Ernie at Webliminal blogged Monday about the Pew report released this week. The document is essential reading, I think, but the Predictions Database at Elon University is the real cabinet of wonders: a beautifully arranged database that not only maps the development of thought concerning networked computing but does it in a way that can’t help being inspiring and provocative. Think of it as a facebook for Internet intellectuals. I add my congratulations on the great work Janna Quitney Anderson, assistant professor of communications, and students in Elon’s School of Communications have done on this project. I’ll be looking forward to Professor Anderson’s forthcoming Imagining the Internet, a book based on the the Predictions project.

You’ll find a bunch of interesting pull quotes from the Pew Report in Ernie’s blog. Here are a couple of my own favorites from the Report:

“The next decade should see the development of a more thoughtful internet. We’ve had the blood rush to the head, we’ve had the hangover from that blood rush; this next decade is the rethink” (Rose Vines. technology journalist).

Unpleasant surprises: The experts are startled that educational institutions have changed so little, despite widespread expectation a decade ago that schools would be quick to embrace change.

Startled indeed. Along those lines, it’s worth quoting some of Part 8 of the Pew Report, on “Formal Education”:

Prediction: Enabled by information technologies, the pace of learning in the next decade will increasingly be set by student choices. In ten years,
most students will spend at least part of their “school days” in virtual classes, grouped online with others who share their interests, mastery, and skills….

Many of the respondents who have had experience with teaching online said only highly motivated, mature students exhibit the ability to be successful in a learning environment in which so much responsibility is placed upon a student. Moira K. Gunn, host of public broadcasting’s Tech Nation, wrote, “I do not now, and have never, witnessed successful benefits in virtual classrooms. While the role of the teacher will change from authority figure with all the information to one-on-one educational coach, the one-teacher-one-student paradigm will remain the most effective.” Indeed, children in elementary school “still need a watchful eye and human attention,” according to one expert.

I’m not quite so pessimistic as Gunn, but I agree wholeheartedly that there’s no substitute for an attentive teacher in close contact with a student, which is why I think the idea of scalability in online learning needs careful consideration. Gains in “productivity” with commodified forms of online learning are in my view chimerical. A cognitive apprenticeship is much more than delivery and mastery of content, though they are important. Real school can’t happen unless one mind is inspired by the workings of another mind as it observes that working in process. There’s nothing like having an expert think aloud when you and the expert are in real-space together and all the channels of communication are open and ready. We need to work together to ensure that benefit is available to all citizens, not just to those who can afford it.

I’m still mulling over the idea of “student-centered learning.” At this point, I’m thinking student-centered learning is not so much about student choices as it is about genuine dialogue in which both student and teacher are invited to learn from their mutual thinking aloud. Information technologies can broaden and amplify the opportunities for mutual thinking aloud by giving us richer access to multiple modes of shared cognition. I guess.

In the spring of 1990 my wife and I were childless and living in Richmond, Virginia. I was a little over halfway through writing my dissertation. I craved a diversion. The warming weather brought just the escape I needed: XL-102, the local FM rock station, sponsored a contest called “A Song For Richmond.” The idea was that listeners would write and record songs featuring Richmond, and then enter those songs in this contest. The prizes were modest but attractive. There was an initial airing of your song if the DJs, Jeff and Jeff, thought it was good enough to play on the radio, a second airing with an on-air interview if you made the finals, and a third airing if you were one of the twenty-four winners who made it onto the official “Songs for Richmond” tape (all proceeds to support Oasis House).

After years of fooling around with my home studio, I decided to put down the diss for a bit, write and record a song, and try my luck in the contest. So I retreated to a back bedroom (it would be the baby’s room less than six months later), set up the equipment, and began to put the tracks together.

This is the result. It’s the first airing, edited to cut out some of the patter, and it includes all the lovely smooshing and pumping that the radio station’s compressor contributed to the sound. The extra compression hides a multitude of sins in the recording and (cough) performance, though I’m sure the ones that remain will be clearly audible (and, I hope, forgiveable).

I did okay in the contest. There were 350 entries and I came in 18th, so I’m on the final tape. Along the way they played my song three times on the radio. (Maybe that used up all my fifteen minutes.) This was the last time I really did anything with that recording rig, the last time I wrote a song–now, a song from the attic.

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In “The Classics in the Slums,” Jonathan Rose writes a fascinating essay about the power great books have to transform lives. He argues that Matthew Arnold was right: the best that has been said and thought can make lives better. That’s an argument contrary to most of the last thirty years or more of literary theory in the West, which insists that “great books” are a) great only for the ruling classes, principally rich men, and b) great for those ruling classes in large part because of the power of “great books” to spread white male hegemony and keep the marginalized safely on the circumference or perimeter.

Rose, whose 2001 The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes (Yale UP) won the Jacques Barzun Prize in Cultural History, understands that his argument will seem conservative to some readers. That’s perhaps one reason he emphasizes the radically transformative power of great art, and backs up his argument with evidence taken from his research into British working-class lives in the twentieth century:

Even more impressive is a 1940 survey of reading among pupils at nonacademic [British] high schools, where education terminated at age 14. This sample represented something less than the working-class norm: the best students had already been skimmed off and sent to academic secondary schools on scholarship. Those who remained behind were asked which books they had read over the past month, excluding required texts. Even in this below-average group, 62 percent of boys and 84 percent of girls had read some poetry: their favorites included Kipling, Longfellow, Masefield, Blake, Browning, Tennyson, and Wordsworth. Sixty-seven percent of girls and 31 percent of boys had read plays, often something by Shakespeare. All told, these students averaged six or seven books per month. Compare that with the recent NEA study Reading at Risk: A Survey of Literary Reading in America, which found that in 2002, 43.4 percent of American adults had not read any books at all, other than those required for work or school. Only 12.1 percent had read any poetry, and only 3.6 percent any plays.

To hear Rose tell it, a passion for radical economic transformation can be awakened even by a Thomas Carlyle. Apparently it has something to do with an intellectual awakening that may lead to political action, but is not itself primarily a political action. His article is also a timely cautionary tale, warning against assuming too quickly what the poorly-educated laborer has inside his or her head.

Interestingly, a similar piece appeared today in the Washington Post: “The Great Books’ Greatest Lesson.”

No, not a teaching strategy, just another of those strange coincidences I’m seeing more and more frequently these days. Last night marked the shaky ascent of my first podcast. Today Technology Review blogs on podcasting.

Maybe coincidence favors the obsessive mind? (Apologies to Pasteur.) Or maybe this is my destiny.:)

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (3.6MB)

Ton’s Interdependent Thoughts: Blogs as Personal Presence Portal Revisited: Interesting meditation on blogs and their discontents.

See also Elmine Wijnia’s “Understanding Weblogs: a communicative perspective”, which concludes that “weblogs do offer a platform for the ideal speech situation.”

Once again, ladies and germs, John Milton’s L’Allegro. I apologize for the duplicate feed. I’m testing the hacks I just applied to my base WP 1.2 installation.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (3.6MB)

Here’s my first podcast: a reading of John Milton’s lyric L’Allegro (“the cheerful man”). I knew my first podcast had to be poetry, and I thought it ought to be Milton, and though it’s long (about eight minutes, and 3.7MB) and I’m sure I could do better after another ten takes or so, a pilot is a pilot and it’s time to stop apologizing and get on with it.

I figure my podcasts, like my blogs, will be all over the map. I’m aiming them at the segment of the market that self-identifies as “tolerant.” If Milton ain’t your bag, stay tuned: the next one is likely to be completely different.

Thanks to Rob Wall for checking in with encouragement and a timely WordPress mod in his comment on the preceding blog.

L’Allegro.mp3

Podcast: Play in new window | Download ()

Word Press 1.2, the blogging script I’m using, doesn’t have direct support for the RSS 2.0 enclosure tag, so I’ve set up an account at Feedburner that promises to support podcasts. You’ll see the new fiery “feed” icon in my meta section, below right. Please use that link for your RSS reader’s subscription to my site, at least until you hear otherwise :). I’ll have a link to my first podcast a little later this evening.

The first Wiki site went live ten years ago. In 2004 the Wikipedia, the most famous Wiki in the world, grew to over a million articles and over 30,000 contributors. And Infoworld says this is the year of the enterprise wiki, as businesses everywhere are looking to wikis as information managers.

An interesting term for an interesting concept with interesting ramifications. Even its origins are interesting.

In “Tuning in to Technology’s Past” , an article in today’s Technology Review, Thomas Hughes defines “reverse salients” as “components in the system that have fallen behind or are out of phase with the others.” Why not call these “mistakes,” or “failures in planning,” or even what happens when castles in the air turn out–surprise–not to have a foundation? Because they’re sites for innovation, sometimes well after the initial idea or system has been put into practice. As Tom Standage explains,

As Edison’s electricity system expanded, for example, it became apparent that it could only supply electricity efficiently within a couple of kilometers of a generator. This reverse salient, identified by other inventors, led to the development of alternating-current distribution. Charting the development of technological systems, and spotting which parts are falling behind, can help innovators decide where to focus their efforts.

One challenging implication emerges for me: while it’s true that if you fail to plan you plan to fail, innovation should often go forward even if the plan seems incomplete. No plan can anticipate every exigency. And a great idea will always carry with it “reverse salients” that may kill it in its cradle–or may provide opportunities for innovation and even greater development than the initial vision anticipated. It’s an interesting way to look at risk, and an interesting way to think about how the past lies in wait for the future, or vice-versa.

A quick Google search turns up 1720 hits on “reverse salient.” One particularly interesting essay is called “Perpetual Uncertainty”. It’s short and rich and, unexpectedly, on the website of the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston.