Yes, tonight I put WinXP SP2 on my trusty tablet, the honorable Toshiba Portege M200 (all rise, says the bailiff). And … nothing happened. Nothing untoward, that is. The custom download was about 75 MB, nearly 200MB less than the everything download that’s been available online for a week or so. The download was verified, then installed, all automatically. It was also nice to see a system restore point set automatically. The machine rebooted (after it asked politely and I said “sure”), and when it came up again, I was asked if I wanted to set automatic update to “on.” “Sure,” I replied. Then the boot finishes and voila, mirabile dictu, Windows Security Center launches. It tells me that autoupdate is on but Windows can’t tell if my virus definitions are up to date. I gave it permission to stop monitoring: “I’ll do that myself, thanks.” I note that the firewall is on. I exit Security Center and go about my business.

Nothing is wrong.

If there’s another shoe, it’s either a slipper and I couldn’t hear it fall, or else it’s taking a long, long time to thump on the floor.

Emboldened, I’ll probably go ahead with the update on my prime machine at school tomorrow. Watch me jinx that one, too. 😉

Folks may talk about computing on the deck.
People may say they surf on the beach.
Friends may want their notebook at the breakfast table.
For me, happiness is a warm laptop as I sit in the stereo sweet spot, do my work, and listen to my music.
Tonight’s treasures:
Band On The Run
Wes Montgomery: Goin’ Out Of My Head
CCR: Pendulum (SACD, yum)

And so to bed.

This afternoon I helped returning students at my university get their computers configured and back online on the campus network. There were changes this year that meant the process was substantially more involved than it was last year. This year students had to install a suite of software to ensure their computers were up to date on OS patches and antivirus software before they could log onto the network with full privileges. There were snafus aplenty as students made their way through the new requirement. I and a small army of other IT folk were on hand in the dorms–excuse me, residence halls–to offer help when help was needed. I was waylaid about seven times during my three hours on duty, and each computer took me an average of twenty or twenty-five minutes–not because I’m so slow, necessarily, but because the difficulties were so tangled and interrelated: multiple catch-22s like getting antivirus updates even as new viruses are coming over the unprotected wires.

And viruses there were in plenty. I fancied I could also feel them coming through the CAT-5 cables as I did my work. I imagined they were coming in through the suspended ceiling, just the way the monsters did in Aliens. At the same time, however, I was aware that another set of creatures was trying just as hard to get through those cables: the fellow human beings who were trying to contact the person whose machine I was working on. As I worked to restore the Internet connections to full life, I could gauge my success by how quickly the screen would light up with Instant Messaging contacts, outgoing and incoming. It was as if the computer’s virtual eyes opened, blinked, and began to see again.

So I worked through the afternoon, beating back the viruses, welcoming back the great wide networked world, and being thanked by student after student for restoring an old friend and the essential connections it enables.

It was a good day to be good with computers.

I like aphorisms, if they’re thought-provoking and not pat. Good aphorisms are like good melodies: they tap into the inevitable without being at all predictable.

One of my favorite aphorists of education is a man named Jerome Bruner. I’m not sure what he’s doing now, but in the mid-1990’s he was Research Professor of Psychology and Senior Research Fellow in Law at New York University. He’s certainly a member of my Secret Societry for Real School. I’ve long been in love with his book The Culture of Education, and long intended (as I pave the road to Hell, alas) to read his other books as well. In any event, here are a few choice quotations that are short and pithy enough to qualify as aphorisms by my standards. And if the quotations are really too long to be aphorisms, then I claim blogger’s license.

I’m very grateful Bruner wrote them down, and that I can share them with you.

Indeed, the very institutionalization of schooling may get in the way of creating a subcommunity of learners who bootstrap each other.

Nothing is “culture free,” but neither are individuals simply mirrors of their culture. It is the interaction between them that both gives a communal cast to individual thought and imposes a certain unpredictable richness on any culture’s way of life, thought, or feeling.

School … [is] both an exercise in consciousness raising about the possibilities of communal mental activity, and … a means for acquiring knowledge and skill.

[E]ducation is a major embodiment of a culture’s way of life, not just a preparation for it.

[T]he metalinguistic gift, the capacity to “turn around” on our language to examine and transcend its limits, is within everybody’s reach.

The chief subject matter of school, viewed culturally, is school itself. This is how most students experience it, and it determines what meaning they make of it.

[E]ducation is too consequential to too many constituencies to leave to professional educators.

Finding a place in the world, for all that it implicates the immediacy of home, mate, job, and friends, is ultimately an act of the imagination.

It wasn’t easy. I wanted to be an astronaut but the astigmatism was a problem. So I wanted to be a rock star, or at least thrash about in School of Rock poses in a garage band. The money to buy the instruments never coincided with the right opportunity to play, unfortunately, and finding musicians you really want to play with is a delicate business. Being a DJ could give me a little taste, but it was definitely a wanna-be job in that respect. So lately, surprise! I found a bunch of musicians I liked playing with, and I had the instruments I wanted, even a P.A. and a garage to practice in, and now I find that a) I don’t have the time and b) I really want to play tightly-arranged power pop/rock, and that kind of music takes lots of rehearsal that I don’t have the time for. Nor do my bandmates–and they don’t quite have the Badfinger/Beatles/Beach Boys/XTC/Who/Big Star/Fountains of Wayne bug that I do, anyway. I bet some of them think I made up “Big Star,” though of course I didn’t.

So, dear reader, I don’t guess you or I will ever know if I had a “Strawberry Fields” or even a “Come and Get It” in me. I suppose it wasn’t meant to be, but at least I did shake a tailfeather, or something, a couple of times before I got too old. And there’s still the Todd Rundgren trip in my home studio. Or maybe that would be the Beck trip nowadays.

No, I don’t mean the IPO that a Playboy interview almost derailed. I mean the growing sophistication of Google and other WWW search engines. I used to have to think carefully about my search terms, remember my Boolean operators (I’ve always loved that phrase–“call now, Boolean AND operators are OR standing NOR by–all the librarians just hit the floor laughing), try to match my sense of what I wanted with a sense of the likely indexing scheme the engine (or, in earlier days, the book) would have adopted.

Now, however, I just type in something like “what is a vortal?” and Google takes me to a list of sites with answers. And that’s not all, Ginsu knife fans. Because I haven’t done my search with indexing in mind, the associative trail is littered with more opportunities for serendipitous discovery, at least so far. Case in point today: “what is a vortal?” brought me eventually to Word Spy. What’s Word Spy? Here’s the way the site defines itself:

This Web site is devoted to lexpionage, the sleuthing of new words and phrases. These aren’t “stunt words” or “sniglets,” but new terms that have appeared multiple times in newspapers, magazines, books, Web sites, and other recorded sources.

Now, of course, I need to look up “stunt words” and “sniglets.” “Lexpionage” I think I can figure out. Ironically, none of those words is defined on Word Spy, though in finding that out I did happen onto the definition of “Google Bomb,” which I blush to admit was a new term for me.

Time for another search.

Another school year looms, I mean beckons, and I regard it with my usual mingled dread, fascination, awe, and excitement. (That list is in no particular order.) I look forward to being pushed harder by native-born citizens of cyberspace, by which I mean incoming students. These folks were around eight years of age when the World Wide Web appeared, so they’ve spent some of their childhood and all of their adolescence in an increasingly robust and ubiquitous online environment. That heritage represents a huge challenge for higher education. I don’t think we should adopt all the aspects of the culture students live in–there’s a strong countercultural obligation in higher education, I believe–but at the same time, college shouldn’t be the place where information technologies don’t really matter. We need to create a robust network of our own that connects the work of teaching and learning to the world beyond the classroom. Or to put it another way, we should encourage students to view the world as a learning space that asks for reflection, persuasive argument, and committed interaction. I think information technologies have a crucial role to play in that encouragement.

Seems that an estimated three million Americans blog and that publishing people are now scouring blogs to spot new talent.

Hey Mr. DeMille, we’re all ready for our close-ups … though “Gardner Writes” is an escapade-free zone.

Why all the titles with “secret” in them? Maybe I’m still recovering from my anniversary trip to the International Spy Museum?

In any event, I was talking to the birthday boy at a birthday party yesterday and discovered we both were big fans of a British rock group called XTC. The band got started as part of the punk/new wave movement in the late 70’s, flourished during the 80’s despite a moratorium on touring caused by the front man’s stage fright, and continued through the 90’s and into the 00’s with a small handful of great albums, some record label litigation, personnel upheavals, the usual art rock-n-roll story.

What’s interesting to me about XTC is that it’s rare to find someone who sort of likes them. People have either never heard of them or are quite passionate about them. I suppose there is a middle ground there, but I don’t see many people living there when it comes to XTC.

So why not call XTC a “cult” band? One certainly could, but the other tell-tale cult signs aren’t really there. Folks don’t wear XTC t-shirts (though I see they’re now available, so the handshake may become a cult after all). They don’t write fan fiction about XTC. They don’t try to emulate the band members. (I’m not sure they could emulate the lead singer-songwriter, Andy Partridge.) That is, fans of XTC don’t really behave differently because of their devotion to the band. They just love the music. And when you meet someone who says they love XTC, you can bet they love the music i-n d-e-t-a-i-l.

Hence the idea of the secret handshake, the “oh, you too?” response when someone else says they love the Swindon Beatles.

Time to crank up the stereo again.

Strange things are happening every day, as Sister Rosetta Tharpe once sang.

The essays by Vannevar Bush and Douglas Engelbart I wrote about below have been teasing my mind with more connections over the past couple of days. Since I’ve been thinking about Bush I’ve been haunted by a sense of deja vu. I just knew I’d heard the name somewhere before. Then, while reading a tenure file, I saw the name … and realized that I’d heard it from my junior colleague “mentee,” Dr. Tim O’Donnell, speech professor and director of debate at the University of Mary Washington. He’d written his dissertation on Bush and the rhetoric of science.

So I call Tim up, all in a lather about this connection, and the next day Tim brings me a box full of books (including his diss) and articles. One of the books is G. Pascal Zachary’s biography of V. Bush. In the biography I read this:

Among those smitten by the memex in the summer of 1945 was a 20-year-old American radar technician, waiting for his ship home from the Phillipines.
One muggy day, Douglas Engelbart walked into a Red Cross library on the edge of the jungle on Leyte Island and found Bush’s article in the Atlantic. Infected with memex fever, Engelbart returned to the U.S., finished his bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering and set off “along a vector you had described,” he later wrote Bush. Within a few years, he was harboring his own notions about how to turn intimidating digital computers into intimate amplifiers of the human mind.

Now let’s think about that last phrase for a moment: “intimate amplifiers of the human mind.” I think that’s a pretty fair description of school, as well as of personal computers and their networks. That’s why I say that Bush and Engelbart are not just IT visionaries. They’re extraordinary members of the Secret Society for Real School.

As is Jerome Bruner, a philosopher of education whose The Culture of Education has been a major influence on my own thinking and practice. Of course I need to return to that book now, go to the index, and look to see if either Vannevar Bush or Douglas Engelbart is in there. I’ll make sure I’m sitting down before I look.