I read Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead over the Thanksgiving holiday. I don’t often buy a contemporary novel solely on the strength of positive reviews, but Michael Dirda’s review (blogged on below) stuck in my mind for days and I found myself yearning to read the book for myself.

The holiday was an apt time for this book. My family and I were visiting Grandma and Grandpa in Harrisonburg, joined by my sister-in-law and her new husband and her stepdaughter, and amid much eating and hilarity and shopping and loving talk I found several hours in which to read the book. The surroundings and family warmth made the book even more resonant than it would have been anyway, so much so that at times I had to put the book down for fear I would return to the festivities with my face streaked with tears. They might have been tears of happiness or sadness–the book has plenty of both–or they might have been tears of wonder, which are the hardest tears to explain. In any event, I didn’t feel it proper to intrude my own reading ecstasies on everyone else at the table (or elsewhere), though I did read a couple of passages aloud as I went along, and there was a fine moment when I got to a passage on predestination in this household of staunch Presbyterians (sister-in-law and father-in-law are both Presby ministers, don’t you know). Mostly, though, I read the words and pondered them in my heart.

This really is a remarkable book. It reminds me of Sir Thomas Browne, of Flannery O’Connor, of George Bernanos (whose Diary of a Country Priest is mentioned in the book), even of George Herbert, a strong presence throughout whom Ames specifically discusses at one point.

But this is not a derivative book by any means. The voice of John Ames, the book’s protagonist, is unique, and compelling. There is equal power in his introspection and his narratives, a difficult trick that Robinson pulls off brilliantly. She also does something else brilliantly: she manages to convey the multiple levels of Ames’s self-reading while at the same time she suggests patterns apparently invisible to Ames that the reader may sense without feeling at all superior to the protagonist. Dramatic irony of this sort is rare, and is usually reserved for tragedy. This book, however, is not a tragedy.

I can only echo the praise others have given this book. The writing is limpid, wonderful. It’s a novel of ideas, a great character study, a great book about America. It’s something like a psalm, finally. One of the many things I’m grateful for this Thanksgiving is that I had the opportunity to read this book–and that Marilynne Robinson had the courage and skill with which to write it. Thank you.

Interesting article in today’s Technology Review on “big science” collaboration. The National Science Foundation is funding a “Science of Collaboratories” project. And what is a collaboratory? Gary Olson at the University of Michigan defines it this way:

an organizational entity that spans distance, supports rich and recurring human interaction oriented to a common research area, and provides access to data sources, artifacts and tools required to accomplish research tasks.

It’s easy to see that this definition can work for all sorts of collaboration in higher education and elsewhere, which is why the article’s seven principles for successful collaboration are useful for anyone trying to use online learning effectively. The eighth principle is also very important, though it isn’t given its own number and is mentioned only at the very end: “social glue” among participants is vital, and one of the best ways to get “glued together” is by face-to-face interaction.

There’s that blend again.

Simson Garfinkel of Technology Review blogs about Dan Klein’s presentation on this topic. Lots of links from the blog to the presentation: a streaming webcast, as well as PowerPoint slides and a PDF collection of those slides. It’s actually an interesting intellectual exercise to try to imagine the presentation based only on the PowerPoint slides–almost a translation exercise. I think I get the gist of it, though I had to get all the way to the end to understand what was up with the vultures and emus. Well, understand is too strong. Let’s just say I can guess at the general point Klein seems to be making.

I suppose it’ll take the webcast to clear up all the mysteries. Better, but less fun. (Spoken like a true English prof.)

That’s the title of the new novel by Marilynne Robinson, whose only other novel to date is the well-loved Housekeeping. I’ve not read Housekeeping yet (though I have seen the movie), but I have a feeling I may need to read this latest novel first. Michael Dirda’s review in today’s Washington Post was very stirring. He quotes this excerpt from the novel, a passage of extraordinary beauty and resonance:

I feel sometimes as if I were a child who opens its eyes on the world once and sees amazing things it will never know any names for and then has to close its eyes again. I know this is all mere apparition compared to what awaits us, but it is only lovelier for that. There is a human beauty in it. And I can’t believe that, when we have all been changed and put on incorruptibility, we will forget our fantastic condition of mortality and impermanence, the great bright dream of procreating and perishing that meant the whole world to us. In eternity this world will be Troy, I believe, and all that has passed here will be the epic of the universe, the ballad they sing in the streets. Because I don’t imagine any reality putting this one in the shade entirely.

Here’s the complete text of Dirda’s review (registration required).

I just ran across an interesting essay by Simson Garfinkel on “The Myth of Doomed Data.” It’s not the whole story, of course, but it is a powerful rejoinder to those who insist that the digital future will simply erase the digital past, over and over.

Here’s a taste:

Some argue that it’s impossible to look into the future and determine which of today’s formats will survive and which will go the way of the VP 415. Poppycock! As a society we have a very good understanding of what will make one file format endure while another one is likely to perish. The key to survival is openness and documentation.

It’s a two-hour session. It begins (it seems) with a film showing, The Forgotten Faces (1961). Then Jim Welsh presents on Images of Budapest. Ken Nolley ends the session with a paper on Fahrenheit 9/11. In between I’m doing a paper on The Fog of War.

And here we go! Ack.

Later edit: What a privilege it was to be on this panel. Jim (and Ken, in later discussion) did a great job of exploring the fascinating work of Peter Watkins. Ken’s paper was a deeply thoughtful and inspiring look at the responses to Michael Moore’s latest film. And the response to my paper was thoughtful, sharp, and encouraging, even (especially?) when the discussants took issue with some of my points. I’ve got to be careful here, or soon I’ll be insisting that academia can actually work the way it’s supposed to….

Thanks to everyone involved in this session for a splendid experience. It was as seminar through and through, planting seeds for fruitful investigation in many directions.

Not a new off-off Broadway play, but a quick and partial summary of yesterday’s event at the University of Mary Washington Teaching, Learning, and Technology Roundtable.

In a fit of last-minute inspiration, I had asked the six Instructional Technology Specialists in the UMW Division of Teaching and Learning Technologies to present a brief and interesting overview of new and new-ish tools for learning. They rose to the challenge beautifully. Jerry “Running With Scissors” Slezak brush up on his Hawaiian and took us on a tour of wikis. Kate “Baby Blue Punch Bloggie” Cooke shared her experience with IM and Chat. Andy “And He Blogs” Rush did a cool meta-demo of Visual Communicator. Lisa “Trek Blog” Quinton explored the wild wide world of blogs. Martha “The Fish Wrapper” Burtis walked us through the powerful integrative tool variously called “Content Managers” or “portals,” specifically an online community she’s built for DTLT on a platform called PostNuke. And Lisa “Learning To Sail” Ames integrated the entire showcase by means of an online evaluation tool called Zarca which she’s using to gather feedback from the showcase attendees. You can visit each of these ITS sites by following the links in my blogroll on the right.

What happened as a result of this torrent of facts, creativity, and perspectives? What happens as the result of all great teaching? Some people immediately catch fire with ideas and inspiration. Some people’s eyes glaze over. Some people wonder how they’ll ever find the time to experiment with even a small portion of these new tools. Some people want a complete build-out of an immersive PostNuke environment for their classes next spring. (The guilty party will please raise his hand. Thank you.) And some people wonder, with some justice, why all the emphasis on technology when teaching is primarily an exercise in human interaction. I myself think the technology exponentially augments the power, pervasiveness, and endurance of that human interaction, but even I will admit that yesterday was, by design, mighty techy.

But one other thing always happens when great teaching takes place: seeds are planted. This was the hardest lesson for me to learn when I began teaching at the college level nearly twenty-four years ago. I was a new graduate student at the University of Virginia, enrolled in my second semester of classes, and I was taking a class in Southern Literature from the man who was my most important mentor at UVa, Alan Howard. Alan’s Crossroads web project, an M.A. program in American Studies, represents an extraordinary comprehension of the power of the Web, and it continues to be an inspiration to me and to American Studies scholars everywhere. Just like Alan, in fact, though he’d no doubt deflect my insistence on saying so.

So there I was, young and green as a shallow sea, being a kind of teaching assistant for Alan’s class as I and my cohort led discussion groups for undergraduates who were taking that version of the course as we were taking our graduate version. Not by nature a patient person, I was continually exercised by the lack of strong, immediate responses to what I saw as almost unbearably exciting material. Alan had sized me up early on and was patient with my impatience. He took me aside and told me that teachers did their work because they had something they wanted to share, but they had to learn that the responses they sought might not come for years and might never be visible to them at all.

So I swallowed hard and became a teacher anyway.

Yesterday, more seeds were planted by more teachers, or to call us by another name, fellow learners. For that I am very grateful. And I’ll take this opportunity to announce that one seed sprouted very quickly indeed: our student rep to the TLTR, Charmayne Staloff, was so inspired that she immediately went home, opened up an account on Blogger, and joined the blogosphere by blogging.

Twice.

The conversation just got significantly richer. Welcome, Charmayne.

The site’s title is rather off-putting (“Mustard Gas Party”?), but the photographic essays on Modern Ruins are superb. The artist has a very strong sense of the uncanny. Thanks to Bryan Alexander for blogging this site.

Here’s one of my favorite images from the site so far:

<img src="http://gardnercampbell.net/blog1/wp-images/creeping evening_01.jpg"

The title alone is worth the price of admission.

This fall I have been gripped by Vannevar Bush’s essay “As We Might Think” and by Doug Engelbart’s essays over at Bootstrap.Org. Reestablishing contact with Brian Lamb and Bryan Alexander (who led me to this essential chapter on Doug Engelbart from Howard Rheingold’s Tools for Thought–thanks a bunch, Bryan) and DePauw’s Dennis Trinkle (who introduced Bryan to Howard Rheingold–get the story here) has made all these thoughts accumulate even more intensity for me. Then I find “Life With Alacrity” and Christopher Allen’s very useful history of social software on his blog. The article generated many comments that take the discussion to an even higher level. Great stuff. Thanks to Charlie Lowe at cyberdash by way of Martha’s “The Fish Wrapper” for the links that led me there.

I know I recently blogged about how a network is not itself a mind, but with the kind of celerity this Internet enables it does sometimes seem that the thoughts are coming after me just as much as I’m pursuing them. I’m struck by how much I’d like to encourage this feeling in my students, too, and that I’ve often had it when I do my research and writing in Renaissance studies and film studies. It’s something like feeling the conversation cares about, even anticipates, my participation in it. A fragile, fleeting emotion that’s hard to sustain … but an important motivation for keeping up my end of the chat.

“What is truth? said Jesting Pilate, and would not stay for an answer.”

Brian Lamb blogs about the Northern Voice weblog conference in Vancouver next February. Deadline for submissions: Nov. 15, 2004. The list of possible topics, like all good lists, is itself an education. I’m particularly intrigued by the notion of a 1-2 minute “lightning tool talk.” I’m hoping Brian can capture and share a couple of those talks on streaming video somewhere, somewhen. Or maybe I’ll see for myself whether the “moose is loose” (what a great conference logo, eh?):