We’ll be looking at a small-scale pilot of our new University portal later this semester. I’ve long been excited about the arrival of our portal, in which the user can customize his or her graphic relation to local intranets and the Internet. The result is a set of channels, some chosen and some “pushed” to the user, that represents the larger worlds of connectivity each user inhabits, or wants to inhabit.

If ordinary desktop computing is unidimensional, and web browsing is two-dimensional, then portals are maybe two-and-a-half or three-dimensional. (Rough reasoning, but stick with me.) That’s progress, but it didn’t prepare me for Cyprien Lomas’s blog on Croquet. (Thanks for blogging on this, Cyprien.) One of the things that makes my job so rewarding is what just happened: I clicked on a link, read a blog, and suddenly I’ve found a deep, extensive project in which my wildest dreams have not only a timetable and a beta version but a complete FAQ that boldly articulates their conceptual basis.

A screenshot and caption from the Croquet site:

This view shows an educational ‘arena’ containing interactive resources. Molecular models with simulated physical properties can be made available to researchers, educators, and learners.

It’s love at first sight, and I can’t wait to see this Croquet thing in action.

Two brief excerpts from the Croquet FAQ:

Question: What is the Croquet Project?

Answer: The Croquet project is an effort to develop a new open source computer operating system built from the ground up to enable deep collaboration between teams of users. To do this, the project seeks to define and develop a system is focused on the simulation and communication of complex ideas. We call this “communication enhancement” – the direct extension of the abilities of humans to develop, understand, and describe even the most complex simulations. Croquet enables this communication by acting as the equivalent of a broadband conferencing system built on top of a 3D user interface and a peer-to-peer network architecture.

Question: What is the value of Croquet to higher education?

Answer: Croquet provides means for educators, researchers, and other learners to encounter one another and establish authenticable peer-to-peer interactivity and deep telepresence. Croquet’s architectural approach provides a secure framework for peer-to-peer rich media interaction between users. Researchers, educators, and learners are able to meet and discover one another within a common online knowledge space in which a rich set of peer- and community-based learning opportunities are possible. Croquet environments may also be used as a participatory theater for real-time demonstrations. For example, a chemistry professor may communicate directly with the members of his/her class through chat or voice over IP, load a three-dimensional molecular model into the scene, and then manipulate the model in real-time within the shared environment. The educator may choose to leave the model in the scene and restrict or control its access to others over the course of the semester and beyond. The professor may also create objects in the vicinity of the model that point to associated web-based learning objects. Additionally, the professor may choose to “publish” the object and associated materials to a larger audience by setting their viewing rights and positioning them within an appropriate locale of the shared environment.

To move beyond the current online learning environments for higher education implies a significant paradigm shift. Rather than limiting our vision to automating quiz grading and dispensing instructor powerpoint slides, we see Croquet as a first step toward a system designed for deep user collaboration, scalable realtime interaction, and authoring supported by a digital repository and an implicit content management system.

Most piquant bit of the site so far for me: the definition of a Croquet “mirror” as a portal that leads back into the space from which it originates. I like thinking about a mirror that way, in or out of Croquet.

I also find myself with that peculiar feeling that Brian and Bryan must already know a lot about Croquet, and that I must speak with them immediately.

Bring it on.

The annual International Consumer Electronics Show (or “CES,” as Doctor Evil might put it) is back for 2005: in Vegas, and in full swing tomorrow. Here’s a Washington Post “blog” (can a newspaper blog within the newspaper? am I being too strict? let’s not always see the same hands) called “Gadget Gab” that promises all the latest. As I find more CES blogs I’ll report back. CES is important as a bellwether of emerging technologies as they exist in the popular imagination, and thus an interesting source of inspiration/early warning for the sorts of electronic environments we should be aware of in our teaching and learning.

Plus, gosh, it’s fun.

Fascinating story in today’s Washington Post (registration may be required) about “neuroplasticity,” the brain’s capacity to be rewired by mental regimens of one sort or another. The Post story concerns Buddhist monks steeped in years of meditation whose brains produce dramatically more intense and focused gamma waves than usual, a fascinating piece of information all by itself, but only one part of the ramifications of neuroplasticity, as reporter Marc Kaufman writes:

“What we found is that the longtime practitioners showed brain activation on a scale we have never seen before,” said Richard Davidson, a neuroscientist at the university’s new $10 million W.M. Keck Laboratory for Functional Brain Imaging and Behavior. “Their mental practice is having an effect on the brain in the same way golf or tennis practice will enhance performance.” It demonstrates, he said, that the brain is capable of being trained and physically modified in ways few people can imagine.

Scientists used to believe the opposite — that connections among brain nerve cells were fixed early in life and did not change in adulthood. But that assumption was disproved over the past decade with the help of advances in brain imaging and other techniques, and in its place, scientists have embraced the concept of ongoing brain development and “neuroplasticity.”

Dr. Davidson’s analogy of “golf or tennis practice” suggests that these neurological findings may be a case of back-to-the-future for educational theory. I almost said “pedagogical theory,” but of course these findings would apply equally well, or better, to andragogy, if indeed Knowles’ distinctions between pedagogy and andragogy are finally tenable. (My thanks to Lisa Ames for introducing me to this interesting and controversial term.) In any event, just as we know that part of the practice of a sport involves deliberate conditioning of certain muscles and reflex patterns that are important to excellence without being limited to a particular sport, or as much fun as actually playing a game of golf or tennis, it may also be that certain kinds of mental exercise help shape the direction or even the extent of our brains’ neuroplasticity in a way that would promote excellence in either particular or general intellectual endeavors, without that exercise being as enjoyable or apparently purposeful as we’d like it to be. This is, of course, a very old idea. Perhaps older kinds of curricular design had more merit than we’d like to admit: learning a foreign language, or diagramming sentences, or solving polynomial equations, or analyzing film clips, may be Good For You whatever your field of specialization turns out to be. Or to put it even more bluntly, maybe your piano teacher was right to devote so much time to having you practice your scales. It turns out that your brain really is like a muscle after all:

“What we found is that the trained mind, or brain, is physically different from the untrained one,” [Richardson] said. In time, “we’ll be able to better understand the potential importance of this kind of mental training and increase the likelihood that it will be taken seriously.”

Now the happiest education is probably the one in which an activity that the learner finds enjoyable is both good mental training and worthwhile as an end in itself. Yet such an experience is unusual for many students, especially beginners, and doesn’t always occur even for career intellectuals. One brilliant Oxford don confessed that he felt actual nausea at the beginning of any great intellectual undertaking–and I know he’s not alone in that feeling. (Certainly nausea and worse are not unknown to the athlete in intensive training, either.) The surer source of delight, then, is in the gain in neuroplasticity and sheer mental power to which the mental effort contributes. And those gains may be stimulated by mental activity that, like many kinds of physical conditioning, can be repetitive, wearying, even dispiriting. The trick, then, would be to learn enough about learning to have a better sense of what kind of mental regimens make one’s mind the strongest … and the most supple.

Though they are related, I think we should distinguish strength from suppleness, or to put it another way, mental power from neuroplasticity, since the latter is more about the power to be reshaped than about the sheer strength of particular intellection. And if the goal is to prepare our students to be self-directed, life-long learners, to put them in charge of their own zones of proximal development, to make them their own bootstrappers, a crucial function of education must be to train students to recognize, use, and expand their own neuroplasticity. I believe a liberal arts education best serves that crucial function. Education modelled on consumerism or superficial notions of “customer service” does not. True “student-centered” learning does not always mean that students will find their studies immediately engaging or satisfying. Some things will always have to be taken on trust, and struggling to earn that trust is one reason teaching is such hard work.

And always, lurking within every learning moment, a paradox waits: education both increases and decreases neuroplasticity. Tricky business.

(Here’s the original article from the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences: “Long-term meditators self-induce high-amplitude gamma synchrony during mental practice”.)

Ain’t been round since you know when…. Time for a holiday/birthday miscellany:

1. The HD broadcast of carols from King’s College Chapel, Cambridge on Christmas night was deeply moving. Here’s technology for you: Dolby Digital surround sound put me into the deep, detailed ambience of this magnificent 16th-century chapel, and the music was immersively wonderful; hi-def TV from a satellite dish made the candle flames as beautifully hypnotic as they were when I first visited the chapel in 2002.

It’s all about the technology. It’s not about the technology.

2. Last night’s episode of House, M.D. was extraordinary. The dialogue was razor-sharp and very, very quick. The typically exotic medical malady was clearly a device to enable larger questions of love and fidelity, questions that spread through the entire show in an artful and disturbing way. The show’s ongoing fascination with mammary glands was so over-the-top (sorry) that it began to seem not so much exploitative as ironic, though this continues to be the show’s least defensible obsession, in my view. And there was a crystalline little acting moment when we discover something about Cameron’s past–but more than that I should not say.

3. My kid brother, thoughtful as ever, got me Rob Jovanovic’s new book on Big Star. In it I read Peter Holsapple’s tribute to the college radio station that turned him on to Big Star. It was my college radio station: WFDD-FM, in Winston-Salem N.C., the NPR affiliate at Wake Forest University. I was an announcer on that station from late 1976 through May, 1979; I served as Student Station Manager during the 1977-78 academic year.

Holsapple specifically praises the “Deaconlight” late-night free-form shows, and while I have no idea if he ever heard mine (I did a ton of ’em and loved every minute), I am delighted to think that the station played a significant part in nurturing the fascination with Big Star that would come to fruition over the next three decades. I know I played my share of Big Star on Deaconlight: over the years, I probably played every bit of the first two albums twenty times. The book and DD’s great Deaconlight site (thanks, DD) have inspired me to dig through some of my old tapes to archive this bit of personal history before it–or I (it’s my birthday, after all)–crumble into dust. I just wish I’d been a better announcer at the time.

What to my wondering eyes should appear than this news from NORAD: Ringo Starr will help track Santa (or Father Christmas, as he’s known in the UK) once again this year.

Merry Christmas, Beatle Peatle everywhere. Happy Crimble, and a Merry Goo Year.

In the wake of Martha Burtis’ haunting blog on, among other things, the promise of online communication, I’ve followed some of the links in the trAce article Martha cites. I too am interested in Walter Ong’s work in orality, so you’ll understand that I was delighted to find a website called “Remembering Walter Ong.” Among its many treasures, the site includes both a full-length lecture by Father Ong and an interview in which he explains how he sees himself and his work.

To hear at last the voice of the man who thought and wrote so richly about the experience of orality is a very stirring thing indeed. My thanks to Sue Thomas, Martha B., and Jonathan Druy, who runs the “Remembering Walter Ong” website.

Interesting bit of synchronicity here: just a few days after my Wikipedia/Wikinews blog, there’s a story in Technology Review about Larry Sanger, one of the founders of the Wikipedia. Turns out Sanger is an epistemologist. A-ha!, as Spenser would say.

It’s an interesting article. The discussion of “nonbias” and the “revert wars” (what a noun!) reinforce my sense of Wikipedia’s basic philosophical underpinnings, further strengthened by the revelation (to me, anyway) that one of its prime architects is himself a professional philosopher. Yet even the trained philosopher seems to evade the assumptions behind his own creation. Early on, the article suggests that Sanger no longer doubts the possibility of certain knowledge. By the end, however, that possibility seems either rejected or bracketed:

To build a public encyclopedia, you don’t need faith in the possibility of knowledge, he says. What you have to have faith in is human beings being able to work together.

Cheery and humane sentiments, but they beg the question. If one doesn’t have faith in the possibility of knowledge, why would it matter if human beings are able to work together or not? How would you even begin to define or assess “working together,” or “human” for that matter? And if human beings are able to work together to, say, poison the environment, or destroy entire civilizations with a few missiles, how can faith in the possibility of human cooperation be a foundational assumption, a fundamental necessity, an implicit ethical absolute?

From Denmark, no less. (I love the Internet.) It’s the first time I’ve seen Lessig speak. Noted with interest:

1. He’s a very effective public speaker–almost a preacher, really.

2. He’s carefully choreographed a series of mini-pull-quotes–think words?–for his PowerPoint (or whatever) accompaniment. The effect is theatrical as well as rhetorical. Sometimes it’s a little distracting. It’s never boring.

3. Think of the strange, counterintuitive thing this webcast represents: a freely disseminated videorecording that resides on a computer at the University of Southern Denmark, on the other side of the world from me, a video that I can summon and see on my desktop when I like. After all these years, it still seems a marvel.

4. And what is this thing that I see? Why, a sage on the stage! a lecturer! that thing that was supposed to be either a) dead or b) on death row! Yet such is the skill of the speaker, such is the interest of the content, such is the dramatic presence of the event, that it’s plain that the lecture per se need not engender passivity or promulgate repressive pedagogy. It may even foment critical consciousness. Paolo Friere has nothing to fear, here.

Viva voce!

Bryan Alexander blogs on an interesting Technology Review piece concerning Microsoft and Google. There’s a conceptually rich dichotomy here, especially as it becomes clear that issues of indexing and retrieval–essentially, librarianship–will be at the cutting edge of networked computing for some time.

A colleague at my university alerts me to the “BOB” awards just announced by Deutsche Welle, an organization he describes as roughly similar to the BBC World Service. Here are the categories (quoted from the site, with descriptions where needed). The site notes that prizes were awarded “by an international team of blog experts.”

BEST BLOG
Absolutely everything about the future winner of this category should be perfect – it should tackle poignant issues, have a great design and even better writing.
BEST SUBJECT
In the category of “Best Subject,” Weblogs will be honored that deal with a single issue and provide excellent analysis, original information or service.
BEST DESIGN
In this category, we will be rewarding sites with clearly structured, functional and topically suited design. The blog should also be aesthetically pleasing, leaving no desire unfilled.
BEST BLOG INNOVATION
The award for most-innovative Weblog is intended for excellent and helpful portals, technologies, software and other innovations that foster the growth and advancement of the blogger community.
BEST JOURNALISTIC BLOG/ARABIC
BEST JOURNALISTIC BLOG/CHINESE
BEST JOURNALISTIC BLOG/ENGLISH
BEST JOURNALISTIC BLOG/GERMAN

I’ve looked at only a few of the winners, but already it’s been fascinating to get an international perspective on the blogosphere.