Dr. C.’s Learning Web

We finished the McLuhan video in New Media Studies today, and the students learned that MM had children (six, in fact) with a very charming and intelligent wife who both marveled at her husband and waxed rueful about his idiosyncracies. We learned that his son could not convince MM that in fact Brasilia was now the capital of Brazil. This TV special, hosted by Tom Wolfe, is quite the ride. Highly recommended for anyone with any interest in McLuhan. At this point, I’m going out on a limb and suggesting that nearly everyone should have some interest in McLuhan. I can’t believe that it’s been less than a year since I read him for the first time. So many gaps, so little time. Yet desire still cries, give me some more to read. (Secret handshake there for “Astrophel and Stella” lovers.)
Rock/Soul/Prog was a mixed bag today. Some folks are not [...]

Original post by Gardo

Today’s Washington Post features an unusually fine article from Joel Garreau (registration required) concerning the ways in which cellphones have changed, and continue to transform, our lives as a species on this planet. Twenty-five years of cellphone technology have brought us to the point that Google CEO Eric Schmidt can say, “Eventually there will be more cellphone users than people who read and write. I think if you get that right, then everything else becomes obvious.”
The article is full of insightful quotations and balanced judgment. There are the expected laments for lost privacy, for intrusive conversations in public spaces, but they’re contextualized in a much larger and more thoughtful analysis than I usually see. I’m especially impressed with the way in which Garreau has understood the intimacy of human contact represented and enabled by cellphones.
No educator can afford to overlook or downplay the ways in which cellphones are changing civilization [...]

Original post by Gardo

The Intro. to New Media Studies class today was pretty explosive. I had assigned excerpts in The New Media Reader from McLuhan’s Gutenberg Galaxy and The Medium is the Message. I was up this morning about 5, reading some insightful and tremendously inspiring blog posts from the class. A couple of the posts were especially provocative, hortatory, probing. As it turns out, there was one highly engaged post I couldn’t understand fully. On the way in to school, I puzzled over what had led the student to make what I was fairly certain, but not altogether sure, was a mistaken identification of one of McLuhan’s references. I concluded that McLuhan’s reference to Coleridge must have been the thing the student couldn’t quite pinpoint. As I considered what I thought to be the mistake and a probable cause, it occurred to me that the mistake actually pointed to a deep and [...]

Original post by Gardo

The book arrived from ILL today. (Carla Bailey, Queen of ILL, comes through once again. Please do not hire her away from us.) I ran across the title in a Google Book search on “cognitive resonance.” I’m starting more or less from a dead start here, but from a quick read of the first chapter the book looks quite promising: education, intuition, experience, and reason are the four pillars of a theory of abstraction, learning, and communication author Ben Lieberman builds up from the beginning. Art and modeling are coming up in chapter two. I love the synthesis, the eclecticism, the boldness with which this writer moves through disparate fields to pull together a book that seems to be about software, but at a deeper level promises to be a treatise on human understanding.
More as I move along.  Here in the meantime is the summary printed in the book:
Modeling complex [...]

Original post by Gardo

Interesting two days, in this respect anyway: I did a presentation on Brian Wilson for Elderstudy yesterday, then explored “I Get Around” all the way through “Caroline No” for my Rock/Soul/Progressive class today. From senior citizens (I really don’t like that term much) to 18-19 year-olds. Brian spoke to all of them. This of course reinforces my sense that yearning, vulnerability, and an awestruck sense of the divine origins of beauty are trans-generational in their appeal.
Don’t worry, baby. Everything will turn out all right.
Don’t worry, baby.
The woods echo, and their answer rings.
Happy St. Valentine’s Day, everyone.

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Original post by Gardo

Interesting two days, in this respect anyway: I did a presentation on Brian Wilson for Elderstudy yesterday, then explored “I Get Around” all the way through “Caroline No” for my Rock/Soul/Progressive class today. From senior citizens (I really don’t like that term much) to 18-19 year-olds. Brian spoke to all of them. This of course reinforces my sense that yearning, vulnerability, and an awestruck sense of the divine origins of beauty are trans-generational in their appeal.
Don’t worry, baby. Everything will turn out all right.
Don’t worry, baby.
The woods echo, and their answer rings.
Happy St. Valentine’s Day, everyone.

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addthis_title = \’St.+Valentine+2008\’;
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Original post by Gardo

Rangey stuff today. I hope it cohered. A partial list of what we discussed:
Several books–What the Dormouse Said, The Dream Machine, Dealers of Lightning, Tools for Thought.
The Engelbart Demo–GUI’s, alternate keyboarding devices (the five-key “chord”), display technologies, the various diegetic worlds inhabited by Engelbart during the demo (the text he was working on, the display showing him, the text, and the team supporting him), the mouse as a pointing device, alternate pointing devices (in particular, the light pen), the reception and influence of the demo.
The “Ease of Use” problem (aka, “did you ride your tricycle to work today,” as Engelbart likes to ask). Do we miss our best augmentation opportunities by concentrating on ease of use?
Categories and ontologies: is Engelbart more associative (a la V. Bush), or more hierarchical (a la J. C. R. Licklider)?
Fractals, microcosms/macrocosms, and the tripartite information architecture Engelbart imagines: Specification, Organization, and Content (each stage of [...]

Original post by Gardo

Back in the office today after the ELI 2008 Annual Meeting, I met my first class at 9:30 this morning: Introduction to New Media Studies. Today was our first day on Doug Engelbart. In one moment, two-thirds of the way through the class, the synchronicities became unexpectedly piercing.
A student in the front row marvelled with disbelief at the intensity and complexity of mind Engelbart appears to imagine we should cultivate. The student insisted, with growing energy, that ordinary people couldn’t meet that standard, that it would be unbearably difficult to live in the integrated domain Engelbart eloquently describes. Could Engelbart really be serious in thinking we could and should be that alert, responsive, and focused? I replied that I’d never been in contact with anyone as serious about his vision as Engelbart was and is. I went on to say that Engelbart believed everyone should be striving toward just the [...]

Original post by Gardo

Courtesy of the University of Mary Washington Computer Science Department, I and an SRO crowd of students, faculty, and staff got to hear a fascinating talk today by Dr. Eric Miller (CSAIL, MIT). There’s no questioning the depth, intelligence, or intensity of his commitment to a data web; he made the best and most inclusive case for the semantic web I’ve yet heard. Inclusive, because his vision is not just about normalizing descriptive vocabularies or getting everyone firmly in the RDF camp. As I understand it, his vision is more about taking the data already implicit on the web and making it explicit, reusable, mashup-able. It’s a persuasive vision, one strongly reminiscent of Vannevar Bush’s and Douglas Engelbart’s desire to find a way to get ahead of our own information-generation and make good, timely use of the knowledge we have already discovered, knowledge that often languishes unread and unremarked because [...]

Original post by Gardo