squishycow!
Originally uploaded by KF.

Some time back, I emailed the Accordion Guy, asking to be added to his list of folks who wanted a squishy cow of their very own.  Joey assured me I’d be on the list, and then sometime later let everyone know that Tucows had run out of cows (there were, after all only two), and so we were all on the squishy cow waiting list.

Yesterday, there came a package.  And in the package, my very own squishy cow.

squishycow v. batty
Originally uploaded by KF.

And just in time, too; I really needed to stage the cow/bat showdown, just in time for Halloween.

The person who happened upon The Anxiety of Obsolescence by googling how long to bleed to death lacerated liver has me quite worried.

What I know about music honestly (as George once said here) would not fill the thimble of a small-fingered seamstress.  But this is an astonishingly cool visualization, which makes clear something about the relationship of music and math that I’ve always known was there, but never really got.  And which makes me wish I knew more.  (Hat tip: Ezster.)

Notes from my session at Flow, below the fold. I’ll be cross-posting these at making MediaCommons shortly.

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More notes from a very interesting session of Flow.

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I’m posting some of my notes from yesterday’s sessions here. These notes should be taken primarily as my impressions of the conversations that took place; any misimpressions created by these notes are solely the fault of yours truly.

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Greetings from Austin, and the Flow conference.  Things here have been fabulous so far—the conference organizers have developed a great new open format, in which brief papers were posted online, roundtable participants are presenting brief statements, and then the conversation runs from there—and it’s been real conversation, actual discussion, respectful and engaged contention with the ideas in play.

It’s absolutely appropriate, then, that we’re releasing making MediaCommons today.  making MediaCommons is intended to be a site-in-progress, a meta-site, of sorts, in which my colleague Avi Santo (and the other editorial folks whom we’ll be bringing on board in the coming days can plan in public, building the network around what the future users of MediaCommons want.

Please stop by, register for the site, comment on our features, and propose projects for development.

Running to the next panel now.  More soon.

Happily, two other things have happened in the last couple of days that have begun to turn my mood around a bit, diminishing the stress somewhat and making it all seem, if not exactly bearable, at least worthwhile.  One was meeting up with a colleague last night for some food and wine and a general unloading of aggravation over the course that this semester has taken.  And the other was meeting Aunt B.

She’s in L.A. this week on business, and generously drove out here to meet up with me (among other folks, of course).  And we had a fabulous chat over dinner, as she’s already mentioned.  I’ve been reading and corresponding with her for a while now, and so I expected her to be great, but I wasn’t quite prepared for how amazing I’d find her, how wide-ranging her interests are, how much she cares about intellectual communication, and how generally fabulous I’d find her to be.  We spent a significant percentage of the time talking about blogging, a topic which is of course taking up an increasing share of my brainspace, and as we were going our separate ways after dinner, we both mentioned how astonishing the experience of in-person meetings with bloggers you like can be.  While all bloggers construct personas in their writing, personas that are never equivalent to the person of the writer, by and large bloggers with awesome personas have turned out to be awesome in person as well.  Back before I met George, what now seems like a million years ago, I was terrified of what in-person meetings with folks I knew from life online would be like.  And with good reason:  at least a couple of the charming folks that I knew from my heavier listserv days turned out to be, shall we say, rather unpleasant in real life.  The email format somehow produced a radical dislocation of personality, or perhaps it simply allowed for the masking of personality.

But bloggers—generally speaking, bloggers seem to be good folks, but beyond that, blogging’s mode of discourse, its reliance on a kind of ongoing development of a narrative of self, seems to allow, if not require, some aspects of an actual personality to come through.  The blog is of course always a performance of self, and never that self in any direct sense.  But the performance in this form gives me the impression, after having met a number of folks in person whom I knew first from the blogosphere (n=something greater than 10), that the blog permits, where it is desired, some glimpses into an “authentic” identity, which other modes of online discourse have often managed to mask.

In sum:  Aunt B. = awesome.  And blogs = completely obsessing me, right now.

I’m reeling.  Absolutely astonished.  My worldview has been shaken to its core.

I wanted to write about this over the weekend, but held off, afraid that the release of the first part of this story onto the internets might result in a round-the-clock patrol being stationed outside my condo, just waiting for me to leave.  I mean, it’s not like the Claremont PD is too busy to stake out scofflaws such as myself.  In any case, I’m glad I waited until the resolution to post, because I never would have expected the story to turn out this way.

So Friday, as I’m jetting off to Portland, I had a pretty harried arrival at the airport.  The long-term parking lot was full, so I had to speed around to the daily lot to park, and then I had to check in at an unfamiliar kiosk, which wasn’t that big a deal, but I just felt all stressed and all.  And so by the time I got into the first security line, the one downstairs in front of the escalator, where they check boarding passes and IDs, I was already a little keyed up.

So when the small south Asian lady said “your driver’s license is expired,” I immediately argued back.  “No it isn’t,” I insisted.  So she showed me the date:  08-23-06, not 08-23-08, as I’d thought.  I received no renewal notice from the DMV.  I’ve been driving with an expired license for two months.  And, in fact, I’ve flown on that expired license at least once.  I don’t have my passport with me, and I don’t have my social security card.  So I had to go back to the ticket counter, get approved by the desk agent, and submit to a very thorough secondary screening.  (Which, as a slight digression, involved my bags being thoroughly unpacked and checked and swiped for bomb dust.  And—as if things weren’t already going well enough—the first swipe of the interior lining of my suitcase set off the alarm on the bomb dust machine.  I kid you not.  It was, however, a false positive, and so after some steely glares and even more thorough examination, I was allowed to go on.)

On the way home, in Portland, I fessed up to my expired driver’s license at the ticket counter, and the agent there set me up for the secondary screening again, which was, if anything, even more thorough than that in Ontario.  But the most astonishing part was its efficiency.  I was traveling with a colleague from ITS, and when I presented my “SSSS” boarding pass to the checker, she directed me into lane eight for my special screening.  I had my very own team of two TSA agents, who put me through a puffer, which I’d never experienced before, and so I felt momentarily like I’d walked into a science fiction movie.  (Of course, recent reports suggest that the puffer isn’t all that reliable, but it sure felt convincing.) After the puffer, the regular x-ray and metal detector, and after that, the swipings for bomb dust.  Every single article in both my suitcase and my pink bag was swiped and checked (and this time everything came up clean).  And as one of the two members of the TSA team finished with an article—shoes, laptop, laptop case, pink bag, suitcase—they handed it to me so that I could put myself back together.

The most amazing part is that I was done, redressed, repacked, and waiting for my colleague when she finished with the regular security process.

In any case, I’m flying out again on Thursday, headed to Austin for Flow, and would rather not go through such checks again, so this morning I tucked my passport into my bag, just in case.  But I also had to take care of the driving part of the driver’s license, and after a phone call to the DMV yesterday, it became clear that the only way that I could get it taken care of was to actually go to the DMV.  And without an appointment, at that; the only available appointments were during my classes.  So I gritted my teeth and went out there this morning, first thing, right after they opened.  I brought a magazine, just in case.

And I never even got a chance to pull the magazine out of my bag.  I was literally—not exaggerating in the least—in and out, including checking in, filling out the form, waiting for a window, and getting the whole vision-check-thumb-print-picture-shebang taken care of, in ten minutes.

Ten minutes.

My driver’s license will arrive in the mail sometime in the next 60 days; in the meantime I have my old license, a printout that represents my renewed license, and a slightly bewildered new respect for the ways that large-scale bureaucracies really are learning some lessons about customer service.

Yesterday’s presentations were overall quite provocative, and have been wonderfully blogged by Bryan, James, and Laura. There’s been a tension throughout, however, between the forces of standardization and the forces of innovation, and somebody (and I’m sorry I can’t remember who) finally hit the issue dead center by asking whether we’ve gotten in trouble because of our uses of terms like “learning management.” Is learning something we really want to succumb to management? Or is that desire for control over the environment in which learning takes place finally stifling?

Anybody who heard my presentation yesterday (which I’ll post shortly) or who’s seen any of my classes knows perfectly well which side of this issue I come down on. Without the ability to innovate, to test new possibilities, to try something risky that simply may not work, I don’t know that I could teach, or that any real learning could take place in my classes. For me, the values that Bryan identified yesterday as embodied in the amalgamation of stuff described as “web 2.0” are far more exciting and conducive to the open exchange that teaching and learning require, than are the values of organization, systematization, and enclosure that are promoted by current implementations of the LMS.

I’m walking away from this symposium hoping that the LMS will develop in a more open fashion. It’s eminently possible, after all; the Segue project at Middlebury, which Alex Chapin discussed yesterday, presents a wide range of tools for faculty and student use, with a finely granular permissions system that defaults toward openness but allows for protection of the kinds of materials that ought to be protected. I get nervous about the idea of having one overarching system that serves all network purposes, but if we had a system that were sufficiently complex and robust, it would go a long way toward making my uses of the LMS feel less managed, and more experimental.

(tags: LMSLAC2006)