abject learning

Growing up in Saskatoon, I had the immense good fortune of encountering Henry Woolf a few times. I’ll admit, I wasn’t fully aware of just how accomplished an actor he was, but whenever he came to visit a high school or university English class I was taking (he was obviously very open to doing so) to talk drama or Shakespeare he always made an impression. Incredibly smart, an astonishing raconteur — even when I was a teenage football-playing lunkhead I could see the dude was operating on a different level than the rest of us. Yet he was humble, self-deprecating, and very funny — I later learned he had more than held his own with world-class comedians in The Rutles and other related projects (this wonderful interview with Woolf captures that scene).

It always struck me as odd to see this London stagemaster with a background like his (worked with Lawrence Olivier, directed Orson Welles) living apparently quite happily on the Canadian prairies, teaching at the University, in his words “an absurdist head of department who likes playing lunatics.”

I am prodded into this reminiscence by a piece he wrote appearing in today’s Guardian, a tribute to his boyhood friend Harold Pinter:

A bunch of determined solipsists is how I would describe the six of us as we bowled about Hackney in the late 40s and 50s, our lives central to the workings of the universe. We had mostly met at school – a group of six friends, including Harold Pinter and me – encouraged by the shining example of our English teacher, Joe Brearley, to put our lives first and the world second.

What does that mean? Well, in 1947 the world seemed too much. The Holocaust loomed over us. Atomic bombs had incinerated Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The cold war was being manufactured to keep the American economy going. What lay in store for us looked pretty bleak. We could prove to be the last generation. No future. No children. Us. Did we agonise over this? Discuss our unhappy fate into the small hours? Not a bit of it. By silent agreement, we put the day-to-day world to one side. Once we breathed its infected air, we were goners.

“Life is beautiful but the world is hell,” Pinter said recently. That might have been our motto, the six of us.

…Then there was the theatre. Joe Brearley took us to see Robert Helpmann and Margaret Rawlings in John Webster’s The White Devil. We had never seen anything like it. We rushed about declaiming: “There’s a plumber laying pipes in my guts”; “Oh, I have caught an everlasting cold”; “My soul is like to a ship in a black storm driven I know not whither”. Sixty years later, Harold is still likely to come out with “the time is ripe for the bloody audit and the fatal gripe” or “I’ll go hunt the badger by owl light” from The Duchess of Malfi.

I’m struck by how Joe Brearley is still remembered some sixty years later, and how one evidently remarkable teacher could see his influence extend through those students down through the years, to the point where even I benefited in a small sense. His gift for guiding young people through difficult, even hopeless times is something the world could use a whole lot of right now.

About once every two weeks, somebody asks me about tools that can take a set of PowerPoint slides and convert them into a web-accessible format with audio narration. There are a number of systems that do this, of course, but they usually involve a fairly hefty price tag — or require licensed software on the user end — and some of the cheaper methods can involve a fair number of tricky bits that confuse new users.

So the recent emergence of VoiceThread is most welcome. (I got your linktribution right here, dog.) Simply upload your images (directly from Flickr, if you wish), add text and/or audio annotation as desired, and you are left with a multimedia presentation that can be shared via hyperlink or embedding into whatever environment, including one of those CMSs…

I haven’t used this for a full presentation, but did do a few test runs and can testify that the system does indeed work as claimed.

Add in that nifty flickrCC search and image editing tool (more doggy linktribution), and it’s remarkably easy to find legally reusable and groovy images, add content, add narration (mad mixer/clumsy talker that I am, my only feature wish for VoiceThread would be the ability to upload prepared audio rather than live recording), and share via pretty much any web space imaginable.

The voracious demands of my rampaging ego compel me to point towards an article just published in the latest issue of EDUCAUSE Review on mashups in higher education (HTML and PDF).

This wasn’t an easy article to write, in part because I decided to consider mashups in the sense of both content creation and online applications. As I got deeper into the writing of it, it also became near-impossible to separate the topic of content reuse in higher education from the basic principles of open education (the influence of David Wiley’s recent talk in Vancouver is evident in this regard).

There’s also an audio companion to this piece, though if I was honest I might admit I wrote the article as a companion to the audio mashup. (Download 13.8 MB MP3, 15:00) Sources for the audio file are here. I’m especially fond of the last four minutes or so of the track, a remix of audio recorded at the inaugural EduGlu Symposium last February during Northern Voice — thanks to Draggin for snagging and sharing it.

There are bunch of people I should thank, actually, but I’ll narrow it down. First, a huge shout-out to ER Publisher/Editor Teddy Diggs for agreeing to run the article in the first place, and then demonstrating astonishing patience and an awe-inspiring openness to weirdness. I hope she doesn’t come to regret it. From a writer’s perspective, Teddy is everything you could want in an editor, every change she made to the text was perfect, her editorial touch always very light and subtle. And she’s an absolute blast to work with, always fun even when prodding on deadlines…

Keira tolerated me thinking out loud and brooding for weeks on end, was an excellent sounding board, and also took on a lot of extra household stuff to give me the time to write. This was a slower writing process than normal for me, and every extra bit of time I got was needed.

I proposed this article not because I was an expert on mashups, but because I was interested and wanted a reason to learn and think more about them. As a result I talked through a lot of things with a lot of peers, and thanks to all of them. A special shout-out to Scott Leslie, who spent a couple hours walking me through the implications of mashups on institutional IT strategy when frankly I had no idea what they might be. He also sent me a lot of resources along the way, making sure I was following Raymond Yee’s excellent work on the subject.

My goal of learning more and having some fun met with roaring success. Onward to the next freakout.

White Stripes free show in Whitehorse shared CC by nordicshutter

A few weeks back I wrote a huzzah for the way the White Stripes were approaching their Canadian tour, going to every province and territory, playing gigs in small venues in remote northern communities for no discernable financial gain. As the tour proceeds (we missed the Vancouver gig, but heard that it rocked most hard), I can’t resist a follow-up huzzah for how they’ve busted out of the Rock Star bubble while jaunting across the Great White North:

They’ve played youth centres in Burnaby and Edmonton, a park in Whitehorse and even a city bus in Winnipeg. In each case, the gig was arranged only hours in advance, with strict instructions from the band’s management not to tell the media.

Ed Whitehead, who co-owns two bowling alleys in Saskatoon, returned a call on Saturday from the Stripes’ road manager, who wanted to know if it would be okay for Jack and Meg White to play a short set at the Eastview Lanes.

“I’d never heard of the band before, so I didn’t know what to expect,” Whitehead said. But his lanes had been visited by “lots of celebrities,” including Mr. Dressup and the road crew for Nickelback, so he said yes.

…People who happened to look at a White Stripes online message board in advance of Monday’s bus performance in Winnipeg were told merely to assemble at a specific intersection at 3:10 p.m. A bus pulled up, about 20 fans got on and, one stop later the Stripes climbed aboard, to play The Wheels on the Bus and Hotel Yorba.

The most remarkable may be a clip of the Stripes at the Forks in Winnipeg, in which Jack is shown sitting near a local busker, strumming a few supporting chords while the other man plays the blues.

And in Toronto yesterday, they played a YMCA:

During the short set, Jack pulled four of the children up to the makeshift stage to sing and show off the masks the campers had been creating before the arrival of the rock stars.

During songs like Hotel Yorba and Martyr for my love for you he’d peer over the mic, smiling fully at the kids waving to him.

Meg joined in the giggling too as one camper, 8-year-old Dylan Pires, sang his own version of I Believe I Can Fly, and another very small boy pumped out The Wheels on the Bus to his excited camp-mates.

Jaded Gen-Xer that I am, I can’t help but wonder if this is just very clever marketing in the age of viral media and YouTube. But ultimately, I don’t care… fact is, the kids in that bowling alley in Saskatoon or that bus in Winnipeg are getting an experience they’ll always remember, and a much healthier example of real rock star cool.

As an aside, the new White Stripes album Icky Thump is about the only hyped release of the summer not to disappoint me. Maybe because they remember that one of the things we need our rock bands to do is, um… ROCK?

…but hey, it’s their obligation to their shareholders, right?

It was just their way of having… a bit of fun, the swines. Strange thing is they make such bloody good cameras web applications.

As a comic in all seriousness, I think it’s good business for the ‘do no evil’ crowd to get in on that health care PR industry scratch. I’d like to get a piece of that action myself. (I’ll take this opportunity to restate my intent to sell out my services, body and/or soul to the highest bidder at Big Money’s convenience, but alas, I’m still waiting for some corporate hack, any corporate hack to make a single reasonably lucrative bid.)

And as the dialogue storm over Sicko builds in its odd, inevitable way, do keep in mind one critical fact. It’s been documented on this weblog and elsewhere that Michael Moore is rather rude.

On the public construction of knowledge, the nature of education, and all sorts of groovy stuff nearby… just go listen.