Is there a Wikipedian National Anthem? Here’s a story in Wired about Power Wikipedians. I prefer to think of that status in the altruistic sense of “powerful givers” rather than the Foucaultian sense of “circulators of power via discourse.” Their mini-bios sure don’t read like those of career “discourse initiators.” (Yes, today is bash-Michel day at Casa Campbell.) Author Daniel Terdiman has this to say about power Wikipedian Stacey Greenstein:

According to Wikipedia’s lists of most active editors, Greenstein made 1,809 edits during the past month. But she thinks that the timing is off and that those numbers refer to the work she did in December. “I suppose knowing that the 1,800 number was wrong says more about me than the fact that I edited 1,800 during some 30-day period.”

Greenstein’s passion in the real world is the same as it is on Wikipedia: fixing things. She is as likely to put misplaced books back in order in a bookstore as she is to correct a Wikipedia article. “I can’t understand why people would take a book off the shelf to see if they like it, and then put it back in the wrong place,” she said.

Greenstein has covered a wide variety of topics. Her favorites are primates and cephalopods, and recently, New York City subways. She considers it her mandate to be as good a Wikipedia citizen as she can, especially as the project has grown up. “I care a great deal about … Wikipedia,” she said. “The concept of ‘freedom to do as we please’ has finally begun its maturation to ‘responsible to do what we need.'”

Could this be the return of the philosopher kings and queens, except that this time anyone who wants to be one need only volunteer for Wikipedia duty?

I apologize for the title’s lack of creativity. I haven’t thought of a pithy or enigmatic label for the connections I want to outline here, so I resorted to what amounts to a list of keywords. I don’t even have a picture for you today. C’est la blog.

Yesterday’s New York Times ran a piece by Elizabeth Van Ness asking “Is a Cinema Studies Degree the New M.B.A.?” (The article ran in the Arts section, and you’ll have to register to read it. My thanks to Alice for spotting the story.) This morning on the way to work I listened to a podcast in which Jon Udell of Infoworld was interviewed about podcasting, blogging, and rich media on the web. There are rich connections here I want to explore just a little.

The Udell podcast (about thirty minutes long) is an elegant primer on podcasting and would be an extremely useful teaching tool for anyone trying to understand the phenomenon at a conceptual and user level; in fact, Udell tells a story of his own experience listening to podcasts that perfectly expresses my own experience with them, and hence my enthusiasm (at least for the listening end–producing them taps into far deeper enthusiasms for me). But that’s only the first level of this interview. On a deeper level, Udell brilliantly summarizes the converging factors that are leading to what many believe to be a communications revolution. He also identifies blogging as the primary point of leverage in this revolution. He’s not alone here either. What’s exceptionally useful about Udell’s podcast is the way he very plainly but comprehensively explains the pattern of influences and convergences, ending with another elegant primer on RSS and how it has changed his life.

The NYT piece says nothing about blogging, podcasts, RSS, or even the Internet per se. Instead, it’s about a deeper kind of media literacy, one that not only trains students to sit back and dissect the rhetoric of, say, television commercials, but provides the deeper training in expressiveness within these media that we in the academy have long taken for granted in the realm of English composition. Dating back to the humanist revolution in education that occurred in the European Renaissance, the idea here is that merely reading isn’t enough. Deep skill in reading cannot be attained without deep skill in writing. Thus we teach not only attention to others’ words, but adaptive skills and strategies in creating those words ourselves. Now, students are going to film school not simply to land a job in the film industry, but to master the skills and strategies of sophisticated visual and aural communications. Moviemaking 101 sits right alongside English Comp.

What strikes me this morning is how closely Udell and the NYT piece agree on the fundamental importance of acquiring these skills and strategies for the new era of rich media on the World Wide Web. Udell points out that we no longer have people type for us. Instead, the word processor means that we all have to learn typing. The gain is that we are more productive. Similar new skills and new literacies–in modes of multimedia writing, not simply in reading–will be essential to success in this century.

Podcasting as such is only about seven or eight months old. Blogging is only a few years old. These changes are coming at us very quickly. Will higher education be able to respond in a meaningful way? I hope so. In fact, I believe that the most creative and smart thinking about education has always concerned itself with the deep understandings of learning and expression that the new century clamors for. We need not start from scratch. What we need to do, I think, is to be honest about the ways in which education has been distorted despite our better knowledge, whether by ideology or by the more insidious effects of scaling along industrial (read: factory and assembly-line) models. (Though I take issue with some of the points and analogies, “Going Home: Our Reformation,” a challenging and inspiring piece Martha blogged about last week, arrives at many of the same conclusions.) Taken together, Udell’s podcast and the NYT piece help us imagine a better way.

My own managerial bias is always toward identifying extraordinary individuals, encouraging their talents, and assigning them to tasks where creativity and expertise and intelligence can trump Business and Usual. That bias got some powerful reinforcement Thursday from an article in the Washington Post about Azyxxi, a digital medical records database designed, not by committee, but by two doctors with unusual backgrounds: Mark Smith (who began his career as a Ph.D. candidate in computer science) and Craig Feied (who, the article says, knows “25 programming languages”). Favorite pull quote:

It is noteworthy that Azyxxi did not come out of the hospital’s IT department, after the appointment of a task force, the drawing up of a detailed needs analysis and approval of a long-term capital budget. There was no request for proposals, no campaign to win “buy-in” from staff, nor was a dime allocated for training. The system was designed largely by two extraordinary doctors who were lured from George Washington University a decade ago with a mandate to fix an under-performing emergency room with nine-hour waits, dissatisfied patients and an unhappy staff.

Give me extraordinary people, every time. Process and projects are necessary, but they only get you in the door. Without unusual and gifted individuals, you’ll either expire at the threshold or find your way to the same dreary, largely ineffectual place all the other committees got to.

The one thing the article doesn’t tell us is who did the luring. Who was that visionary? I imagine she or he made someone unhappy along the way….

Just before the day falls off the cliff it’s been teetering on, Bryan Alexander pulls it all back from the edge a little, for a while, with Major Fun.

Now it can be a tow cable for you, too.

Last September, Lawrence Lessig delivered an address entitled “The Comedy of the Commons” as part of the SD Forum Distinguished Speakers Series. Yesterday I picked up the address on an IT Conversations podcast. Today I braved the snow (not much to brave early in the morning, actually, though it is getting slick now) and went in to the office for a bit, listening to Lessig on the way there and back. It’s a wonderful lecture on the difference between “rivalrous resources” that diminish when they’re shared and “non-rivalrous resources” that actually increase in value when they’re shared. Chief among the latter category are language and ideas. Lessig then goes on to talk about IP (intellectual property) in the age of the IP (Internet Protocol), and the result is a great primer in copyright law and corporate attacks on fair use. The lecture is at a fairly high (though not at all difficult) conceptual level. It’s also full of facts I either didn’t know or had forgotten about, especially the revisions to the copyright law in 1978. The Q&A period gets a little more down-and-dirty, though it’s a credit to the assembly that the occasion never gets too bash-y. (It’s all too easy to make oneself feel better among like-minded folks by reviling a common enemy, but unfortunately that kind of group hug doesn’t turn out very interesting or nuanced ideas, at least not in my experience.)

This kind of address is what I’m coming to love about podcasting, where the immediacy and energy of the speaking voice guides me through endlessly interesting content of all kinds. Great radio, great interviews, great music (did I mention the “Vinyl Podcast”?), and great lectures. I may have to start sleeping with a speaker under my pillow again, just the way I used to when I was a kid.

Ian Campbell’s blogged on a whole set of nifty ‘Net phenomena, beginning with the Numa Numa Dance that we discovered after I read the story in today’s New York Times. After Ian, Alice, and I had grooved mightily on the NND, Ian got inspired and put links to it, two Badger versions, the mighty Bananaphone, and a soccer irony into his blog. Get ’em while they’re hot!

(Thanks to Larisa Mount for tipping me to Bananaphone.)

Silly title (homage to Marshall Crenshaw) but another quickie podcast, this time of some guitar noodling that might become a pleasant enough theme for my long-aborning podcast on last Friday night’s Paradise Lost readathon. Coming soon to a podcatcher near you!

Bryan Alexander blogs about Flyguy, a wonderful Flash dream-game that I will not describe. Instead, I urge you to check it out for yourself. Then, if you’ve a mind, read what Bryan has to say about it, and if you’ve half a mind, read my comment in response.

Flyguy reminds me a little of “A Silly Noisy House,” an early multimedia CD-ROM by the Voyager Company that my family has always found very charming, piquant, and lovable. You’ll find a brief description of it in this Wired article from (gulp) 1994. Another website recalls “A Silly Noisy House” fondly and calls it “abandonware.” (CD-ROM as Velveteen Rabbit?) On his MIT website, Marvin Minsky talks about Voyager and his work with them on his “The Society of Mind” CD-ROM. He also gives SNH a mention.

Some folks complained that SNH was cute but a waste of time. All play, no education. My own position is that the best play is an education in wonder, and that lessons in wonder (or, you might say, lessons in expecting neat stuff) must always be part of the curriculum.

I have located more information on Peggy Weil, who developed A Silly Noisy House. I don’t have a definitive timeline for her, but it seems that in the late 90s she was working on a project called “The Blurring Test: Mr. Mind” for a company called “Web Lab”. (Is this company still a going concern?) As of last fall, she was an adjunct professor in the USC School of Cinema-Television, and she spoke on “First Person Media” at a conference in the Interactive Media Division. I wonder if Prof. Weil ever met Bob Keeshan. (Strange TV site here, but a good little piece on Captain Kangaroo, complete with lo-res clips.)

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.