I am awestruck by the speed and pervasiveness these things represent, and I wonder how any institution of higher education can afford not to offer students rich, focused opportunities to reflect on, and shape, these emerging technologies. I hope that the blogosphere is indeed a potent force for human rights, but whether or not that turns out to be the case, we owe it to our students to help them reflect on the phenomenon we’re witnessing.

That’s the title of a recent article in ComputerWorld magazine. My colleague Martha Burtis’s work on bots in education has helped me think about cognition and AI in some new ways, and this piece reinforces my sense that a breakthrough in these areas may arrive sooner than we think.

Favorite pull quote:

In any case, we probably wouldn’t want to make machines that are too much like humans, he [Robert Hecht-Nielsen] says, or we might end up with systems that are influenced by personal biases, just like many people are.

Instead, AI systems will handle tasks that humans aren’t particularly good at today, like dependably answering tedious customer questions with an endless supply of patience.

“AI will mean ennoblement for the customer,” says Hecht-Nielsen. “Someone will answer calls in a call center and spend as much time as the customer needs, and they will be polite and fun. It just won’t be a person.”

“Ennoblement”: a new concept in customer service. What’s not to like about that?

For the curious, the sleepless, and Claude who asked, here’s a podcast that Explains It All. Or tries to, anyway.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (4.9MB)

I apologize for being silent so long. I’m told by a reliable supervisor that the California strain of influenza, probably the strain I hosted last week during my ‘flu festival, was a) particularly hard-hitting and b) impervious to the flu vaccine that I didn’t qualify for anyway. Since I am a scholar, I am somehow comforted by this knowledge. And I believe I am on the mend. So without further ado, a gadget:

Lots of buzz in the aether about DEMO, the innovation/demonstration revue that just concluded in Scottsdale, Arizona. The press coverage I’ve seen has focused on blogging and wiki applications, which of course pleases me, but I’m even more pleased to see an old friend from my Amiga days still in play. NewTek brought the Video Toaster to market in the late 80s , and the era of affordable desktop video production was born. Now it looks as if NewTek may have another ace to play: the BlackBox.

BlackBox is a portable live production switcher/Web streaming appliance. For under $5K, BlackBox allows the user to produce a live event, including switching multiple cameras, graphics, pre-recorded video material, PC screen shots, etc. (eight simultaneous video and graphic sources) and stream the output to the Web in real time. There is no other similar product in terms of price range, range of functionality and portability, on the market today.

Live TV for five grand: just add cameras and event. I can imagine plenty of illicit uses for this gadget, but I can also imagine a revolution in webcasting for education, and I know some enterprising undergrads will start doing some deeply cool campus TV shows, coming soon to a desktop near you.

Actually, BlackBox is part of the product (or “solution,” as the buzz goes) called TriCaster, which NewTek bills as the world’s first portable live video production suite. I bet they almost called it a TriCorder, but sober heads intervened. In any event, this may turn out to be the Portastudio of the video world. I’m intrigued.

Today’s Technology Review has an interesting blog from Henry Jenkins on recent developments regarding “fansubbing,” in which American viewers (or at least viewers in America) translate and subtitle Japanese anime that hasn’t yet been released in the US. Jenkins’ earlier article on this phenomenon, “When Piracy Becomes Promotion,” discusses the practice (and its intellectual property issues) in detail. The latest news is that a major anime studio called “Media Factory” has asked some fan sites that distribute fansubbed anime (mostly via BitTorrent, to the tune of ninety terabytes per day) to stop handing out or linking to copies of its works.

Following the easily visible threads of this story has led me from the MIT Anime Club in the late 1970s to the poignantly-titled Anime-Faith website (“Anime-Faith is chill,” it proclaims), where this morning one can download eighteen of these fansubbed productions. One title on the list is not available for download, however: Anime-Faith simply notes that it is “now available from Pathfinder Pictures.” This little notice is at the heart of the fansubbing community’s ethical understanding of itself. Once the title has been made available for retail purchase, ethical fansubbers take it off their sites–or at least that’s the promise they make.

Fansubbing, like fan fiction, is a fascinating example of learning communities that spring out of entertainment phenomena. (That may be a distinction without a difference, but bear with me.) To put it another way, the distance between a fansubber or a fanfic writer and a scholar may, in certain instances, be nil. One could make the same argument about creative writing, but writers I’ve known always have favorite writers whose work serves as touchstones for their own creativity, so there’s no news there. To flip the idea around, however, is to consider whether fandom, mutatis mutandis, might be a useful paradigm for understanding and encouraging learning communities.

I anticipate some early objections.

Q: Doesn’t a fan simply lose him- or herself in a kind of superficial hero worship? Won’t fandom be another opiate for the masses?
A: Not necessarily. Fans are not necessarily infatuated or fatuous. And the idea of fandom might encourage a sense of personal agency, commitment, and community in the learning enterprise.

Q: Can fandom coexist with critical thinking?
A: Insofar as critical thinking means an habitually ironic, distanced, self-excusing skepticism, I suppose not. But it’s obvious from that definition that I don’t believe such critical thinking should necessarily be at the heart of the educational enterprise. Nor do I think such “critical thinking” is even what its name promises. But that’s another blog.

Q: Can fandom coexist with critical thinking?
A: As fandom approaches the condition of a maturely loving relationship (modulating distance and devotion in a cycle of ongoing understanding) with ideas and their expression in human utterance and praxis, yes.

Q: Isn’t this all rather Dead Poets Society?
A: The idea at the heart of that film is worth exploring, despite the sentimental narrative that surrounds it. Or because of it.

The fact is, fan communities flourish and generate astonishing energy, whatever our official attitudes and strictures, and they will continue to do so. That energy can obviously fuel great personal commitment and creative output. It’s a renewable and communal source of energy that education would do well to explore more thoroughly.

Love is not all you need. A clear head and a light bulb are also handy, as Bob Dylan once said. But without love, where would you be now?

I just updated my Word Press installation to version 1.22 and it killed the WP 1.2 enclosures hack. Or at least it wounded it: my SQL database still had the extra tables, as I discovered after much trial and error (sometimes it’s good to assume you’re wrong, and sometimes it isn’t), but the new admin files overwrote the blog forms so I didn’t have the enclosure fields I had before. Ah well. Now I think I’m ready for a test ‘cast, which will be nothing but a banal impromptu version of what I’ve just written, which is a banal impromptu version of what I’ll say in a moment. But I’d better stop before I descend any farther into “I’m the world’s worst self-deprecator” mode.

A Washington Post article led me to the 2005 Bloggie Awards website. It’s an appealingly modest award competition–prizes seem to be in the $25-50 range at most–and very much in the blog spirit. I was pleased to see the inspiring South-East Asia Earthquake and Tsunami Blog is a finalist.

A new program at William and Mary will require students students to purchase notebook (aka laptop) computers. The program, called My Notebook, will begin as an optional pilot in the fall 2005 term; it will be required the following year.

Here’s coverage from a local TV station’s website that’s basically the AP story; it includes comments from W&M’s Gene Roche, Virginia Tech’s Larry Hinckler, and Diana Oblinger, Director of EDUCAUSE’s National Learning Infrastructure Initiative. The William and Mary My Notebook FAQ has detailed information on the program.

Programs of this kind almost always require that schools standardize on a single platform if they want to get the full business benefits. One can also argue, as W&M does, that single-platform computing is necessary to realize this program’s full educational benefits. At W&M, the standard platform will be MS Windows. Students who elect to purchase a Macintosh, or any other laptop not offered by the school, will not have the convenient and fast support the school will offer. They’ll have to get their support elsewhere. They’ll also need to be sure their computers can run the applications they need to complete the assignments their instructors give them; for Mac users, this could mean purchasing software to emulate the Windows OS on their machines. In other words, instructors will assume a common platform and a common configuration and create their classes accordingly. Anyone not buying a laptop from the school will have to meet those requirements on their own–not a daunting task for the computer-savvy, but an inconvenience that will probably motivate most students to buy through the college.

I’m not myself an advocate of campus-wide single-platform computing. I understand all the reasons it makes sense, but something in me resists this step, partially because I’ve had pretty good luck as an outlier in most things and I don’t want to eliminate or even curtail that possibility for others, and mostly because I don’t think one platform fits all uses. And as long as diverse careers require diverse computing platforms, I think we need to support multiple platforms in the campus computing environment.

But there’s a larger point to W&M’s program, one that I hope doesn’t get lost in the platform wars. We’re all waiting for information technology to transform teaching and learning in higher education. At this point, mobile and wireless computing hold great promise for this kind of transformation. William and Mary already has a robust wireless network and plans to have full coverage in the very near future. The laptop requirement and its associated benefits pretty much complete the infrastructure required for this transformation. (The only thing missing is Tablet capability–a significant omission, in my view, but not a dealbreaker at this point.) Then it will be up to the professors and the administrative leaders in academic computing to create imaginative and effective uses for these resources.

That last step’s a doozy.

Good luck to our neighbors to the east. We’re taking notes.

Never mind Look Who’s Talking. Now it’s Look Who’s Blogging. Joshua Pohl’s proud parents have bought him his own domain and outfitted him with his own Baby Blog. Only three entries so far, and only one in Joshua’s “voice,” but that’s not bad for a one-week-old.

I’m sure this is not the first blog/domain bought for a baby, but it’s the first I’ve seen, and it’s fun to think about. I hope Joshua’s parents have considered the security issues. On the other hand, I’m pleased they’ve already locked up Joshua’s name domain in the .com arena.