Both Martha and I found ourselves resonating with this post from Jenna, who wrote it during her trip to NYC as part of her theatre class.

Jenna’s blog is part of a large online project we’ve been facilitating for their class this semester. My own work has been largely behind-the-scenes. Out front and with astonishing diligence and imagination, our Instructional Technology Specialists have worked for months with these students and their professor, Gregg Stull, to realize a dream. You can read more about the project and process at The Smooth Elephant. From there, if you’re interested, read along with the students and Gregg as they blog. There’s a lot of material there, much of it very powerful indeed.

Even so, in the midst of all these aggregated blogging, video, and podcasting wonders, it’s often the small moments, the moments that might otherwise be lost or known only to one person, that carry the richest rewards. Jenna’s special day, like all the other experiences these students and their professor have had during this course of study, has now become part of the fabric of my life too, and the lives of anyone in the world who finds these blogs. Thankfully, Web 2.0 makes that process of discovery and sharing not only easy, but likely. These blogs will live on. I hope they will become an ongoing project for these students as they carry their work into the professional world. I hope and expect they will be a great resource for future students, and for the entire department of Theatre and Dance.

I am very proud of these students, their professor (whom I am fortunate to have as a colleague), and the work my staff has done with them. I am humbled and honored to be among them.

As you’ll see on The Smooth Elephant, this project is only one of many in which the Division of Teaching and Learning Technologies has partnered with faculty to augment and transform teaching and learning. More dreamers welcome!

EDIT: Martha’s reflections on the theatre project’s “getting down to business” are a must-read.

I’d heard about the Live Clipboard buzz at the O’Reilly conference, but as CogDog Alan Levine says, it’s the demo that does it. So when I read Jon Udell’s Infoworld blog on Microsoft’s Live Clipboard and did the demo, I had that a-ha moment, and it was pretty huge. I don’t think Jon’s assessment of this development (“blew the doors off”) is at all exaggerated. Suddenly the idea of Web Services got a whole lot more interesting. And the fact that the demo invites the user to copy and paste between Firefox and IE is elating–or worrying, depending on your paranoia threshold.

Then I read Jon’s InfoWorld column, where this little nugget caught my eye:

He [Microsoft’s Ray Ozzie] showed how RSS feeds acting as service end points can be pasted into apps to create dynamically updating views. Virtually anyone can master this Tinkertoy approach to self-serve mashups.

More on the possibilities here.

Maybe this is the good-angel version of the bad-angel Active Desktop. At the very least, I’m intrigued to think of the possibilities of a Feedbook app that I imagine as a dynamically updated text, but with a difference. Difference? The feedbook app would not just be an RSS reader on steroids, but a magic book, an application-as-book, in which each section is a continually updated portal within certain delineated boundaries and with certain dynamic or even interactive capabilities. The professor, responding to his or her sense of class needs, could tweak the mashup throughout a class. Each year the text would grow richer, and each year it would be a little different. And it would be like an app, not like a collection of feeds.

Think of a film textbook in which chapters included, embedded within generalizable analytical frameworks, dynamically updated trailers of current movies. Below the trailers would be spaces for students to take notes, share-able with fellow students. The whole thing could be exported, ripped/mixed/fed wherever, framed for evaluation or saved for further work. Dynamically updated showtimes for those movies in that area would appear nearby. Blog entries, related movies, Pandora-like suggestions for cognates, etc. All there, all presenting options for reflection, analysis, and directed browsing to the student, with partial bread-crumb trails leading elsewhere and inviting off-text exploration and serendipity. The lines between text and e-portfolio and notebook would be usefully blurred. Each text would be an invitation to another world, and a map of that world, and a record of one’s travels through that world.

I do not know what I’m taking about, really, but I’m intrigued even though I can’t articulate why just yet.

I find these words extremely thought-provoking:

“i don’t want recommendations. i want abstract adventures. (and making friends is a by-product of being on the same mission.)”

They come from Martin Lindner’s fine post on two Web-enabled music services, Pandora and LastFM. My immediate reaction is that the divide between recommendations and abstract adventures may define certain essential cognitive differences I’ve run across (and experienced) in my own Life With People. Lindner’s words also heighten my awareness of two ways of trying to ignite curiosity and intellectual passion in students. I’ve never taught a class that didn’t have students on both sides of that desire dichotomy.

Bryan Alexander’s frame for considering these issues not only alerted me to Lindner’s original blog, but puts many facets of this absorbing thought-experiment on glittering display, with even more links to delight the mind’s eye. As is his wont. He’s absolutely right about the fine post from Steve Krause, for example. The whole nature vs. nurture paradigm, which I once altered into creature vs. culture (riffing on Walker Percy’s “The Loss of the Creature,” q.v.), has tremendous ramifications for the entire social software enterprise, not to mention education (is there a more powerful form of social software?), and I admire Krause for the particularity and fairness of his observation, matched with his wisdom that nature and nurture each has its role to play.

Music’s Duell, indeed.

Interesting NYTimes piece today (registration required) on the death of TV. Sure, the rumors are greatly exaggerated, but when Rocketboom draws 200,000 viewers a day, eyebrows and questions are raised in CableLand. As well they should be.

Yesterday’s Rocketboom is particularly interesting in its coverage of this year’s SXSW event in Austin, Texas. I’m struck, as always, by how much IT innovation is driven by what the innovators themselves would like to play and work with. Perhaps this is where play gets serious in any community. Project: create the magic carpet you’ve always wanted.

With costs so low, production staffs so small, and imagination and creativity the vital fuel, why aren’t colleges and universities producing their own Rocketbooms? Heck, even my daughter Jenny’s sixth-grade class is doing “you are there” podcasts on the Great Depression.

Some days I feel as if I’m sitting next to Niagara Falls with a hydroelectric plant held up at the docks in Newport News.

I’m ready to take delivery on those turbines, please.

Stories via Podcasting News.

Unusually perceptive MSM piece on blogging today in the Chicago Herald-Tribune. Will Richardson‘s mentioned prominently, as is (to my surprise and delight) WordPress. The anecdotes range from kindergarten to life-long learning. I’m encouraged to see such an evocative and comprehensive treatment that avoids all the usual hooks for an article about the blogosphere.

Perhaps some folks are starting to get the message.

Interesting to see that higher education is conspicuously absent from this particular story.

And how.

From an NPR piece on Latin Alternative Music:

“stubbornly uncategorizable, and available to anyone who takes the time to seek it out.”

Change “it” to “him” and I’d be proud to wear that around town.

Via Alice.

First up, Microsoft. Easy target, but fair: their design is not something to emulate, but it sure is easy to parody.

Thanks to Andy for the initial link on this one.

In the spirit of equal opportunity, it’s Apple’s turn in the dunking booth. (If this video isn’t loading in properly, here’s the direct link)

All brought to you by YouTube.

That venture capital coursing through the dot com boom made some folks mighty rich, and at least a few of those seem to have turned their money into streams of inventive Web projects. Has anyone done a study on these “early commerce pioneers,” people like Brewster Kahle et al., who took their earnings and reinvested them in quirky, essential Internet projects?

Word association time.

mp3?
iPod

podcast?
iPod

podcatcher?
iTunes

content delivery?
iTunes U

textbook publishing?
iTunes U

course management?
iTunes U

Why else would Campus Technology title its article on campus mp3’s “Is it iTime yet?”

Even the Chronicle gets in the act today, and makes it clear (via Michael Feldstein and others) that Apple’s business plan with iTunes U envisions not only a renaissance of the Mac but also massive inroads in every part of higher education’s content authoring, management, and delivery.

The iTunes U program has the potential for other functions, as well, such as selling textbooks or distributing course documents, according to some college officials who have been briefed on Apple’s plans.

“Another potential watershed is the opportunity to use the iTunes Music Store as a textbook publishing medium,” wrote Michael Feldstein, assistant director of blended learning at the SUNY Learning Network, the online program of the State University of New York, on his blog after attending a daylong briefing at Apple’s headquarters with other campus officials last month. “Apple was explicit about their goals in this regard.”

He said in an interview that Apple officials told him and other academics that the company hoped textbook publishers would sell either whole books or individual chapters online in much the same way that music labels now let users purchase an entire album or just individual tracks. That way professors could ask students to purchase pieces of different books rather than buy entire volumes. Mr. Feldstein speculated that as the screens of iPods get larger, the machines could be used as e-book readers.

At least Brian Lamb is quoted in the Chronicle piece with some salutary cautions.

Cupertino exerts a tremendous, distorting gravitational pull. I remain concerned that higher education is ready to sell its birthright for a mess of iTunes. Those leading the charge give us information gleaned from special tours, insider contacts, etc. I feel a rush of “Apple’s time has come round at last!” from folks who’ve been waiting a long time for this parousia. “Demur, you’re straightway dangerous / And handled with a chain.”

And all this triggered by a small audio/video device. Jobs, like Hollywood, understands (now) that the most powerful CPU is the one inside a dream. As a human truth, that’s one thing. As a business plan, that’s unsettling.

Perhaps I should just take my soma.

Jerry blogs on an amazing and inspiring story. Human beings are such interesting animals. My favorite pull quote: “My first thought was to download the latest version of Winamp, which I downloaded at 255 k/s – less than five seconds! I was so happy; I think this was one of the most beautiful days of my life!”

Such joy from such an apparently small thing! And yet I’m reminded of the Christmas party at Fezziwig’s in Dicken’s “A Christmas Carol.” In its own way, even Winamp represents something potentially awe-inspiring about the human spirit and the human community. All depends on one’s readiness to share in another’s joy and determination. (And one’s addiction to music.)

Just when you think Jon Udell can’t get any more perceptive or articulate, it’s tomorrow and he’s written another column. (Really: he’s almost that consistent. The mind boggles, and the hands turn red from sustained applause.)

Today Udell analyzes one of the greatest security risks of all: the human-computer interface, where digits become sense data. Pull-quote of the day:

… we humans, with our legacy analog-only sensoriums, represent a terrible security risk.

Now as someone who still enjoys vinyl LPs alongside his SACDs and DVD-As and redbook CDs, and who listens to them all through a pressure-sensitive set of analog eardrums, I love my legacy sensorium. I’d love telepathy too, so long as I can post away messages from time to time and keep my mind to myself when I want. But Udell’s points are all extremely well-taken, and the writing, as usual, is as lucid and refreshing as a clear mountain stream.

That man’s writing teachers must have thought they’d died and gone to Heaven when he took their classes.