I’m at the 2005 EDUCAUSE convention and getting ready for tomorrow’s pre-conference workshop on digital assets management. I’m also looking forward to a reunion with some friends–friends I didn’t know just two years ago, when I first came to EDUCAUSE.

I’ve already heard from one of those friends, Bryan Alexander, who tells me the advance copies of the Nov./Dec. EDUCAUSE Review are in the convention registration packets. I have an essay on podcasting in this issue. (Hence the title of this blog post.) Editor Teddy Diggs and I thought it would be fun to podcast the article on podcasting, so here’s the audio version of my essay.

I very much enjoyed writing and podcasting this essay. The subject is near and dear to my heart, and Teddy was a great editor to work with: sharp, funny, humane, and vigilant. She coped very well with my desire to try to stay ahead of the news just as podcasting went mainstream with iTunes. Since the article went to bed in mid-September, Yahoo has come on board, and Apple has introduced its video iPod. I considered putting the late-breaking news into the podcast, but I wanted the audio version to be as close as possible to the print version so that the experiences could be compared more directly. I think and hope there’s enough analysis and musings in the article that it will be interesting and perhaps valuable even in the midst of rapidly evolving circumstances.

I found it harder to do the podcast than I had expected. It’s a longish piece–it runs about 50 minutes read aloud–and I wanted to do it all in one go as much as I could, rather than recording it in sections. That took some stamina, and I ended up with several complete takes that have quite different characters. In the end I went for something gentle instead of a more upbeat approach. I wanted the gentleness to carry both excitement and thoughtfulness. We’ll see if I got anywhere near. Comments are welcome, as always. I’m particularly curious about how the print and audio experiences compare; if you do both, let me know what you think. The print issue will be online next week, I imagine.

Thanks, Teddy, and thanks to Bart Prater of WROV Roanoke, the best radio teacher I ever had. Thanks too to my family, who gave up many hours of gaming, NeoPets, TV, and computer access so that I could wrestle my Rode NT1-A into submission and get a version I could live with.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (32.6MB)

Interesting blog entry from Tyler Cowen’s “Marginal Revolution” blog on Thomas More’s Utopia, a work that in C. S. Lewis’s phrase “starts many hares but catches none.” I’m not sure Lewis was absolutely right, but it is fascinating to see how many perspectives More’s justly famous piece rewards. I’m neck-deep in John Donne right now, and loving it, but next term my sixteenth-century lit. class will give me a chance to talk about More again. I’ll clip Cowen’s entry in my Bloglines account and have another conversation- or paper-starter for my class.

Cool.

I just read an excellent blog entry from Paul Angiolillo at Technology Review that compellingly demonstrates the need for hybridity in technology. Too often I find either nostalgia for older ways that, to be fair, were sometimes abandoned too quickly, or pedal-to-the-metal futurism that scorns anything pre-1999. The truth about technology, like most human truths, is much more complex, interesting, and provocative, and Paul’s blog entry today is a fine example of deep and precise thinking on this topic. More, please!

Teaser for Andy: Boston cops on technology-enhanced bikes.

The title demonstrates a false dichotomy, one right up there with books vs. e-text and dozens of others in this stage of the information age. One can fall off an elephant on both sides, after all.

The specific inspiration for the title comes from a Chronicle Wired Campus blog entry linking to an essay by Robert Johnson, CIO of Rhodes College in Memphis, Tennessee. Johnson makes a good case that removing books from a library in favor of e-texts and social spaces is a shortsighted strategy. But then he falls off the elephant on the other side by insisting that the screen experience cannot in any way rival the print experience, which is one of great involvement, physical comfort, life-changing depth, and so forth. After awhile, I feel as if I’m watching a Maxwell House commercial, and anyone who knows me knows that I too love books with a mighty love.

But of course I love computers too. Funny how that works. Here I am writing and reading online. Not too long ago I was gently turning the pages of 16th- and 17th-century books in the Duke Humfrey’s Library at Oxford’s Bodleian library. I find both experiences compelling and valuable. I bet I’m not alone. Perhaps this is the issue, or the divide: there are those who have found compelling textual experiences online, and those who have not. My hunch is that Johnson is looking at online reading/writing through the wrong generic lens. It’s the difference between curling up with a novel and reading a blog. Both use writing, and both can be extraordinary, even transformative experiences.

The Chronicle’s blog entry features a long comment from Dartmouth’s Malcolm Brown that offers a very reasonable middle ground. Well worth reading, especially if one wants to stay on the elephant.

Not the kind from Quadrophenia, the kind I spent time on this summer and last spring, when I had time to spend on modding the blog. I needed to upgrade to WP 1.5.2 for a) security reasons and b) to install Spam Karma (following CogDog’s example).

Now I’ll need to a) remember all the mods and b) find time to tinker. But tinkering is fun, so all is not lost. (How else to approach the jigsaw puzzle of life, he asked portentously?)

EDIT: I restored the old version; couldn’t stand the plain space any longer. Now to discover how to do the 1.5.2 upgrade without killing the mods, if that’s possible.

EDITEDIT: Back to the new version. Comment spam was just too much. I’m slowly tweaking my way back to where I was.

Joan Vinall-Cox at WebToolsforLearners links to a very interesting essay in the University of Toronto magazine: “The Infinite Library.” Joan’s blog entry sums the piece up very well. My postcript is this little pull quote:

As UTL boosts its technological capabilities, Moore [Carole Moore, the chief librarian] likens the direction that the library is heading to a much earlier forebear – a medieval library. These institutions of the Middle Ages were not only book storehouses but places where manuscripts were rewritten and information was combined and republished in new ways, she says.

That’s a remix culture I can get behind. It’s also a little vindication for my oft-stated position that the online revolution reveals to us truths that have been hidden in plain sight for a long time.

Back from a reunion where I danced for hours with a perfect partner … clearing the decks and unpacking to watch more of disc two of the Dylan documentary … things about to come clear again. About to again. Why do you sing? Anything special to express? Will you suck your glasses? Donne would push farther, and so would Dylan. Donne pushed farther, and so did Dylan. Still pushing. What’s there when the fog clears? Anybody around to show it to? John? Bob? Joni? Brian? Johanna?

I haven’t checked these out yet, but the concept looks pretty interesting: an entire site devoted to screencasts, with the first set devoted to podcasting. I hope their bandwidth holds out. I also note with interest that you can subscribe to the feed via iTunes. Nifty.

Via Podcasting News.

Library Thing?

iTunes shared playlists for books, sort of. Or, given the tagging, a kind of bibliophile del.icio.us. Intriguing. Unfortunately, the world seems to agree: I get a raft of mySQL errors when I try to go past the blog and static pages to look at real user book catalogs, and I suspect bandwidth problems are also cropping up. I hope site developer Tim Spalding sorts the problem out soon so that he can keep moving toward his dream of reclining all day on a pile of gold.

Even with the system down, there’s a lot to learn here. For example, I didn’t know about the Library of Congress Z39.50 gateway. In the no-surprise department, at least one user reports a great deal of pleasure comes from simply entering the names and authors of books in your personal library. For some of us, that pleasure center is quite well-developed.

Thanks to audium for the link.

The mission statement:

The purpose of the Wikiversity project, which will ultimately reside at www.wikiversity.org, is to build an electronic institution of learning that will be used to test the limits of the wiki model both for developing electronic learning resources as well as for teaching and for conducting research and publishing results (within a policy framework developed by the community).

The goals can be described as follows:

* E-teaching materials. The development and cataloging of tests, teaching materials that go beyond the scope of Wikibooks such as slides and videos, complete courses, and more. All this information must be presented from a neutral point of view and represent the current state of scientific research. Wikibooks will be used as a partner project where appropriate.
* E-learning. A framework within members of the community can actually take courses online
* For more info on what Wikiversity is, please check its About page.

What can I say? “Interesting” seems far too weak a comment.