I’m getting there, I really am, but sometimes you have to go a very long way out of your way to come back a short distance correctly, and life keeps interrupting.  The danger of leaving Twitter open on the back-channel: This from the Laughing Squid: When San Francisco Was the Smut Capital of America.  Given the current state of the the internet, I’m not sure what to make of the fact that there was no such thing as a legal porn flick before 1969.  That is 42 years but it’s the kind o sea change that makes you wonder about the real possibility of the singularity. What really interests me is the not exactly covert suggestion that this was somehow a gay thing; as though a couple of guys in San Francisco got tired of getting busted and figured that the out was to interject “perversion” into the mainstream culture, something like that.  Teh real point was that in 1968 we barely had tits and nobody said fuck (parenthetical note: I make it a general practice not to use phrases like, “the F___ word since the, shall we say, “semiotics” of shared understanding offends me, while today we have 4cahan.



SMUT CAPITAL OF AMERICA Teaser from Ben Leon on Vimeo.

The backchannel phenomena is one of the interesting things that technology makes possible; it’s a catchall phrase for the now shareable conversations that happen during a conference presentation or a lecture; twitter, IRC,cell phones, and texting in all formats come into play. Usually within the academy the backchannel is seen as disruptive, but that maybe because we’re not paying attention. Here’s Danah Boyd with a meditation on that possibility. I’ve been falling behind on my news reader, so thanks to Mike Morrison from the other end of the hall for reminding me to take a look in the old aggregator. Mike commented that he didn’t imagine that the Boyd post would be of interest to most of the folks in the unit; if that’s the case, I’m hoping that it doesn’t remain the case. I think our eventual success will depend on all of us being interested in this sort of thing. This because there’s a loud and lively conversation going on about technology and learning, and we need some local participants.  Here’s a post from Ryan Bretag by way of John Pederson; the core being:

Leaders are never content with their status as a leader, learner, and teacher. As John F. Kennedy said, “leadership and learning are indispensable to each other” and I believe that is a core tenant of anyone identified as a leader: a life-long learner growing deeper and broader intellectually, listening deeply, and leading through inquiry, passion, and community.

BTW, and just so there’s no confusion, the leader I have in mind is you.   The specific you in this case being the folks who work with me. It’s a little odd to have a specific target audience; blogs normally operate under the illusion that they’re talking to everyone on the Internet, in much the same way that books and posts on leadership pretend to be news rather than simply the flavor of the week. Not that there’s anything wrong with the FOTW mind you; it’s just that after a while  it can feel like you’re reading an extended AA aphorism. But then as David Foster Wallace reminds us, the secrets of life are pretty banal .  Benjamin Zander likes to point out that you can lead the orchestra from any position, even if all you’ve got is a kettle drum. He also notices that the only person in the orchestra that doesn’t make noise is the conductor. Anytime you feel a little down and wonder what we’re doing or why, or whether it’s worth it, watch one of the Zander videos; they tend to run a little long, but you’re guaranteed to have a more or less life-changing  moment, or your money back.

Speaking of videos; Ze Frank goes legit as a video commentator with some thoughts on being a progressive. As Peterson points out however, Waves is still the best Ze piece ever:

Of course it would be kind of pointless to have an aggregator without having the Gibson blog in it so you can find things like:

OUR QUOTIDIAN ALEPH
posted 7:56 AM

“Aleph” as in the Borges story: the spot under the basement stairs from which can simultaneously be seen all things ever.

Simultaneously profoundly amazing and definitively boring:

PingWire

Because you can’t step in the same river twice.

On a more serious note, after all you are reading this at work as part of a job assignment, right? You might want to take a look at Enterprise 2.0 & Social Computing I apologize for the 2.0 reference, but hey, we’re wandering around inside my mind, remember?

This has probably gone on long enough, possibly longer than that, so I will leave you with one last link to something that we definitely will need to pay attention to as things develop Wikimedia is about to make wikivideo, or if that’s too serious for you might want to head over to Rock, Paper, Sonehotgun and check out what’s really happening.

Because something is happening here
But you don’t know what it is
Do you, Mister Jones?

I think when most of us started to listen to Bob Dylan we assumed that we were part of some community that shared a certain hipness denied to the rest of society. Maybe so, but it kind of missed the point. The point, if I may be permitted, was that we didn’t know, but we knew that we didn’t know, and were trying to deal with the implication of our ignorance.

One of the unforeseen effect’s of the current information overload is that we’ve lost comfort with not knowing. We tend to be, along with our previous president, “deciders”; after a couple of seconds of examination, we either understand something or we assume that it doesn’t have enough significance to warrant the time and energy to try to figure it out. YouTube is a great example; we’re not really ready to deal with the mystery. Probably the best demonstration of our ignorance can be experienced by trying to get a handle on the Ipower social network. It’s hard to know where to start; the AtheneWins channel began October 11, 2007, it’s currently the 13th most subscribed YouTube channel, and the 23rd most viewed. This is particularly impressive when you consider that most of the competition is record companies and media production giants. Still, the real curiosity is the content; start here: Best Paladin of The World pwning nubs on My Heart Will Go On from Celine Dion (ATHENE #1).  From there it gets really strange, bringing new definition to phrases like tasteless and sexist. How to get a horny bitch (ATHENE #12). In an apparent effort to leave no group un-offended they rapidly move on to Tom Cruise, Scientology, and most of Asia: Hot Girl & Crazy Gamer on Tom Cruise from scientology (ATHENE #19). Before proceeding any further we need to take a brief detour with Marina Orlova 28-year-old philologist who is HotForWords so that we have a good understanding of “irony”. It turns out that the folks at AtheneWins, which has now branched out into the Ipower channel, Tania Uncensored, etc. are actually a group of Belgium political/net activists. This raises questions like , “Do they know what they’re doing; are they serious, and if so when so; are they a positive force for social change, or simply another example of the degeneration of youth and society; why are several thousand people watching them on a daily basis (on any given day one or more of the Ipower productions finds itself in the top 20 most viewed videos on YouTube), and my personal fave, ‘What is identity?’” Perhaps more to the point, it raises the question- do we/can we have any idea what’s happening on YouTube? Wittgenstein ended the Tractatus with position seven: “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.” Good advice; if we could follow it, we just might learn something.

What shall I wear?

My Sexy Countdown Blog

Identity increasingly operates like information; for many of us identity is not just physical. Who you are is a function of who you know, what you know and how effectively you can use that knowledge. You can be Steve Jobs or you can be the Fake Steve Jobs; either will work, you get to choose, but you have to deliver. At today’s count there are 203 Shakespeares registered on MySpace. It’s easy stake a claim but writing the next Hamlet or even Troylus and Cressida may prove a little more challenging. The key phrase is ‘the next’ because ‘identity’ is different than ‘reputation’. Reputation like resume is situated in the past, a history of supposed successes and failures. Identity lives in the now, and increasingly in the future, it is a measure of capacity and comletence, of what are doing and can do.

Creating and maintaining an identity when you become a artist.

Writing Students and Professors Fight to Keep Theses From Being Freely Available Online from The Chronicle of Higher Education

Brad Wheeler In Search of Certitude

A little exploring of Issue #0 led me to this NY Times article which we can file under the "If you thought Second Life was strange try New York City" heading.

Ray Kurzweil has built an amazing section of his KurzweilAI.net site using Personal Brain and it’s and interesting demonstration of form following content.

Paul Graham is another infrequent poster, but again he’s worth paying attention to, even if I only get 10% of what he’s about. What matters here is that Graham’s test for a new programing language is simply ‘shortness’. This resonates with several threads I’ve been trying to tie together: information overload, Twitter, what needs saying, how to say what needs saying so it gets heard, etc. I keep circling around, “Shorter is better.”  I do recognize the inherent irony of short posts to long posts, but….

Take the Arc Challenge

Philosophy: One of the original intents of the site was to provide a channel for online conversation and exchange among the members of the SU community. However, we discovered that the community wasn’t singular, but rather a number of individual communities. Further it appears that the members of these communities are you might say ‘way busy’ with what they are already doing. We’ve been trying to figure out what we could contribute, how we could be useful, and this is what we’ve come up with. If the web is as David Weinberger maintains is simply Small Pieces Loosely Joined the challenge is connecting not creating. In the Web 2.0 world the startup process has been described as, “Throwing stuff at the wall and seeing what sticks;” inter-media reference, “Business plan? We ain’t got no business plan. We don’t need no business plan! I don’t have to show you any stinkin’ business plan!!” Which is to say we have eliminated the notion that we need a plan of any type; think of LA as an evolutionary process.

What You’ll Find Here: News about what’s happening in various corners of the University regarding learning and technology. Items and pointers to discussions from the larger world that seem one way or another related or important. Brief reviews of tools that might be useful, and meditations on what it means to live online as well as off.

Code Theory: Your Current Correspondent doesn’t actually have Geek credentials, the said CC does have some impressive backup. Rather than simply presenting a blog/web-site/online-presence we’re going to run some commentary on how and why we’re doing it. That will involve some tech jargon and maybe even some code samples, by way of example:

The Learning Aesthetics is currently running on a WordPress blog engine. One of the implications of this is that the ‘look’ of the site is controlled by a theme. There are several hundred, that may well be an understatement, free WordPress themes available and many of them are quite beautiful. Currently we are running the Sandbox Theme and in the CC’s opinion most folks won’t find it what they would think of as ‘beautiful’. However, as the Sandbox name implies it’s designed to be played with and that’s what we’ll be doing. We’ll be implementing a theme-switcher plug-in later so you’ll be able to step back in time and see how things developed. Here’s more description from their site:
The Sandbox is a lot of things:
• Beautiful on the inside
• For WordPress 2.0.x and 2.3.x+
• Valid XHTML 1.0 Transitional
• Widgets plugin-friendly
• The basis for your new, GPL-licensed theme
The real feature of the Sandbox is its markup. The use of class-generating functions in the body, post div, and comment/trackback li elements create an exceptionally extensible foundation. As Andy said, Given straightforward markup with plenty of selectors, there isn’t much that can’t be accomplished with CSS and a decent browser.