Ruminate

Maybe I’m just unflappable due to being on vacation, or perhaps I’m even more skeptical of institutional support than others, but I think people are wringing their hands way too much over the demise of EduSpaces. Or perhaps I’m just surprised that they haven’t been wringing their hands until now. If you haven’t been following the situation, Brian has an insightful post with lots of links and Gardner has taken notice too…

A couple of thoughts, though:

• Has everyone just been really lucky and never chosen to use a service that has disappeared suddenly and without warning? It’s the way of the web and it’s only going to get worse when the current hype-bubble bursts… but the prescription remains the same: keep control of your source data, be flexible, and teach your students to do the same. Those will remain essential information fluency skills for the foreseeable future. I take advantage of the capability of these applications knowing that one of the prices I pay for that choice is being keenly aware that I have little control over the service (see next point). Can it crash and burn? Absolutely. And it has and will again. But I similarly choose spontaneity in my classroom presentation, risky forms of public participation with technology, etc. over more traditional and “safe” techniques. I don’t expect institutional “stability” and predictability but I likewise don’t have to accept all the strings that come with them. I don’t think we can have it both ways.
• This really has nothing to do with open source… a capable open source platform or service can be institutionalized and abandoned just like a limited, expensive, proprietary application. I know which I would rather have for as long as I can have it. The choice is not about using open source applications or not, it is about choosing between institutionally supported systems and others. In my experience, institutions don’t have a much better track record at keeping systems alive (how much of our time is spent trying to negotiate the ever-changing technological platform for teaching?)– in the end, it is all about fiscal reality, and whether the system in question is one in which the proprietary vendor is being paid or local development staff is being paid makes little or no difference in their likelihood of getting chopped. If anything, open source applications– once embedded and modified– are more likely to stick around, much to the chagrin of the users because at that point most of the utility that made them attractive in the first place has been lost!

View the Video

As I struggle with trying to update a video embedding plugin on a blog it doesn’t hurt to keep in mind what it used to be like, not so long ago. Although I wasn’t into the technical details back then, I remember using a Mac Classic and text-catting with a friend on the other side of the desk. And the TI-99/4A with its awesome application cartridges, the Commodore and Vic 20 churning away to save files on tape that I had typed in from a magazine (peek, poke) so I could play a game. Or the first time I used QEMM and Desqview and could switch between multiple applications– Sidekick and Lotus Symphony, I think… with 16 colors! And all the hours I spent on a VAX terminal, writing papers in LaTeX with TPU and processing them for the one laser printer on campus, a hugely expensive monstrosity guarded carefully by the “nodies” who ran the “computer node” aka lab.

The whole conceptual shift from using applications to “being online” has been so fundamental and overpowering– coloring everything we do– that it’s hard to remember that crazy computing land before time, all of 15 years ago.

[I probably shouldn't post a draft like this without proofing and revision, but I am bone-weary and managed to fat-finger away a dozen hours of work that I have to make up before Friday... so I know I won't come back to it. Caveat emptor.]

Doris Lessing’s Nobel Prize acceptance speech has predictably ruffled some bloggers’ feathers. I posted the offending tidbit to my blog yesterday knowing it was a provocative lead. What surprised me was that so few appear to have looked at the rest of what Lessing said (I posted one important snippet to my Commonplace Book), much of which is spot-on. In fact, I’m not even sure she’s wrong when talking about the Internet and Television.

But let me dispose of one canard first. A number of people have pointed out the “irony” that, were it not for blogs and the Internet, they never would have seen Lessing’s speech. That’s wrong thinking on two levels. Read the rest of this entry »

Doris Lessing is a worthy and fitting winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature. Her acceptance speech makes clear that she is both engaged in extraordinary work and mired in an old conception of writing, creativity, and the web:

What has happened to us is an amazing invention - computers and the internet and TV. It is a revolution. This is not the first revolution the human race has dealt with. The printing revolution, which did not take place in a matter of a few decades, but took much longer, transformed our minds and ways of thinking. A foolhardy lot, we accepted it all, as we always do, never asked: “What is going to happen to us now, with this invention of print?” In the same way, we never thought to ask, “How will our lives, our way of thinking, be changed by the internet, which has seduced a whole generation with its inanities so that even quite reasonable people will confess that, once they are hooked, it is hard to cut free, and they may find a whole day has passed in blogging etc?”

Very recently, anyone even mildly educated would respect learning, education and our great store of literature. Of course we all know that when this happy state was with us, people would pretend to read, would pretend respect for learning. But it is on record that working men and women longed for books, evidenced by the founding of working-men’s libraries, institutes, and the colleges of the 18th and 19th centuries. Reading, books, used to be part of a general education. Older people, talking to young ones, must understand just how much of an education reading was, because the young ones know so much less.

We all know this sad story. But we do not know the end of it. We think of the old adage, “Reading maketh a full man” - reading makes a woman and a man full of information, of history, of all kinds of knowledge.