Today was a heck of a day at the MLA. I actually experienced the conference, and the way it was meant to be experienced, I think.

In part, I mean having had a full night’s sleep, which was blissful and amazing, and which I hope to repeat immediately after this post. In part, though, I mean that I attended two great panels, ran into some old friends, met and talked with some new folks, and generally enjoyed the entire thing.

I started early today, at the 8.30 am panel “Everquesting: Digital Learning and the Humanities,” and while I was waiting for it to begin, I immediately ran into Scott and Matt. The papers, by an all-star cast of Anne Balsamo, Cathy Davidson, Anna Everett, and Douglas Thomas, were all quite interesting, though the timing was quite off somehow, and by the time Thomas got up to give his paper, six minutes were left in the session. The result was that Thomas barely even got to launch into his presentation before the entire thing was stopped, and there was no discussion at all. Which was a shame, as several ideas came up that I’d have liked to hear more about.

Anne Balsamo’s paper was a very sci-fi oriented projection of a future higher education scenario deriving from contemporary virtual presence and gaming technologies; part of her point was to unpack the ways that the students of the future will far outpace contemporary faculty (in their fluid uses of network technologies for gathering knowledge), but also the ways in which they still need educating (in critical thinking and creative synthesis; in being convinced that knowledge is not simply out there to be “found,” and is inseparable from the act of thinking). One of the most compelling bits of her talk, for me, was the last item in her closing manifesto for the future education of what she, after Pat Cadigan, called “original synners”: that academics must cease their quest to educate students-as-replicants and instead start thinking about education students-as-mutants. Higher education has for the last two hundred years largely—though by no means exclusively—been focused on self-replication, on a constancy of values in knowledge production, and it simply must think more fluidly about the new technologies through which knowledge is actually produced today, and how future generations are going to need to morph to meet the demands of those technologies.

Cathy Davidson, furthering this point, mentioned her frustrations with the rhetoric of crisis that has seemed to engulf the humanities, as the traditional disciplines have been faced with contemporary technological change, saying that, given the issues that are at stake in our encounters with new technologies, “if we cannot find ways to take on leadership in the digital realm, then we in the humanities deserve our crisis.” Indeed.

At noon, I attended Matt and Kari‘s panel on Material Textualities, which was fascinating, not least for the ways that (as Matt pointed out at the beginning of his talk) the MLA’s reliance on alphbetical organization of panelists resulted in a reverse progression of papers from the digital (Matt) through the image (Kari), and back to early print (Peter Stallybrass), which created some great backward-resonances of a sort that isn’t usual in these settings.

Inbetween these panels, I cruised the book exhibit, which I’ve inevitably found to be the place for the chance encounter with the person I didn’t expect to see. And indeed, I ran into two old pals in quick succession, neither of whom had I planned on seeing, but each of whom was great to catch up with. After the panels, I had a short breather, and then spent some time with a former colleague, before heading off to the blogger meetup.

About which more at a later point. For now, there’s crashing—another full day ahead tomorrow.

It’s pretty much been a non-MLA, due to complete and total physical collapse. When I arrived in Philadelphia, after the shuttle bus, the first plane, the shuttle bus, the second plane, the “air train,” the real train, and the cab, I checked into my hotel room, put my stuff down, checked my email, and got a phone call from a former student who’s here interviewing. I wanted a drink and something to eat before bed, and so went down to meet him in the lobby bar.

At some point during our conversation, I did the math, and figured out that as I’d awoken at 3.30 am in Prague, that meant that I’d gotten up at 9.30 pm the night before, local time-wise. And I was clearly not at my sharpest, because while I had a fantastic time over what turned out to be two drinks with the former student, I somehow forgot to eat, and hadn’t eaten anything since the second plane. But, I figured, I’m so tired now that I don’t even feel like eating.

Not the best decision, I don’t think. I went up to my room, completely crashed, and woke up three hours later, ravenous and unable to go back to sleep. I drank a bunch of water, read a bit, turned the light back out, turned the light back on, read a bit more, made another assay on sleep, and then finally just gave up and sat at the computer, hoping to get some work done.

And, in fact, I did! But I did it the very, very hard way. My intent was to use yesterday morning to record the audio track for a video presentation of one of the talks I’ve given this fall. I’d planned on using ProfCast, which records both your audio and the content and transitions between your slides as you play them. The problem is, however, that I need to see the notes from my slides in order to record the audio, and thus I need either to print out the paper and read from that, or I need to be hooked up to an external monitor so that Keynote will default to the “rehearsal” view on my own screen. And as I am without printer or external monitor, that wasn’t going to work. So I recorded the audio track in Audacity, imported it into iMovie, exported my slides to jpeg, imported them into iMovie, stretched them out to meet the appropriate transitions in the talk, et voilà!

Except. When I compress in iMovie 5, the sync between audio and video slips. The more compression, the more slippage. So a “reasonably sized” (i.e., only ridiculously large 10MB) .mov file plays fine for the first couple of minutes, but then the slides start refusing to change, even as the audio marches ruthlessly on. I’ve exported a “full quality” (i.e., 87 MB) .mp4 file, which is perfect. Now I just have to (a) figure out how to compress it enough to have any hope of a reasonable web distribution for it, or (b) find a way to print my paper and do the stupid thing over again in ProfCast.

In any case, that little morning adventure, pleasant though it was, apparently took every bit of energy I had for the day. I’d room-serviced a huge breakfast, and so thought that despite jet lag and lack of sleep I’d be fine. I met my friend Cyrus for lunch, though, and about halfway through, it suddenly became really, super evident that I was Not Fine. I somewhat hastily excused myself, went back to my room, and spent the next three hours attempting fruitlessly to take a nap. (Can someone explain that to me? How is it that you can get yourself to the point of nervous collapse from exhaustion and then find yourself unable to fall asleep?)

Finally, after a room-serviced hamburger, I took one of my big-gun sleeping pills, and completely crashed. Slept through until 6 am. Which I think is the first full night’s sleep I’ve gotten since leaving California.

And thus ends my first day at the MLA!

Today promises to be more conferency, all the way around. My schedule:

8.30 - 9.45 am:
Everquesting: Digital Learning and the Humanities
Liberty Ballroom Salon C, Philadelphia Marriott.
Presiding: Priscilla B. Wald, Duke University
–Anne Balsamo, University of Southern California
–Cathy N. Davidson, Duke University
–Anna Everett, University of California, Santa Barbara
–Douglas Thomas, University of Southern California

12.00 noon - 1.15 pm:
Textual Materialities
Grand Ballroom Salon I, Philadelphia Marriott.
Presiding: Neil Fraistat, University of Maryland, College Park
–“Save As: Textual Studies and the Challenges of Born-Digital Literature,” Matthew Gary Kirschenbaum, University of Maryland, College Park
–“Picture Criticism: Textual Studies and the Image,” Kari M. Kraus, University of Rochester
–“Textual Studies and the Book,” Peter Bigland Stallybrass, University of Pennsylvania

1.30 pm: lunch with editor and co-editor.

3 pm: coffee with scholar I’m very excited about meeting!

7ish pm: drink with former colleague.

8.45 pm: blogger meetup. Assuming I can stay awake that late.

I’ll hope to see some of you there!

I woke up this morning around 3.30, almost on purpose—my wake-up call was set for 4.30, so I went ahead and got out of bed, rather than spend an hour wondering if I were going to fall asleep and miss the alarm. R. walked me downstairs around 5.15, and I got on the shuttle to the airport. He’s staying on in Prague until the 30th; I, on the other hand, am going to the MLA.
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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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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)

This morning’s first talk, by John Appley and Albert Borroni of Oberlin College, raises a very interesting problem:  as the LMS becomes increasingly popular, its functionality will be increasingly desired by groups and organizations (such as departments, administrative offices, etc.)—but putting content from such groups and organizations into the LMS places that content behind a password.  There’s thus a tension highlighted here between the LMS’s closed structure and the need for certain kinds of college communications—particularly, in their analysis, public relations type information—to be open.  (And thus their talk focuses on ways that information from the LMS might be fed into open websites.)

For my purposes, though, this also highlights another question about openness and the LMS:  there’s certain kinds of student writing and interaction that really benefits from openness as well.  It’s been useful for me, in my teaching, to have my students writing in public spaces, such that they have a wider readership for their thinking than just me, and even than just themselves.  When students’ work can potentially draw responses from other interested readers, they wind up thinking more seriously about the relationship between writing and audience, and about the ways that their thought fits into a wider realm of discourse than just the protected space of the classroom.

On the other hand, it’s necessary for them to be safe as they’re learning, to be free to make certain kinds of mistakes and missteps without fear that every little foible will be instantly discoverable by every future employer’s googlings.  So while I want to use open social software tools to run my classes, I want my students to use screennames within those tools.  I distribute to the class a “super-secret guide to screennames” such that we all know who’s who, and are required to be responsible to one another in our discussions.  In the end, I think this is a pretty good balance between ensuring that the classroom remains a safe space and fully situating it within a wider network of discussion and exploration.

(tags: LMSLAC2006)

Ooh, boy, is this going to be interesting.  I’m arguing in my presentation tomorrow that (in a very small nutshell) the so-called “learning management system” is not about learning at all; it’s content management, sure, but active learning (at least in our touchy-feely small liberal arts college model) requires a kind of interaction that the LMS does not provide.  And I’m going to be very curious to see how this goes over.

The keynote address for the symposium was just delivered by Cyprien Lomas of the University of British Columbia, examining the history, development, and future of the LMS.  A very interesting talk, in many ways, that introduced me to several systems that I wasn’t aware of.  But while he did mention the ways that students of the “net generation” are pressing institutions to provide an increasingly interactive set of tools not just for acquiring information but for authoring as well, he ultimately seemed puzzled by this drive, and troubled by the efflorescence of possibilities.  I’ve seen this same kind of response in our administrative computing folks, whose response to the call for blogging software on campus was “which one? We only want to support one.” One blogging engine, one wiki engine, etc.  What they seem to be missing is the fluidity with which many active users of social software move from one system to another, using different systems for different purposes.

What they see as “a loose assortment of annoying tools,” I can’t help but see as possibility.

(tags: LMSLAC2006)

I’m in Portland for the weekend, attending a NITLE symposium on Learning Management Systems in the Liberal Arts College at Reed.  It promises to be interesting, not least at the moment when I stand up and say “forget the LMS!  It’s no good!”

I’ll be blogging the event as appropriate.  And I’ve got my eye out for Laura, who’s supposed to be around here somewhere…

(tags: LMSLAC2006)