My boss very casually (or was it slyly?) sent me a link to something truly mind-blowing this afternoon. I hope she enjoyed the sound of my world being transformed. 🙂

Lyric poetry is very dear to me, as is writing generally, as is music. Imagine an idea that unites parts of each joy into a truly new whole. A simple idea, expressed elegantly, analyzed in depth and with great articulation in the supporting materials, but in its presentation to the user so simple that almost anyone could get a handle on it, from elementary school students to a grizzled Ph.D. like me.

Go take a look for yourself. I feel like a glider in an updraft just thinking about it.

There’s a prize of one million dollars for solving the Poincaré Conjecture. The yellow brick road to that payoff leads past many of the usual and important milestones in academia: conferences, papers, peer-reviewed journals. As a recent article in The New Yorker makes clear, it’s also important to circulate early versions of a proof strategically, to be sure the flaws are caught before you stake your claim to a discovery.

Russian mathematician Grigory Perelman went through many of the usual processes, according to the article. There was a Berkeley fellowship, contact with many distinguished mathematicians, job invitations from all over, and the like (if there is a “like” when one gets to those heights). But at age twenty-nine, Perelman chose to move back to Russia, to a low-paying university post and physical isolation from the very thinkers he had sought out.

Home. Alone. But not quite alone. Here’s the sentence that even in 2006 retains its power to astonish–and I hope it retains that power for a long time, though the article makes relatively little of it.

The Internet made it possible for Perelman to work alone while continuing to tap a common pool of knowledge.

Individuality and community, enacted at one of the higher reaches of human intellectual accomplishment. But it gets better:

On November 11th, Perelman had posted a thirty-nine-page paper entitled “The Entropy Formula for the Ricci Flow and Its Geometric Applications,” on arXiv.org, a Web site used by mathematicians to post preprints–articles awaiting publication in refereed journals. He then e-mailed an abstract of his paper to a dozen mathematicians in the United States … none of whom had heard from him for years.

Within seven months, Perelman completed the trilogy of Internet postings that seem to have proved the Poincaré Conjecture.

Questions of temperament aside, Perelman’s choices illustrate some of the enormous potential consequences of the Information Age and its media. Scholarship and the communities that form around it will be slow to change, and that’s not all bad. Education is conservative as well as liberal in senses that have nothing to do with partisan politics. Yet I look at the Perelman story and I’m struck by two things. One is that we are at the very outset of these changes, and many of us alive today will live to see dramatic and far-reaching shifts in higher education involving not only learning but also the community of scholars. That’s pretty obvious. The second striking thing, however, is that the New Yorker piece spends almost no time considering this revolution. I speculate that that’s either because that fundamental paradigm shift hasn’t registered on the authors … or because they’re already taking it for granted.

I’ll close with a small troubling thought. It is entirely possible for us in the scholarly community and in higher education generally to take something for granted before it’s actually registered on us. If that happens, we will be blown before the wind instead of steering by it.

How should we keep that from happening?

From MIT’s Technology Review, a story about design spaces and serendipity fields, explored and gathered by evolutionary algorithms.

The site says it’s in beta, but no matter: everything’s beta nowadays, so the word’s meaning is obviously shifting. I’m starting to think that beta is the only condition for a wiki … but I digress.

Wikiversity is up. Here’s the welcome statement:

Wikiversity is a community for the creation and use of free learning materials and activities. Wikiversity is a multidimensional social organization dedicated to learning, teaching, research and service. Its primary goals are to:

* Create and host free content, multimedia learning materials, resources, and curricula for all age groups in all languages
* Develop collaborative learning projects and communities around these materials

Learners and teachers are invited to join the Wikiversity community as editors of this wiki website where anyone can edit the pages. The community portal lists information about many aspects of Wikiversity.

Fascinating. Where will this initiative sit alongside the myriad other online learning initiatives? Will it co-opt them, take notice of them, co-exist with them, ignore them, re-invent them?

Wikiversity begins its work with two main categories: learning projects and learning groups. Here’s how they stand:

Learning projects involve the creation and development of Wikiversity pages that describe and facilitate the learning experiences of learning group members. Learning projects provide activities for learners.

At Wikiversity learning is by doing. Often this involves editing webpages and creating Wikiversity content. Sometimes this involves reading or engaging in activities in the world and writing about those.

A basic unit of community within Wikiversity is the Learning Group. Wikiversity learning groups are groups of Wikiversity participants with a shared learning goal. Learning Groups participate in Wikiversity Learning Projects that are relevant to achieving a group’s learning goals.

Someone’s obviously been reading up on how people learn. What’s interesting to me is how the doing is tied so closing to the reflecting and describing and the writing about. How rich can these projects be when there’s no face-to-face component, at least none that’s required? An interesting question, especially for anyone involved in e-learning.

The really dense reading right now, however, is on the Management page. I’ve had time only to skim it, but it looks like a cross between a worldwide faculty meeting, a PTA, and a university strategic planning session. Given that Wikiversity is guided by Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales’s mission to “to help make all free human knowledge available to all humanity,” I’m not surprised. My 64K question (and who would ever need more than 64K, or was that 640K?) is whether Wikiversity can do for teaching and learning what Wikipedia did for, or to, encyclopedias. Yes, time will tell, but something tells me that Wikiversity is even more ambitious than Wikipedia.

This is going to be very interesting.

UPDATE: I don’t know why I’ve never seen this page before–I’m certain there’s an analogous page on Wikipedia–but I must say that I admire the sentiment, at least in this context. Greatly. Be bold, not radical, and be bold in a context of civility. A fascinating set of socializing norms, and an interesting paradox. Boldness and civility are personal, that is, they are embraced and exemplified in human agency, one person at a time. Yet the goal is selfless collaboration. Much to think on here.

At the “Lunch on the Lawn” after church today, my son and I were talking about one of his favorite pastimes: playing Star Wars: Battlefront online with his friends from all over the world. “You should play it, Dad,” he said. I replied that I was certain to embarrass him and his clan by being such a noob (newbie). “That’s okay,” he said. “You’d get better quickly. Plus it’s a very friendly group. Most of us play just to hang out. We also have a birthday alert that lets us know when someone’s celebrating their birthday.”

I paused for a moment to mull over this new bit of information. A birthday alert for a bunch of guys flying X-Wings around and running scrimmages with other guys? Interesting. Suddenly Star Wars: Battlefront started to sound like YASN (yet another social network). Which of course it is … but here was explicit evidence.

To break the silence, my son went on. “Really, Dad, you ought to try it once. There are lots of Yodas in the clan.”

Yodas?

“Sure: guys over 40.”

You know, it could be worse. Ol’ greenie’s not too bad with a light saber, after all.

Next installment, I’ve promised my son I’ll blog about the game of “bowling” he invented for his clan buddies. It seems there’s quite a lot of play-within-play going on in-world.

Disclaimer: I’d say this even if he hadn’t linked to me with characteristically generous encouragement.

Brian Lamb over at Abject Learning has just published a Q&A on Wikipedia that constitutes one of the smartest, clearest, and most humane takes I’ve read on that resource and its cultural context. It’s an extraordinary synthesis of what many voices have been saying, but it’s more than that. It’s actually an essay on knowledge, education, and civilization. How interesting that Wikipedia both represents and stimulates the larger conversations that are often so implicit (or discouraged) in a world of industrialized schooling.

And did I mention the writing? Limpid and focused. A neat trick to manage both at the same time. Fine enough to savor, strong enough to survive the thousand handouts that will reprint it.

As ever, Brian rocks.

On the topic of leadership, this quotation also seems striking to me.

He who loves community, destroys community. He who loves the brethren, builds community. Dietrich Bonhoeffer

With allowances for the androcentric language, which I’m confident Bonhoeffer meant inclusively, the observation is keen and apt. The idea as I understand it is that communities are built out of persons, not out of ideologies, and that one of the most insidious traps a leader can fall into is that of advocating community while evading engagement with persons in all their alterity, all their knotty complexities.

There may be a corollary here having to do with one’s relation to oneself. Perhaps integrity can be understood, in part, as self-leadership emerging from love of one’s own inner alterity, for the sake of being in ethical and respectful and productive community with others.

Possible connections here with courses of study as well. Each class is a particular community formed around a focused, time-delimited experience, but also an exercise in community, in what Bruner calls consciousness-raising about the possibilities of communal mental experience.

Memo to self: nota bene.

I’m been meaning to blog about this topic for many weeks. I even tried to bring this passage into a staff meeting at one point, though in my advanced discombobulation at the time I couldn’t find the book, much less the passage. Now, however, on a rainy Labor Day, sitting in Boatwright Memorial Library room 321, I’m prepared.

The excerpt is from M. Mitchell Waldrop’s The Dream Machine: J.C.R. Licklider and the Revolution That Made Computing Personal (Penguin, 2001). Ernie recommended the book to me a long time ago. I’m very glad he did. The book is a masterpiece. It took me several weeks to read it all, not because of the book, which although sprawling and compendious is very readable indeed, but because my life was taking several sharp turns during the period. The association was fortuitous: whenever I think of this book or read it again (as I most assuredly will), I will also think of a time of tremendous change, excitement, confusion, and hope. Not a bad set of associations, that, and a liminal moment I will do well to remember.

I’ll be dipping into this book for blog topics often. So much of it delights and instructs me (Horace would be happy) that I’m spoiled for choice. Today, however, I want to quote two magic paragraphs that express some of my major aspirations these days. I may not hit Lick’s target–no shame in that, he was the visionary at the heart of what became the Internet, after all–but at least I can aim in the same direction.

Indeed, Lick was already honing the leadership style that he would use to such effect a decade later with the nationwide computer community. Call it rigorous laissez-faire. On the one hand, like his mentor Smitty Stevens, Lick expected his students to work very, very hard; he had nothing but contempt for laziness and no time to waste on sloppy work or sloppy thinking. Moreover, he insisted that his students master the tools of their craft, whether they be experimental technique or mathematical analysis. On the other hand, Lick almost never told his students what to do in the lab, figuring that it was far better to let them make their own mistakes and find their own way. And imagination, of course, was always welcome; the point here was to have fun.

The Licklider style wasn’t for everyone, and not everyone stayed. But for self-starters who had a clear sense of where they were going, it was heaven. Good people liked to be with Lick; he seemed to be surrounded by an atmosphere of ideas and excitement. “He communicated the feeling that you could understand any field you wanted to,” explains Jerry Elkind. “He loved gadgets and putting things together. He loved to apply information and new ideas. So any area of science was interesting to him; he pulled in ideas from all kinds of domains. And he was always looking for novel ways of challenging your understanding of the domain, by constructing problems or puzzles that would require insight into the theory to solve.”

Licklider wasn’t perfect. He had his share of foibles, dropped balls, and oversights. By the mid-70’s, his thinking had ossified a bit, to the point that he could no longer see his way to supporting Doug Engelbart’s work on augmentation. (To be fair, Engelbart’s lab was not making as strong a case for itself at that time as it had just five years earlier. Still.) All of that said, Licklider dreamed big, and with great intelligence and deep delight he changed the world.

J.C.R. Licklider died on June 26, 1990. He lived to see the accomplishment of much he had worked for. Though he did not see the first explosion of the Internet as a public medium, he knew it was coming, and that he had helped to bring it about. He is a teacher, a thinker, and a leader I wish I could have met–and, after all, one from whom I have learned a great deal, even before I knew who he was.

That’s how teaching and learning go, sometimes.

“[S]o temper all things that the strong may still have something to long after, and the weak may not draw back in alarm.” It’s from a different context–some of you may recognize it–but it works well for the vocation of teaching, too.

Yesterday Google Book Search took its digitization project one step farther, allowing readers to download and print PDF versions of books in the public domain. Computerworld plays up the copyright questions and the ability to print, while Google’s book blog positions the initiative as a way to build a library of classic titles–and some obscurities as well. There’s also an interesting suggestion of mobility in Google’s typically low-key link to the new service: the tagline on the search page reads, “Take Shakespeare with you.”

I took a look at Flatland, digitized from Oxford’s Bodleian library. On the Google site, the book appears in a window flanked by a search box and four “buy this book” links. An “About this book” link takes me to a screen with brief bibilographic information, along with links to “related information,” meaning Google searches for information about the book. These searches are pre-constructed for some precision: 17 links to “other web pages related to Flatland by A. Square” (search field: “Flatland, by A. Square”  “Edwin Abbott Abbott”) and 133 links to “web reviews” of the book (search field: review “Flatland, by A. Square”). There’s an algorithm here, of course, and no one should rely on Google to construct intelligent searches for them, but I admire the way Google has tried to point readers in fruitful directions as they explore these books.

The scan of Flatland is clean and quite readable. For those who can tolerate reading from a screen, reading it online works pretty well. Printing out pages on a laser printer reveals more of the usual difficulties with contrast and blurring of letters, but the copy is still quite clean and in my view would be eminently usable for general reading and for use in the classroom.

Would I rather hold a printed volume in my hand and read from it? Certainly. I’ve given up dogearing pages long ago, but I still scribble in the margins, and I still thrill to the sight of book spines ranging across a handsome set of shelves. That said, I’m also mightily intrigued by the flexibility, ease of access, and cost savings represented by Google’s “classic downloads.” I’m also interested in the possibilities of sharing annotations. Imagine a library of these downloads with marginal notations by a) scholars b) general readers c) a classroom of students. Being able to share (indeed, publish) those annotations might also encourage students to be more diligent in their reading, so that they actually do mark the pages (electronically) and leave a trail of their own cognition as they move through a text.

Group annotations? Many possibilities there as well.

Take Shakespeare with you. Take Shakespeare class with you. Take the communal mental activity of many readers with you. Access and share the traces of your own engagement with other engaged readers.

This could be interesting.

UPDATE: Downloaded PDF books begin with a couple of interesting pages from Google regarding usage, copyright, and so forth. I’m most interested in the general description that begins these pages, in words that, for better or worse, carefully express an ethos that will be familiar to most academics. I note that marginalia also figure in Google’s thought, with a little Indiana Jones twist.

This is a digital copy of a book that was preserved for generations on library shelves before it was carefully scanned by Google as part of a project to make the world’s books discoverable online.