Will the coinage catch on? Or did someone else already coin it and I’m just seeing someone else’s thoughts come back to me with a kind of alienated majesty? (Apologies to Emerson.)

I thought my next EDUCAUSE blog would be about Diana Oblinger on educating the Net Generation. I’ll get to that one in a bit. First I have to tell the story of what happened after that session as I was blogging and waiting for the Horizons VCOP to gather for lunch and talk.

Well, nothing happened as I was blogging and waiting, except for blogging and waiting. Actually, it was just after that period that things got very, very interesting. The Horizons Virtual Community of Practice is a group of NLII-based folk who talk about emerging technologies and their uses in teaching and learning. As we sat in a circle and began our conversation, I brought up browser windows of all the stuff I and the DTLT instructional technology specialists are doing right now, so that I could share them with the group when it was my turn. Jim [I’ll edit this tomorrow with a link and a full name–sorry Jim] began by talking about a kind of “bot” they’ve constructed at his school as a kind of interactive FAQ agent that answers questions about schedules and services and so forth at the school where he works. He shared his discovery that students spent more time playing with the bot than they did asking it genuine questions. That sparked a lively conversation about why people would play with a tool that was clearly a bot and not even a learning bot. I was reminded of the bot Martha Burtis had set up in our own DTLT content manager/intranet back home at the University of Mary Washington, so I decided to log into the flashchat module in that intranet to see if I could find Martha online and tell her what was being discussed in Denver.

What ensued almost defies description.

For about three hours or more, a discussion of bots, intelligent agents, student learning, scaffolding processes of inquiry and reflection on inquiry, John Milton, film studies, portfolios, midrashes, flow and cognitive friction, conferences, cyberspace, real space, music and improvisation, swearing and profanity, cognitive dissonance, color commentary, telepathy, project-based learning, and I’m sure several other topics I’m not remembering right now went on in both cyberspace and realspace. As we discussed stuff at our table, I kept feeding parts of the conversation to Martha, beginning with a link to Jim’s “myagent” website. Martha then replied, asked questions, etc. I kept feeding Martha’s comments into the table talk. Then Vicky Suter opened up another cyberspace environment in which the Horizons VCOP does its virtual meetings. I then fed the transcript of the UMW-side chat into the Horizons space, while Vicky took notes on the table talk and the interaction with the UMW cyberchat in the Horizons space. She and I then began exchanging documents in the Horizons space. I grabbed an entire transcript of the UMW chat and put the document in the Horizons space. I grabbed the entire transcript of the Horizons chat/table talk minutes and put it in a document on my hard drive. Meantime Jerry Slezak, another instructional technology specialist, came online at UMW and started talking with Martha about bots and teaching and learning and all of the above. Then I fed some of Jerry’s remarks into the table talk.

All this time, people came and left in both realspace and cyberspace. Threads kept emerging and receding and then getting picked up again. Jerry and Martha were away for a half hour, then came back and picked up right where they left off, which I then fed into the realspace talk, which then got captured in both the Horizons space and the UMW chat space.

It’s hard to describe how this process made me feel. At its most intense, it was something like telepathy, but without any sense of being crowded out of my own mind. It also made me think how constructive both distance and nearness can be, with the appropriate mediating tools and environments. But the main thing is that two DTLT staffers were able to travel to EDUCAUSE with me and participate in what I’d have to call a seminar. No one planned for that to happen. But the beauty of this group of participants is that everyone knew exactly what was happening as soon as it started happening, and that awareness made it possible for us to deepen and extend our intellectual and personal engagement to an astonishing degree.

It isn’t that realspace and cyberspace became one. For me, it’s that realspace and cyberspace were united within community, the best space of all.

Thanks to all of you who made that possible. You know who you are. Special thanks to Cyprien Lomas, who invited me to the session in the first place. Cypien is an NLII Fellow who blogs on emerging technologies. Check out his blog. I’ve also added his link to the blogroll on the right.

That’s the aphorism I’m mulling over from the first EDUCAUSE session this morning. James Duderstadt, President Emeritus of the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, spoke on “Preparing for the Revolution: Redux.” The irony of the title is worth considering, but I digress. The idea is that we cannot come to grips with the great and worrying possibilities of the IT revolution in education (esp. higher ed) by merely thinking about incremental change and moderate modifications that do not change the essential nature of what we do. Or to put that a better way, we must find a way to affirm the enduring human concerns and ambitions that inform this practice we call education while reimagining the ways in which that practice is carried out.

I am often reminded of the fact that some folks thought a telephone would be a good way to pipe music into houses. Undoubtedly some folks thought radio broadcasting wouldn’t be worth pursuing because it was only one way. It turns out movies didn’t revolutionize classroom education, really, but they did revolutionize the way we think about experience on a much more fundamental level, one that we’re now beginning to understand in terms of what we might do in the classroom with virtual and augmented realities.

And who thought that a portable cassette player with high-quality, lightweight headphones would fundamentally change the way we think about experiencing, reproducing, producing, and selling music?

A butterfly is not just a better caterpillar.

Next blog: I need to write a bit about the wonderful presentation I saw with Diana Oblinger, director of the NLII. Her topic was “Educating the Net Generation,” and it was a terrific combination of reinforcing what we’ve been learning about IT and education over the last couple of years while at the same turning some of that conventional wisdom on its head. Here’s the teaser: Net Gen students want sage and learned faculty, they crave structure, and they also crave informal learning and interactivity.

I love those rich contrarieties and the deeper syntheses to which they (may) point. My hunch is that the ubiquitous and rapid communication computers have provided for us may be a revealing externalization of things we’ve always experienced from the dawn of sentient humanity, though that sounds so grand I have to chuckle at myself. Guffaw, maybe. 🙂

EDIT: I was obviously suffering from altitude sickness when I first wrote this blog–I kept saying “a caterpillar is not just a better butterfly.” Perhaps I was also seduced by meter and alliteration. Thanks to Alice for spotting the mistake and going “huh?” (A full time job around me, but thank goodness someone applied for that job.)

Not the movie.

My contacts with other people yesterday were frequent, surprising, and rewarding. That’s true most days, actually, but even so yesterday was unusual. Here’s a partial list off the top of my head:

1. I got to school and found that the writer I had blogged about the day before, a magazine columnist named Chris Pirillo whom I’ve never met and never blogged about before, had left a comment on the blog. About 15 hours after I blogged about the writer, the writer had read my blog and commented on it. (Deep breath.) Okay. Wow. I then went to his blog and learned about Podcasting and about blogging from a Palm Pilot. A “handwritten” blog is an interesting thing. I’ve linked to his site in my blogroll (see right).

2. An daily email digest of stories at MIT’s Technology Review led me to a blog on TR’s website that led me to an online Physics World piece on great equations, the piece that was the subject of yesterday’s blog. The end of the essay had a mailto link to the writer. I emailed him and thanked him for his wonderful essay. Within moments I got an email back saying “you’re welcome, and how did you happen upon my piece?” Another massive attack of reflection ensued.

3. In my film studies class, I went over the midterm exam that I handed back. We watched a clip from Notorious together, going over the camera motion I expected them to be able to see and note. Following that review, we began our discussion of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind by “mapping the diegeses,” that is, listing the story spaces in the film and thinking about how they were related. The discussion was very intense and very fruitful; the students were ready to go and they inspired me. In the evening, I read posts on our electronic discussion forum that reflected on the movie as well as on the full breadth of my students’ movie-going experience.

4. I had lunch with a good friend and talked about the Presidential debates we had both seen on television. We also discussed the spin we had been seeing on TV, in newspapers, and on the Internet.

5. We in the Division of Teaching and Learning Technologies here at the University of Mary Washington are beginning an experiment with an intranet content manager as a way of communicating more fully and frequently and as a way of collecting and managing our knowledge more effectively. Martha has set up the site and included a very nifty chat room. I’ve not done much IM’ing or chatting online, but my eyes are beginning to be opened to their value and usefulness. Along the way, the chat experiment led to an interesting conversation with a colleague about one of her friends for whom English is a second language, and for whom online-speak has complicated her acquisition of standard English. I’d never thought about this issue, I blush to admit, but it’s interesting to consider. In the past, immigrants learned the language from newspapers, then from radio, then from television–and now from online-speak? The topic reminded me of the discussions I’d had with my son about “leet,” a super-esoteric kind of geekspeak. Super-esoteric to me, anyway. I shared a little bit about “leet” with my colleague and dropped off a movie for the media collection.

6. I went to a farewell party for another colleague. (Thankfully, she’s not leaving the University.) It was bittersweet, as all such occasions are. Much of the conversation had to do with workplace stuff, but a lot of it also had to do with books, movies, myth, television, and the general power of compelling symbolic worlds made of language, images, and sound. We shared our virtual worlds and our private experiences with mediated language as we stood face-to-face, ate cake, and prepared for (and marked) another organizational transition.

7. I began a cell-phone conversation with my wife as I left work and continued it when I got home. Just before bedtime we watched a little of an old favorite of ours, In The Line Of Fire. This morning, I’ve already gotten my first email from her.

If Rod Serling were here (who knows? maybe he is) he would do a much better job of summarizing the lesson. In his absence, I’ll just say that contact is awfully sweet, sometimes, no matter what the medium.

I just ran across an article that I need to share with you. It’s the kind of article that makes me take in a deep, deep breath and move to a higher level of understanding. I love that feeling, even though the pressure changes sometimes make my ears pop, cognitively speaking.

Nothing some cognitive chewing gum wouldn’t help.

The article is called “The Greatest Equations Ever” and it’s truly inspiring. Here’s one excerpt that I hope will lead you to read the entire piece–even if, like me, you’re neither a physicist nor a mathematician:

The unifying power of a great equation is not as simple a criterion as it sounds. A great equation does more than set out a fundamental property of the universe, delivering information like a signpost, but works hard to wrest something from nature. As Michael Berry from Bristol University once said of the Dirac equation for the electron: “Any great physical theory gives back more than is put into it, in the sense that as well as solving the problem that inspired its construction, it explains more and predicts new things” (Physics World February 1998 p38).

Great equations change the way we perceive the world. They reorchestrate the world — transforming and reintegrating our perception by redefining what belongs together with what. Light and waves. Energy and mass. Probability and position. And they do so in a way that often seems unexpected and even strange.

The deep connection for literary people like me is the power of the symbol.

My thanks to David Appel of Technology Review for blogging about this article. (Yes, of course, it was an email with links to a blog with links to a website: that’s one of the railroads I like to travel.) My thanks to Robert P. Crease for writing the article. (Short bio from the Physics World website: “Robert P. Crease is in the Department of Philosophy, State University of New York at Stony Brook, and historian at the Brookhaven National Laboratory.”) And since there’s an email link at the end of the essay, I’ll soon be writing Dr. Crease a short note of personal thanks.

Some strength for the day.

I’m always happy to see a new issue of CPU on the kitchen table. Yesterday was no exception. Chris Pirillo’s column on “The Future of Blogging” is written from the perspective of someone who’s been in the Web game since the mid-90s. (You can read the first little bit of the article here. You have to be a subscriber to go farther, alas.) He accurately notes that blogs are a way to “scribble down a few notes and hit Send,” an operation that was too difficult before the widespread availability of blogging tools like the one I’m using now (Word Press). The key is that you have something to share, and a desire or need to share it.

Chris started with “Chris Pirillo’s Multimedia Madness” and the promise of “one cool MIDI file” a day. Now Chris is at Lockergnome.com, and he has a monthly column in CPU magazine. It’s interesting that I first ran into him in the magazine, which takes me to my blog to note the site on the web that you can go to by clicking a link in my blog. See, I want it all: magazines, newspapers, books, the WWW, CDs, DVDs, the works. (Okay, I don’t want VHS. Ugly medium.) Each connects to the others in interesting ways. Each presents a slightly different experience to the reader/viewer. Each is wonderful on its own. Together, their mutual reinforcement takes me farther and faster than I’d otherwise be able to go.

“Life piled on life were all too little,” as Tennyson’s Ulysses says.

That’s grab bag, not gas bag.

I attended a cybersecurity conference yesterday in Charlottesville and I have a URL for you: the Center for Internet Security. This site has free downloads that will test your computer’s security. You’ll have to register but the process looks fairly benign.

Probably the spookiest thing I learned yesterday was that organized crime groups are getting money from large corporations by hacking into their networks and then threatening to go public with the news that their security has been compromised and their customers are at risk. Companies that refuse to pay up get their customers’ SSNs and credit-card numbers posted to the web. Those of us with shallower pockets still need to keep our computers secure: the biggest game in town is taking over unprotected computers and using them for denial-of-service attacks and worm-spreading.

In other spooky news, bloggers once again are causing a ruckus. This time it’s about the mysterious bulge spotted on George Bush’s back during the first debate with John Kerry. The White House denies the rumors.

And finally, I got to see Brian Wilson perform in D.C. Sunday night. He and his band did a bunch of great Beach Boys material, but the real highlight was a complete performance of SMiLE. It was overwhelming, even better than I’d hoped. If you’d like more details, see my review on the Steve Hoffman forum.

I’ve added Dolen Perkins-Valdez’ blog URL to the list at the right. Dolen is a new colleague in the University of Mary Washington’s department of English, Linguistics, and Speech. Her scholarly specialty is African-American literature. With her kind consent, I am sharing her blog with you. If you need a better reason for visiting than “Gardner likes it”–and who wouldn’t?–I can tell you that her blog on the late Richard Avedon is very cool and presents some Avedon photos I’ve never seen. Two in particular amazed me: famed singer Marian Anderson (“force of nature” comes to mind here) and Marilyn Monroe (dressed up as silent film star Theda Bara–Madonna, eat your heart out).

There’s something happening here. What it is ain’t exactly clear.

Bloggers on both the right and left wings of the political spectrum are not only getting press coverage these days, they’re making news. They were mentioned prominently today in a Washington Post article about Dan Rather and CBS News. Bloggers raised the question of whether the documents about Bush were authentic, and began the analysis that eventually showed they were probably not. Bloggers now defend Rather and CBS from charges of misconduct. It’s interesting to see this medium become so vital as a forum for citizens. (More on blogging’s place in the info “ecosystem” in this Technology Review blog–registration may be required.) Blogging is just template-driven, easy-to-use web publishing. Yes, just that. Funny how an old idea newly configured can take on a new life all its own. Something like the blues, country, gospel, pop, and folk in the hands of the Beatles, say.

I was also struck by a moment just before the presidential debates last Thursday night. I was watching the full-time ABC News feed on WJLA’s (ABC/Washington D.C.) standard-definition channel just adjacent to their high-definition channel. On the channel was a program featuring a young man with a laptop, a wireless connection to the Internet, streaming webcast software, a microphone, and a light or two. He was interviewing a set of college students in a commons area at the University of Miami. The picture was low-def but certainly watchable. The audio was clear. There were no serious glitches at all. Portable broadcasting, on the fly, on the cheap, without wires. I imagine setup and tear-down took about thirty minutes, max. The biggest issue was probably getting the audio feed back from the anchor to the interviewer.

Everybody look what’s going down.

The University of Mary Washington just joined the National Learning Infrastructure Initiative, a strategic arm of Educause devoted to transforming teaching and learning through the intelligent use of information technologies. It’s been just about a year since I first learned of the NLII. At that time, during a focus group at the 2003 Educause convention in Anaheim, I met one of the 2003-2004 NLII fellows, a man named Cyprien Lomas. I got to know Cyprien a little more during the NLII meeting the following January, and I saw him again at the NLII focus session on designing formal learning spaces just a couple of weeks ago. Cyprien’s a creative and interesting person and I hope to get to know him more as the years go by.

To my delight, I’ve just discovered that the NLII has a blog section and that Cyprien is one of the bloggers. He’s on the lookout for new and interesting ways of using IT in teaching and learning. Call him an intelligent agent–a most intelligent agent. I’m looking forward to benefiting from his expertise and curiosity.

Why blog?

Sharing stuff is fun.

For example, Ernie Ackermann’s blog (which I try to read regularly, and which I have linked this blog to-see the links column on the right) shares cool stuff. Yesterday’s blog hipped me to a site here at UMW that a colleague has put together to help his students prepare their research papers, and to a particular page explaining plagiarism. Who knew? (I didn’t, and I’m not sure when I’d have found out.) Ernie also shared an entire site devoted to issues of plagiarism, as well as the site (Neat New Stuff) that led him to the plagiarism site.

That sharing could have happened any number of other ways, but the connectivity of the Internet makes the particular act of sharing have greater immediate ramifications, and potentially greater depth. And it’s one more occasion to make that sharing happen.

Thanks, Ernie.