The notes that follow are entirely my fault, and not at all the fault of the speakers. That said, I’m going to attempt to give a sense of what I take from various sessions at the conference. Various talks are available via webcast at HASTAC.

Jamie Boyle, “Creative Commons, Science Commons, and Open Source”

– digital technologies and relevance to learning in science: we don’t know what we’re doing

– recognition of our inability to predict the future should in fact be a positive

– we’re incredibly bad at estimating the advantages of openness; we overestimate the value of closedness and control

– we’d have made a series of bad choices if we’d been presented with proposals for the current internet or wikipedia, opting for more closed systems

– knowing that we’d have made those mistakes, perhaps we need to operate under the assumption that we don’t know, and that somebody else might have a better idea than we do

– open educational resources sites look like silos right now, separate from one another—CCLearn is devoted to making connections, allowing people to take content from different sources and recombine

– need to move from “this content is mine” to “this content is available for mining”

– makes no sense to spend millions of dollars creating balkanized islands of content

– science commons: creating a realm in which it’s easier to get the content you need

– series of blockages in the scientific process that could be solved by private agreement

– the research cycle: first you have to find the relevant literature (not just finding MORE data, but finding the RIGHT data)—access is not the problem—our methods for generating data have gone digital, but out methods for finding and comprehending data have remained analog

– semantic web—the web in which the computer “understands” the concept rather than searching for the term—admittedly not perfect right now, but will get better (someone will have a better idea)

– what if people apply semantic web concept to science?

– biggest problems: copyright and contracts—journals and publishers want to control what can be done with the material they publish, because they know that the future of publishing this material is not in getting readers, but in processing data

– the research cycle: then you need to get the “stuff”—the raw materials on which scientific experiments are run

– in part because of the credit economy in science—scientists don’t want to share the materials on which their work is based because it might take something away from their own work

– also being held up by legalities—tech transfer agreements are complex and arcane and slow

– uniform biological material transfer agreement can only go so far toward fixing the problem

– what if there were a creative commons-like form that handled all such transfers, in a machine-readable way

– what if you can get reputation for giving things away?

question: what about the unintended consequences of openness?

answer: there’s lots of research that we do want to maintain some kinds of control over, however, in order to cure a disease, scientists must have access to the disease. (cryptography: anyone’s smart enough to come up with a security system that he couldn’t break)

question: credentialing, authenticity, accrediting are important features of closed systems; how to translate to an open system

answer: two modes: one is authoritative map; other is to use a form of metadata, to see usage patterns

In Houston, on my way to North Carolina for HASTAC.  If you’re there, look me up.  And with any luck, there might be actual posting from the scene.

I don’t think I know anyone at Virginia Tech.  But if any of you are there, I hope you and your colleagues and loved ones are okay.

We actually had a psycho-on-campus drill earlier this semester, and though we all went along, no one I know here took it terribly seriously.  That we live in a world that’s always happy to provide us evidence of why we should take such things seriously just breaks my heart.

To say that I’ve been a bad blogger of late is to underestimate the situation pretty seriously.  There have been moments, over the course of the spring, when I’ve wondered if I was losing interest in blogging.  In fact, I think the paucity of writing here is driven by something related, but slightly different:  I’ve lost interest in myself, or in my thoughts, at least.  Nothing seems of sufficient interest, even to me, to bother writing about here.

The problem, as far as I can tell, is that this semester (like most semesters? unlike most semesters? I imagine the former, though somehow it feels worse this year) has been all about the expenditure of energy, with precious little in the way of battery-recharging, whether in terms of downtime or in terms of the kind of work that’s energizing rather than draining, the kind that brings new ideas and a desire to write about them.

In fact, what little time I’ve had to spend on my own work this semester has been spent taking an introduction to computer science class, which has been energizing in its own way, but hasn’t really been productive of stuff to write about.  Because… inheritance!  recursion!  exceptions!  Great stuff to learn, but I clearly don’t know enough about anything yet to have anything worthwhile to say.

But we’re very rapidly moving up on putting this semester to bed, so I’m hoping to get back to some new reading (rather than re-reading) and, even better, some new writing, very soon.

This is just to say that the guys who are tearing down the building that is directly outside my office window—and, conveniently, directly outside the window of the classroom where I’ll be spending two and a half hours this afternoon—are currently jackhammering all over my last nerve.

R.’s been here for the last week, hanging out during his spring break, taking care of some odds and ends.  It was fabulous having him here, as it always is, and somewhat hard taking him to the airport this morning.

But only somewhat.  Because it’s finally begun to sink in:  this is the last time that he has to go home.  Or, rather, the last time that going-home involves traveling in a direction that is away from me.

After an unbelievably long time spent in this long-distance relationship, with the number of years spent living in different states stretching far enough into the double digits to make our survival as a pair seem somewhat miraculous, we’ve finally worked it all out.  R.’s moving here in five weeks.

We’ve spent long enough stretches in the same apartment—about eight months during my last sabbatical; nearly a year during his last one—that there’s no nervousness about this transition.  We know we live together well.  What we’ve got instead is unadulterated excitement, knowing that we can finally do some of the things together that we’ve been putting off.  Some number of those things are material; periodically, over the last week, one of us has turned to the other with this somewhat starry, somewhat craven look, and said, “Two incomes.  One household.  No flying.” And both of us sit back and imagine the things we can do, the places we can go.

But the most important part for me has been realizing that, at last, I’m going to have a life in this town that is completely separate from my job.  Something that makes it worth hurrying to finish things at the office so that I can go home.  Someone who takes priority, and who might provide me with good reason to say no to things a bit more often.

Five weeks left, to finish up this semester and get ready for what feels, at the moment, like a whole new life.