abject learning

Ever since I first spoke with Gardner Campbell one fateful evening at an In-N-Out Burger he has been at the top of my wish-list for people to speak on my home campus.

The wait is finally over:

Emily Dickinson once wrote, “If I read a book [and] it makes my whole body so cold no fire ever can warm me I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry.” Can that experience be true of computing as well? Can the experience of computing reveal metaphors, compelling forms, rhymes, even meter in our encounters with knowledge, virtual worlds, and each other? Do some people resist a deep exploration of computers for the same reason they shy away from poetry? In A Poet’s Guide to Poetry, Mary Kinzie writes, “I believe the craft of writing is actually to entice readers into the same domain as the creative imagination.” Is there a similar craft of computing, a digital imagination no less creative than the verbal, musical, and artistic varieties we have known for centuries?

I believe the answer to all those questions is “yes.”

I will share my thoughts with you, listen to your ideas and engage with your questions, take us through some opportunities for creativity, and seek some provisional conclusions with you. By the end of our time together, I hope you will feel the exploration has yielded at least a few valuable insights into learning, teaching, creativity, poetry, computing, and the schools we have built—and may yet build.

The abstract captures so much of what I love about Gardner… His profound engagement with the concept of digital imagination. His intellectual ambition and daring. His deep and relentless thinking expressed in lovely eloquence. His determination to connect his wonderful mind with the minds of others, to hear and represent their voices.

I would add three qualities that maybe don’t come through so clearly in the abstract, but which are nonetheless likely to be on display this Wednesday:

* Anyone who knows Gardner is aware of what a true teacher he is… I’m struggling for the right words here (with a meeting ticking towards me any minute) but Gardner is as passionate and thoughtful a teacher as I’ve ever met. Lately, Gardner has written a remarkable series of blog posts which demonstrate this…

* Even though we have recently had a mild disagreement on the subject, there’s no doubt that Gardner gets the whacked-out open education thing in his bones. It’s evident in his public education practices like podcasting John Donne poems, and it’s on display in his blog-based courses. He really seems to see openness as key toward a more iterative and real form of schooling that could justify a tag like “revolutionary”. There’s a reason we call him Dr. Glu. I’ve always thought of this talk as the closest thing to a comprehensive grounding of the EduGlu concept that I’ve heard in one place.

* Gardner rocks. He’s the only educational thinker I know that can invoke Lester Bangs as a closer (to great effect). And this talk is something very special to me, for so many reasons. He’s one of my absolute favorite people to talk music with, and if we get to go vinyl shopping this week I just might melt into a puddle…

The session (please register, it’s free) is set for this Wednesday, 1:00 at the Telestudios Main Theatre (visitors to UBC welcome) Rm# 0110 – 2329 West Mall.

If you have another appointment, you should reschedule. If you have a deadline, what’s another couple hours later gonna mean? Simply put, this is going to be THE session of the season.

I’ll try to refrain from selling you on the greatest station in the history of radio, who are currently in the process of the most riotous fundraising drive going… I won’t explain yet again how they model the transition from old media to new media with unbearable anarchic grace. (The New York Times asserts “Instead of being a dinosaur medium eaten up by new technology, it managed to create an international niche brand.”) I will note, however, that this year I upped my own annual pledge past my comfort zone to express my gratitude for the station’s leadership in assembling the pending Free Sound Archive. I have been exploiting WFMU’s ample audio offerings for fun and non-profit for years, and I expect to plunder the new archive shamelessly.

In exchange for my donation, I’ll be getting a whack of wonderful DJ swag. And because I got in early, I also received “naming rights” to a piece of the station. Last year, I got a microphone. And while it was a real kick to hear Station Manager (and dream speaker) Ken Freedman use my mic, this year it feels even groovier to have snagged the rights to a genuine WFMU LP turntable.

As you can see, this year I used my naming powers to support a movement that is bigger than my own petty ego…

Later today, 5-8 PM EST, you can hear indie rock legends Yo La Tengo take your requests and play them live on the air…

This isn’t necessarily the best week to introduce yourself to the station, as they are fixated on getting pledges. But check out the archives, and maybe you’ll decide to pull out your credit card and support culture at its coolest…

The NV edublogger crew had all drifted off from Van Rock City by midday Sunday, and I confess to something that felt like empty nest syndrome. Bereft, with a massive sleep debt, a few cold frosty beverages, a back deck, blazing Vancouver sunshine(!) and a huge amount of information to process.

My spirits were lifted by the sound, drifting up from the yard below, of five year old Harry singing songs with our downstairs neighbour Josh strumming along on guitar. HarrySingsGVB

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The song they’re singing is “Motor Away” by a band that to me is the purest embodiment of all that is wonderful about rock music, Guided by Voices. And yeah, Harry trips up on a few lines. But so does Robert Pollard (especially towards the end of his shows after the 20th or 30th beer)…

Here’s the original (after the short intro of “Auditorium”):

I know what you’re probably thinking… No, I didn’t force-feed Harry this song like some pathetic showbiz Alternadad wannabe. I don’t even think I’d played the song in months. I was simply gobsmacked when he started belting it out walking to school a few weeks ago. He knew the lyrics better than I did.

And just because Harry and I love to crank this song, and because the video has an educational theme, here’s GBV’s “Bulldog Skin“:

Scott Reads RSS Poetry, originally uploaded by cogdogblog.

Scott Leslie (whose own Northern Voice reflection is a must-read) had an awful slot for the Friday night Wiki-Tiki party open mic. He was something like the fifteenth speaker (seemed like the fiftieth), he came on after a break and the energy of the party was waning fast. (The edubloggers were gaining strength, were still there two hours after literally everyone else had left, but that’s another story.) I remember thinking when Scott hit the stage that the emptying, desultory, dazed air of the barroom felt like a Tom Waits song. People were cross-talking obliviously when Scott began to speak, and showed no signs of shutting up. I had been watching Scott patiently but nervously wait his turn for what seemed like forever, and was cringing inside… If it was a fight, and I was a referee, I might have stepped in early.

Then, all that Mr. Leslie did was absolutely nail the freaking thing with a short, punchy and absolutely hilarious reading of “Trackback Love”. I’m so grateful that Alan recorded most of it. If you haven’t seen it, really, go watch it now. Check out that reaction.

As for the identity of the “Technorati Slut”, all I’m prepared to say is that every narrative element of the poem is factually accurate.

Tags: northernvoice, nv08

It seems that every year I sit down to write the post-mortem for Northern Voice and find myself at an absolute loss. This event is such a toxic cocktail of ideas, energy, urgency, depravity, laughter, logistics, friendship, and chronic sleep-deprivation that (my) words simply fail me.

So I’m telling myself that over the next couple weeks I’ll try to write a series of mini-posts on some of the following bits:

* My overwhelming respect for the other conference organizers. Not to mention the volunteers, my colleagues in OLT and at UBC who really stepped up, the presenters, the sponsors and of course all of the attendees. That scope of praise dilutes the goodness, I know, and sounds like boilerplate… but this is an event where everyone contributes to the vibe.

* I knew we had a hot student team in OLT this semester, but their amazing volunteer efforts with the event and the conceptual progress we made on our pending blog platform have pushed me into mad passionate love for them. I’m so excited thinking about what we might yet get from this crew.

* Once again, I was so proud to be associated with an educator contingent that simply delivered the goods. I’m admittedly not the most neutral observer, but in all honesty I feel like our community was superbly represented at the wiki-tiki party/open-mic, Moose Camp, the conference presentations and everywhere else.

* EduGlu is so close… Mark my words, we are nearing a point where openness, simple tools on powerful platforms, syndication, remixing, and some sheer learning party craziness shakes and stirs together into something very potent indeed.

What’s most astonishing to me is that despite my many personal flaws and missteps, I find myself enjoying a true embarrassment of riches. I cannot express how wealthy I am in family, friends, and professional colleagues.

Tags: northernvoice, nv08

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NV08 Keynote, originally uploaded by mastermaq.

… cuz I’m too busy grooving on Northern Voice.

The story is emerging on the blogs, and on the Flickr stream.

Tag: northernvoice

UBC Library book retrieval system, originally uploaded by stodmyk.

This nifty Creative Commons-licensed photo is of UBC Library’s Automated Storage and Retrieval System. It’s part of the newly rebuilt Main Library at UBC. From what I understand, I’ll be moving my base of operations for professional misconduct back to this building next month as the Irving K. Barber Centre enters its next phase.

Five years ago, my first offices at UBC were in the previous edifice of the library. The ceiling was maybe a foot over my head (we used to say it was like working in a submarine), but I loved that space (pics missing). We had windows that we could actually open to the outdoors, they overlooked the greenspace in front of the Student Union Building. And when I needed to gather my thoughts, it couldn’t get better than stepping out the door and wandering the stacks. More than once I found inspiration or consolation in a serendipitous book or periodical…

I guess you really can’t go home again.

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At The Very Heart Of Where The Action Is, originally uploaded by drp.

Stephen Downes mentions that David Wiley’s WordPress-based OpenCourseWare proof of concept mixed with one of Tony Hirst’s many bits of rich, RSS-flavoured open learning goodness might make something extra yummy. By one of those weird strange quarks (strangeness and charms) of serendipity or synchronicity Tony and Jim Groom are looking at each others’ stuff. Jim gets inspired to take the next step, (one of those steps that seems obvious in retrospect — but if they are so obvious, how come nobody else is taking them?), and pulls off something so astonishing that I am blogging it at 2 AM:

The first course from the OpenLearn site I republished was titled Goya. I chose this one for two reasons: a) I wanted to learn more about Goya, and b) it had a number of images and videos associated with it and I wanted to see how they would work. As a result, I now know more about Goya & the images and videos pulled into the site beautifully, very impressive XML! The first time I pulled this course the Introduction and background posts balked, this didn’t happen the second time I tested it however.

Compare the re-published blog site above (click on the image to see it) with the original course in the OpenLearn OER here.

Moreover, each of the course sections was in the proper logical order, meaning that the topmost post on the blog was the introduction, next the background, etc. This fortunate happenstance made reproducing the course outline on the sidebar of the blog simple. I just included the recent posts widget and re-titled it Unit Outline. After that, I had an entire course republished in my WPMu account within minutes.

As for the other two courses I tested (Hume and Word and image), they work perfectly save for a few stray a tags on the Word and image site. Compare the original Hume course on the OpenLearn site with the re-published blog site here. Do the same for the original Word and image course and the republished one here.

This was a pretty amazing experiment for me because it illustrates just how much I learn from reading blogs on a daily basis. Ideas happen in a series of relations, and I so thoroughly enjoy taking other people’s genius and testing it out. When I saw the Goya class get pulled in successfully in just over a minute, I started to realize just how powerful these open resources can be once they are freed from their repositories. [My emphasis.]

To add a wonderfully perverse touch, Jim is employing a classic web jujitsu move, using Wp-O-Matic, “a tried and true spamblogging plugin.”

Meanwhile, all D’Arcy Norman is doing is building EduGlu.

Wait… what?

Students add feeds to the system, placing them in any relevant groups, and tagging the feed appropriately. Items from these feeds are then aggregated, inheriting the feed’s tags and group settings. Students are able to view the incoming content in any (or all) of their groups at a glance, and apply social rating to sort and rank the items – items ranked over a threshold are pushed to the front page of the site. Tag clouds are generated, allowing easy browsing of content. And a full search engine is available, providing some pretty fully featured data mining tools. The aggregated items are archived for as long as needed, and discussion can occur within the context of the EduGlu website rather than being spread across dozens/hundreds of blogs and other applications scattered around the web.

The beauty of this implementation is that it involved no custom code. I didn’t write a single line of code. All I did was integrate a set of off-the-shelf modules for Drupal. This is all generalizable and re-implementable in any number of various ways. [My emphasis.]

Oh, did I mention it’s my privilege to convene a session at Northern Voice that Jim and D’Arcy are doing entitled “Don’t call it a Blog, Call it an Educational Publishing Platform.” Given what these fellows have pulled off in the past week, I shudder to think what they might be up to one week from now…

What I find most compelling about this burst of development is the strong suspicion that similar frenzies are being played out in other relevant domains right now as well. There really is undeniable power at work when words like “open” and “free” don’t merely function as abstract principles, but as keys that unlock doors…

It’s not a revolutionary proposition that a blog platform can be a low-cost, low-stress means of hosting course materials. The argument was moved along nicely by a session Jim and D’Arcy did at last year’s Open Education Conference, and many other voices in the blogosphere have offered up such notions.

So David Wiley’s proof of concept showing how a free WordPress.com hosted weblog can serve up OpenCourseWare shouldn’t be any surprise. But when I actually looked at it, like Jim I had something of a minor eureka moment…

This particular case uses a free hosted weblog — 3 GB of file storage, management is simple, multimedia works like a charm, the content is highly portable and eminently remixable. The excellent RSS functionality opens up all sorts of syndication and mashup potential. And as David mentions, a campus-hosted version could go further, tapping some most-groovy WordPress plugins to deliver some nifty effects. One obvious add-on that Jim reminded me of is Simple Forums, which establishes a discussion board functionality. But of course, the really exciting potential of this approach is its inherent mutability, the opportunity to try stuff that no CMS has ever been able to do. Not to mention the ability to allow students to interact with their digital environment using tools of their own choosing, tools that are owned and managed by the students themselves.

But I’m losing myself in pointless reverie. This approach is fatally flawed in a number of respects and it will never catch on. For one thing, it is far too cheap, and can never justify escalating technology infrastructure budgets. Worse, instructors and students could adopt this technology with minimal assistance or oversight from instructional technology specialists. In this profoundly unserious framework, there is nothing to prevent students from previewing courses before they take them, or reviewing courses later on. Indeed, some “learner” might benefit from this content without being an enrolled student at all!

Faust / Faust, originally uploaded by bradleyloos.

[Suggested soundtrack for this post, LCD Soundsystem’s amusing ode to musical obscurity and idolatry, with ruminations on formats, “Losing My Edge“]

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	CharlesV – LCD Soundsystem – Losing My Edge
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A lot of linkage has justifiably gone towards Kevin Kelly’s post “Better than Free”, which charts a path by which digital work might begin to make sustainable financial sense. The oft-quoted core statement:

When copies are super abundant, they become worthless.
When copies are super abundant, stuff which can’t be copied becomes scarce and valuable.

Which brings to mind the revival of my favorite music format, vinyl LPs. The mainstream music industry is as clueless about this phenomenon as they are with everything else, but the DJs, the niche artists and smarter independent record labels certainly get it:

Pressing plants are ramping up production, but where is the demand coming from? Why do so many people still love vinyl, even though its bulky, analog nature is anathema to everything music is supposed to be these days? Records, the vinyl evangelists will tell you, provide more of a connection between fans and artists. And many of today’s music fans buy 180-gram vinyl LPs for home listening and MP3s for their portable devices.

“For many of us, and certainly for many of our artists, the vinyl is the true version of the release,” said Matador’s Patrick Amory. “The size and presence of the artwork, the division into sides, the better sound quality, above all the involvement and work the listener has to put in, all make it the format of choice for people who really care about music.”

Because these music fans also listen using portable players and computers, Matador and other labels include coupons in record packaging that can be used to download MP3 versions of the songs. Amory called the coupon program “hugely popular.”

Exactly right. When I want to connect with a piece of music, vinyl can’t be beat. (I was given a fantastic translucent copy of the reissued LP pictured above for Christmas, and I get a warm feeling every time I handle it… less warm when I listen, it’s rather dissonant and nasty.) I sacrifice some sound quality and sense of aura when I listen to digital music, but it is fluid, easily accessed and portable. And digital music is effectively free, even if I don’t engage in illegal filesharing. I can tune in to a carefully assembled three hour set by one of my favorite DJs, or see what Last.FM turns up for me. Digital is where I sample, browse and explore. Vinyl is where I commune. It’s where I live. I only wish I had the shelf space and the wallet to buy more of it.

I should add that while I all-too-rarely splurge for the occasional premium piece of 180 gram virgin vinyl, I’m more likely to hit the bargain rack for a stack of records that may never have been digitized (though more and more weblogs are addressing that gap). Most of these cheap campy finds are crap, I suppose, but I always feel like an intrepid cultural anthropologist and archivist walking out with a stack of forgotten music, having spent less than the price of a cappuccino. Roy Edroso captures this sensation well:

…the recesses of our cultural memory are an archipelago where vinyl certainly rules. Things were caught on wax that, with rare exceptions, no one will bother to digitize because there’s no money in it, or because no one cares, or because they just plain suck. These artifacts have the same value as any unobserved details of life: they are either worthless or a treasure trove, depending on how much faith one has in the obvious, or patience for that which is not obvious. Like bookstall remainders, garage-sale handicrafts, photos found in the trash, or conversations overheard on the bus, or anything you might happen to attend that did not call attention to itself, they are part of a secret world that is larger, and often more interesting, than the consensus reality we half-awakenly inhabit, and to which we can only abandon ourselves at great risk to our souls.

CDs are inferior to LPs or MP3s in almost every respect. They are expensive, and nearly as hard to store as LPs. The artwork usually borders on pointless. A slight scratch can render the whole thing unplayable. Their long-term storage prospects are a joke compared to vinyl. They are a pain to handle.

More on the niche-driven nature of vinyl’s resurgence in a couple of Guardian articles published last year.

While I’m here, check out this memoir by a longtime rock manager if you doubt that the demise of the existing record industry is something to celebrate, not to mourn.

And if you haven’t encountered producer Steve Albini’s account of music economics from the perspective of an up-and-coming music act, it’s simply a must-read.