abject learning

this is radio nowhere shared CC by onkel_wart

The tourist amenities and the beaches in San Juan are first-rate, so with the meetings complete, and my own workload in only a modest state of disrepair, I decided to take a day of rest along the island’s Atlantic coastline before returning home.

The water temperature was absolutely perfect. I’ve never swam in such powerful waves, and I spent hours bobbing and bodysurfing out in the churning maw, sometimes swimming, other times wading, following the irresistible rhythm of the waves. A glorious sensation.

Something I realized about myself that day… When I’m in a safe, comfortable solitary place I don’t achieve a state of blissful relaxation where I “get away from it all.” When I relax, I think. Which is a luxury in itself, given how the obligations of daily life seem to preclude thinking very much about anything.

So while I was bobbing out in the waves, I thought about that Canadian visionary Marshall McLuhan, and that early stage in his career when he transformed himself from literary scholar to media prophet, and how he cited Poe’s descent into the maelstrom as a metaphor for the human being sucked into the new media environment, how he wrote that when one enters the tumult it is foolish to resist, that the only chance for survival is to somehow connect with and ride out the pandemonium.

I imagined myself floating not in amniotic warm salty water, but in a digital ocean of zeros and ones, tossed this way and that, embraced one moment and thrown violently the next, riding waves wherever the prevailing energy happened to take me.

And though from my position I couldn’t see the waves coming, and I never came close to consciously determining a pattern between the mellow ripples and the big-time crashers, I came to develop a feel for the environment itself. Like how every now and then the water would get sucked away from me in every direction, and no matter how far out from shore I was I would find my feet on the sand below… that’s when I knew a really big wave was coming my way. The dumbest thing you can do at a moment like that is to plant your feet and try to resist the surge. No way… you have to be alert, get light, get loose, and when the boomer hits you have to jump straight up into it, and do your best to align with the energy and ride with it.

I thought about other stuff too.

I don’t pretend to be a McLuhanesque visionary, I’m just one of millions of nodes bobbing out in the digital wonderland, riding waves of information, with socially filtered antennae-bots probing out in innumerable directions and sending back data that I have no expertise to analyse. Lately I’m receiving increasingly strong and troubling transmissions… About a deepening financial crisis with the global megamoney players just staring at each other, waiting for someone else to blink. Energy prices are at record highs and the forecasts of the most hysterical peak oil pessimists are looking more and more prescient. The latest climate change reports suggest a truth not so much inconvenient as apocalyptic and irreversible. An emerging worldwide water shortage doesn’t seem to be on anyone’s agenda. War is being driven by kleptocrats and theocrats intent on doubling down on their disastrously wrong bets, and there is the near-certain prospect of escalating conflict ahead. Nuclear weapons are proliferating, tracking mechanisms of existing weapons are breaking down from neglect, and we’re seeing the criminally irresponsible dismantling of multinational treaties, the weaponization of space, and evidently serious talk of tactical use of “strategic mini-nukes.” Centuries-old and unresponsive governmental structures are thoroughly corrupt and utterly unprepared to deal with the challenges they’re facing, a mood of resigned and depraved apathy prevails amongst the citizenry. New media is eating old media and spitting it back out so fast that the venerable old media institutions (including higher education — especially higher education) don’t even know that it’s happened. And one after another, inspirational heroes, peers and friends tell me in private moments how tired, isolated, burned-out and disillusioned they are… Believe me, I could go on and on…

I really hope I’m wrong about this… but I sense a damn powerful sucking sensation everywhere around me. I feel a wave coming. And it’s going to be a motherfucker.

Get ready to jump.

At night, sections of old San Juan are transformed into something like a giant open air nightclubopolis… with every form of party music imaginable, salsa to rock to electronica (Pete Tong will mix there soon) throbbing out of bars all along the streets and cobblestone walkways that are so peaceful and quaint during the day. It’s one hell of a fun place to party.

At around 2 AM last Friday night, a shiny new black Humvee with the bass-heavy hip-hop cranking plowed down Calle Fortaleza as part of the never-ending procession of vehicles cruising slowly down the impossibly narrow 19th century streets. The Hummer was so big that it hung over the road onto the sidewalk, forcing people to press tightly against buildings or duck into doorways as it passed.

Quite the statement, don’t ya think? What with oil inexorably moving toward a hundred dollars a barrel and beyond, and the cataclysmic endgame of global warming clearly in sight. The driver was not dragged out of the Hummer and beaten by an angry mob. He was not met with stony shaming looks. The prevalent vibe on the street was evident admiration, a sense that the owner of this obscenity would have his pick of the nubile girls who were shaking what they had on the street and in the clubs. It was the ultimate bling.

And at that moment that same scene was being played out in countless playgrounds of the idle rich all around the world. It’s probably being played out somewhere right now.

I recognize I’m in no position to get moralistic… I mean, there I was, a tourist from a wealthy country having a grand old time in the nightclub district of San Juan at 2 AM. And I’m typing this self-righteous little blurb on a jet airplane with a carbon footprint I’d rather not think too hard about right now.

I don’t know quite what to make of it – I don’t need to make sense of a moment of Zen, do I? It was an instant in time that I suspect will play in my mind for some time, a moment when the relationships between money, power, technology, and sex came together, pounded into my brain with dazzling visuals and a kicking Latin beat.

I really have no idea what San Juan’s cable TV providers are doing with these monitors-of-monitors showing oscilloscopes doing whatever it is that oscilloscopes do on my hotel TV menu, but if they’re trying to seriously trip me out, then misión cumplida!

In all sincerity, I prefer this to the cable TV on offer at hotels closer to home.

This week the Text Technologies course I co-teach is about to begin Rip, Mix, Feed – Reloaded (feedback welcome), and it occurred to me I got some linktribution and love karma to give out.

Among the things I didn’t blog the past few weeks was a virtual keynote I did with Alan and D’Arcy for the K12 online conference. Due to our schedules, we more or less composed our sections in isolation, which was a real drag as the main reason I agreed to do the thing was to work with my amigos. I think I let that disappointment colour my reaction to the result, which is uneven but not too bad — due mostly to some heroic editing by D’Arcy.

Rip, Mix, Feed Reloaded also draws critically on some absolutely essential work Alan did for his Australian sojourn: Web 2.0 Gems, and 50 Web 2.0 Ways to Tell a Story. These collections are a staple in everything I do these days, it seems. I feel like we in the edublog community should give Alan a medal or something.

Also figuring heavily in Rip, Mix, Feed – Reloaded is Bryan Alexander. I’ll take this opportunity to play a short clip from the aforementioned K12 keynote. While I was procrastinating about preparing my section, I put out an open call on Twitter asking if anyone wanted to engage in some audio hijinks. To my delight, Bryan volunteered. Obviously, this was improvised, and a first take to boot. But I think this is a fine example Dr. Alexander’s comic gifts:

Click To Play

Original .mov here.

Not my hotel’s beach, originally uploaded by MrGluSniffer.

It’s my immense good fortune to be in San Juan right now, at the conclusion of three days of meetings between a wide variety of Latin American institutions, one university from Spain/Catalonia, and one mostly confused visiting Canadian. I’m realizing that I never did share my impressions of an event I attended in Barcelona a couple weeks back, and I will have to go back and do that, because that was also very rich in a lot of ways. But I thought I would quickly capture a few thoughts prompted here in Puerto Rico.

* The world is not flat. That notion is yet another thing that Tom Friedman is horribly, dangerously wrong about. And we shouldn’t want it to be flat. Sure, clearly superior technology can be adopted cross-culturally (think how quickly native Americans grasped the potential of guns and horses, or the global pervasiveness of books, telephones, automobiles, etc…), and it may help cultures to communicate and learn with one another. And there may well be an implicit logic inherent with the adoption of a new technology. But persistent and essential characteristics of distinct cultures exist, even within an increasingly integrated whole, and thank whatever deity or humanist icon you care to thank for that.

* When you only understand half of what’s going on, you’d be surprised how much you learn. The gaps in comprehension leave more space for thinking. I realize now that cognitive space is one of the things I miss most from my time in Mexico.

* I can’t say enough for the spirit and the energy of the people here. I can’t think of any other conference I’ve attended where the dinners were such explosions of singing, dancing and laughter, ones in which everyone is participating — hard to imagine fifty Canadians letting loose like this. All I can say about the people here is “wow”. Huge kudos to everyone, especially the organizers from the Open University of Catalonia and Interamericana University here in Puerto Rico.

I’ll try to share more later.

I came here as an invited guest speaker, but according to the documents composed during the meetings and all of the rhetoric I, and both of the institutions I was representing (COSL and UBC) are now part of the “network”. It’s quite possible the inclusion is just characteristic courtesy, but I can only hope this is the beginning of a beautiful partnership.

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Titulo, originally uploaded by MrGluSniffer.

I find myself tonight in San Juan, Puerto Rico, late at night, horribly sleep-deprived, hoping that the humidity that is fogging up every surface in the hotel room won’t somehow screw up my laptop. Tomorrow, I’m scheduled to speak on the subject of “open educational resources” for an innovation network of 20 Latin American universities partnering with the Open University of Catalonia. Besides getting a sponsored trip to Puerto Rico (first time in the Caribbean), this event has some resonance for me on a personal level. I got my start in this field as a teacher with the ITESM Campus Sonora Norte, in Hermosillo, Mexico so for sentimental reasons I don’t fully understand I want to do well here.

I am planning a somewhat stripped-down version of the talk I gave in Barcelona a couple weeks back (oh yeah, I never blogged that, but Ismael did), which itself was a stripped-down version of the talk I gave at the Open Education Conference (audio for that debacle is now public).

One challenge I feel like I need to deal with is the language thing… The meeting is being held in Spanish, and I’ve been advised that the English skills of attendees will vary quite widely. I speak Spanish like an illiterate Diazepam addict (no offense to illiterates, or to addicts), so while I can order in restaurants and talk politics with cab drivers I certainly don’t feel up to giving a presentation en Espanol.

So as an attempt to meet the participants half-way I have tried to translate my visual materials. I also interviewed a couple of people I often cite as examples in my presentations, so I will have a couple short clips in decent Spanish to play live, with more clips people can check out later. Jon Beasley-Murray discusses blog-based teaching and scholarly discourse (and the importance of students developing a public voice) in the Detectable section, and Pedro Pernias discourses on his work with distributed publishing and OCWinMotion in the RemixableFormatos section. I can’t express how grateful I am that I could tap such awesome contributions on very short notice.

If anyone with Spanish skills cares to correct the more egregious errors that are undoubtedly there in my materials, it is a wiki, and I would certainly appreciate it.

Now, I bow to physiological reality and try to get some sleep.

…of intercontinental jetlag, backlogged tasks, torrents of email, mangled limbs, and trying to Do the Right Thing.

I do have a few posts percolating, and hope to bring at least some of them to fruition shortly. Irregularly scheduled blogging, standing by.

In the meantime, some Bob and Ray, spanning the earlier (removed) and later parts of their amazing career:

So I didn’t feel great about how my talk at Open Education went, but my friends have kind of turned me around… Jim has convinced me that my extensive rant on rats was not a psychotic episode, as I had feared, but actually a symbolic working out of complex relationships concerning work, society and self. Honestly, this may be one of those cases where the critic pulls out something the author didn’t know was there, but is nonetheless on the money. It certainly gratifies my ego to suppose so, authorial intention be damned. And D’Arcy is such a fantastic photographer that he managed some shots of my session that don’t embarrass me.

Then again, it seems my session is the only one for which the conference organizers are withholding the audio. Can’t say I blame them. There may well be legal liability issues, I don’t intend to push the issue.

Two upcoming sessions I’ve been shamed into promoting here:

* Tomorrow, October 4th at 12 noon PST I am doing a virtual session on mash-ups for the Wimba desktop speaker series. My boss gave me a gentle chiding this morning for not plugging this… To be frank, I plan something pretty close to my portion of the Open, Connected and Social event done with my amigos a few months back, with a few new wrinkles.

* Slideshare has made the teaser for More Than Cool Tools its featured slidecast of the day. This may end up bearing some small resemblance to a session with Alan and D’Arcy for next month’s K12 Online Conference. BTW, the audio is not the Tijuana Brass, but this knock-off from the 365 Days Project.

I’m in the Salt Lake City airport as I write this, and positively knackered. So I’ll apologise upfront for a post that is incomplete and probably incoherent. I’m sure I’ll miss lots of stuff.

Some highlights this week:

* getting an early start to the week at quieter than normal COSL office, getting the chance to hang out and talk more than usual with Justin, as he pushed the promising conference application 51 Weeks out the door.

* Ramita Shrestha’s keynote was her first talk ever (she was awesome), and this was her first trip out of Nepal. Listening to how she approached her work running a community-access library with a handful of computers and a shared dialup connection, and what she was up against (even to be allowed to come to the event) was a truly humbling experience. Frankly, I felt like a spoiled punk — which in the global sense I am, of course. She was really gracious in conversation as well. I hope she had a worthwhile experience coming here.

* It’s been my immense good fortune to share an apartment with Pedro Pernias when I’ve been in Logan on COSL business the past couple months. He’s simply a fantastic dude, great fun to be around. And the kicker is that in Alicante he’s been implementing the kind of whacked-out syndicated distributed content framework I’ve been dreaming of, and on a massive scale. His OCW in Motion project — which among other things uses RSS as a content import method into a wiki-based CMS. He presented this amazing system with great style — what wonderful PowerPoint slides (never thought I’d write those words). He says he wants to work with us (I wish he could meet my own whacked out RSS-buddy at UBC, Novak Rogic) and I can only hope it happens.

* D’Arcy and Jim kicked out the WordPress jams, and made a clear and compelling case how free tools can support a dynamic and rigorous network for the creation, remixing and redistribution of educational resources. Honestly, when I reflect on how higher education tends to spend technology money, and refract it against the simple but irrefutable points these guys made (in the expected entertaining fashion), I get kind of pissed off.

* I got to meet the dudes who did the Rick Noblenski video! I am not worthy.

* Scott Leslie’s screencast on client-side extensions and educational resources is freaking amazing. Go watch it now. Prepare your mind for a blowing.

* Had a fun edublogger beer with the boys, and two great additions to the illuminati — Jen and Keri.

* David Wiley’s talk on the proposed license was immensely clarifying and provocative. I’m still a bit uneasy about a license attached to “education”, but I see the overall logic. His “Four R’s” framework is something I will be revisiting.

* I had my mind blown by this talk on location-based metadata. This is huge in terms of mashups, authentic learning experiences, and learning activities that create useful public resources. I need to integrate this subject into my learning, and they gave me a great start.

* My own talk was something of a comedy of errors, but thankfully people seemed to focus on the comedy part and were very kind with me. I might blog more about it (I learned a lot), then again I might not.

It’s a good thing I need to go catch my flight, as I could get intensely goopy about what this week meant to me in terms of friendship. David Wiley describes COSL as a family, and they make me feel very much part of it, and I can’t express how grateful I am for how I am treated by that wonderful and gifted group of people. And any chance to spend time with D’Arcy, Scott and Jim is something to treasure. They are talented, ethical, thoughtful, and funny as hell. And damned good people to have as friends. David made a bit of fun about how we tended to be seen together, but I just wanted to soak up every bit of those fantastic dudes, it was an opportunity not to be missed.

— Apologies for the calibre of blogging here. No time for the usual proofread. (Yes, I usually proofread and revise — hard to believe, huh?)

opened2007 – hope that works, I’m hallucinating from fatigue right now.