d2_memex

Captain 11, Myst, and Sidi ROM

In which the about-to-retire college professor imagines a new round of impresario work with students, teachers, and education techies.

Friends, thanks to Garland Green, the colleague at Rabat American School with whom I collaborated on an Al-Musharaka-sponsored cross-cultural teaching exercise, I think I was able to articulate the fantasy behind the "Sidi ROM" persona I developed in Rabat in October of 2004 and which I hope to re-enervate over the next couple of months.  Open the Stetsonvile.com podcast page, and listen to the last 15 minutes of "D2Skype2," starting at 21 minutes 20 seconds, in which I recall my own first experiences with television in the 1950s, nod at the audio technologies available in the late 60s when I was in graduate school, and spin a story about Myst, magic books, and some of the possibilities for 21st-century teaching.

I imagine pointing the folks cited or alluded to in this podcast to it, and drawing them into a discussion about how we might aggregate like-minded souls and proceed.

• An "Ages Beyond Myst"-like production facility (perhaps implemented on Second Life, since Uru's not online),
• a podcast site where the potential creators and clients ofthese technologies discuss their experiences,
• or, for now, just a well-RSSednet of blog discussions we can all use to illustrate the concepts?

The examined life, the memex, the Google desktop

I've showed my blog writing class Google Desktop, and encouraged them to try it out. I've been waiting for a tool this good. How about you, reader?

Think it's time to reflect on your personal use of your personal computing system? Install the Google desktop, run a few searches infomed by your own sense of the themes, ideas, and images that preoccupy your hours at the keyboard, compare these with Googling the open Web for similar themes, ideas, and images, and comment on your findings either here or at home in your own blog.

How does this tool change things now?

How does it fit into Vannevar Bush's (1945) idea of a "memex"?

How will our near and far future be changed by the ubiquivailabilty of these tools?

Here's one of many recent reviews, from the O'Reilly Network.

Macroinformation

I found my way from the Google: doug davis haverford link in my epigram to my 1/10/01 contribution to pk's macroinformation project. What a nice surprise.

I think I’ve reached the Second Level re “getting” what you’re up to. The richness and range of what you have sent me this past couple of weeks was, I admit, a bit overwhelming. Once I had a chance to read the whole sequence of files, however, with an open Web connection and a quiet house in which to think, I was caught. I got to "String Theory," and found myself off in search of explanations (e.g., http://www.superstringtheory.com/basic4.html) for the physics-impaired (did I mention that I started my post-prairie-hometown education as a physics major at the University of Minnesota's Institute of Technology? I didn’t like finding math and science that hard to understand) I re-reached "salad days" and realized that I didn't know the source of this familiar phrase; and then I could have spent the rest of the evening thinking about the aging Cleopatra's apposition of her new love for Anthony against the early one for Caesar. Jesus Christ, what a juxtaposition!
...
Before I get to the details, I want to try to describe the general feeling I have after an hour or so into pk-space. I have been bugging students and colleagues for six years now about Justin Hall (www.links.net), the Swarthmore college student/graduate who opened up for me the prospect of a life lived and documented hypertextuality on the Web. I have wondered from the start what a grown-up version of Justin might look like, and I have imagined my own obsessive involvement with the Web as one answer to that question (I also fancy myself the creator of the Web pages that Sigmund Freud might have produced, had a browser been as available to him as the cocaine brush in the late 1890s). Now I think that, if I ever get my Internet book written, the Justin chapter should be a Justin-PK chapter. It is abundantly clear, once one takes the time to both read and "hear" a reasonable sample of the intellectual riches available in your Web set, that one is in the company of a powerful, original, impassioned mind.
...
[Y]ou expect a lot of your reader. Your own breadth of reading and thinking, and your readiness to find links between fields and forms of argument not typically joined tells a reader that this discourse is not for the faint of heart. And, frankly, very few academics in my experience will spend the time to fully engage another's argument if it is complex, lengthy, or otherwise demanding. We all have drawers full of documents we agreed to read and to which we do not get. I suppose this is one of the nasty little secrets of academe: that its tenured members, selected for their ability to read and write and supposedly to delight in complex ideas, give evidence most of the time of enjoying neither the reading nor the writing. There is, of course, a more particular reason why your work has not evoked an adequate response from many of those whom you have offered it: your illustrative examples in the form of microessays are both conceptually demanding and so varied as to quickly overwhelm the particular expertise (and interests?) of any particular reader. I found that I needed to come back repeatedly to parts of MacroInformation.org and Knatz.com and to allow myself to wander back through a space in which some of the links had been previously briefly viewed while many others were new. As the hours I have devoted to this have accumulated, my fascination has increased. I loved the excerpt from "The Model" that you offered, I was awed by the ambition and prescience of what you had attempted with FLEX back before the rest of us know there was going to be an Internet, and I was repeatedly persuaded that what had at first struck me as forced or artificial analogies among the examples were in fact making a deeper point. That feeling has given me real enthusiasm for your project, and a real hope that I and others can help it along, even as I appreciate how hard it will be to distill it into a linear argument for publication. Not that that isn't feasible, and important. I think it would be excellent to have a piece appear in Entropy, and I would be delighted to write a recommendation to that effect with some detail about the particular draft you want them to publish. My real excitement, though, is with what MacroInformation.org could become as it draws more contributors. There are several ways this project engages important questions in psycholinguistics, and developmental psychology. There are marvelous additional anthropological examples to be offered, in the spirit of Bateson. There are -- though I'm out of my depth here -- doubtless important and illuminating examples from mathematics and physics which will help to explicate the underlying structure.

It has proved hard to sustain the momentum of these web encounters with other minds. Will the new tools, the ubiquitous access, the great numbers now blogging, make the difference? Or must we re-learn to read as well as to write in the new way?

MetaCortex: MetaVRX

Who would not be fascinated by MC's claims for the new device and its software?

Providing sensory input to four of the five senses, the MetaVRX system will let players see in stereo 3-D vision, hear in simulated surround stereo, feel objects when they’re held or impact their bodies, sense temperature changes, and even smell their simulated surroundings. “Players have yet to realize how important olfactory feedback is in the gaming world, because they take it for granted in the real world,” Walsh continued. “Imagine the adrenaline rush as, while you’re exploring an alien world, you realize that you are smelling the sour musky odor of an invisible grungbeast. That smell could give you those precious extra seconds that may mean the difference between life and death, or at least having to start a level over.”

Tuesday Google had nothing on metavrx, today that's changed.

The Five Year Plan

CIO is discussing the (not-so) long range plan, in preparation for a discussion with our bosses, and we've thought of developing a set of images of a day in the life of a faculty member or student. Here's my early-morning effort to think a couple of years down the road.

The prof

• rises to a first cup of coffee and the morning papers on the bedside tablet PC, then heads downstairs to her study. Her blog shows eight revised files from the seminar students and she dictates a short reaction to each. A couple of the student postings to the class space need Web resources added, and she does one of these for each student, storing a collection of screen shots and commenting as she works. She reflects that they’re getting good at thinking hypertexually, and they continue to surprise her with the trains of association spinning out fromarc a reading and class discussion to a favorite film, a tentative political stance, a recent discussion on another class’s blog.
• The morning mail has a short video edited from last Friday’s senior seminar by the department assistant (one of the junior majors), and this she pronounces ready for the students' review and discussion  as she opens access on the departmental blog.  There is a clever parody of the President's discursive style from her grad school friend, and she drops this to the "humor" panel on her blog.  The revised agenda for the workshop next week she decides can wait until the evening, but as she drops it onto the "professional, pending" panel she includes a note to be sure the interactive display will work at wi-fi speeds in the lounge area of the conference building, where she hopes to discuss her panel with colleagues after the plenary session.  Since the next message is the Provost's second reminder, she dictates a short paragraph on how the new coffee bar in the art gallery has enhanced interdisciplinary discourse, then
• settles into preparing for her afternoon class.  The draft survey from last Thursday's lab session has collected 200 and some responses from across the campus, and she checks to make sure the macros are in place for today's demo on aggregating data, producing charts, and representing the findings statistically.  There are several additions to the shared links page for the course, and a particularly ingenious idea for the main study that evokes an e-mail pat on the back for the student (with links to a couple of journal articles relating to the hypothesis in question). One of the readings for today's class is a classic paper on the integration of "hard" and "soft" methodologies, and she re-reads the difficult section explaining the formulas and makes three minor changes in her annotations to the students' file copy of the reading.  She will remind them that each mention of this reading in the class blog or individual work should include a link to the original document with its archived comments by students and herself and its dynamic links to search agents pointed at scholarly papers non-trivially referencing this one and to the wikipedia entry on the author.
• She starts a working lunch in a corner chair at the coffee bar, but she is joined by her colleague in the reading group (the only one of the 17 other members she ever sees in person), and they chat for a few minutes about Richard Powers’ The Gold Bug Variations, agreeing that the AV annotations offering Bach's score and Gould's early performance has been helpful, especially given the richness of the links to Hofstadter's work. They really must get the three life sciences people in the group to lead them through the genomics connotations of the novel.
• The afternoon's class goes well.  The students are all familiar with the main lines of argument in the reading, and several of them have been in animated discussion on the blog intermittently during the night.  She lets them continue this discussion, reflecting that these face-to-face discussions (without a computer in sight) are still where some of the best ideas develop.
• She drops by the technology center on her way home for a chat with the colleague who is planning the comparative literature conference in the spring.  Since this will involve both simultaneous translation and fully hypertextual annotation across four languages it's important to be sure that the support people at the participating institutions have all the software tools needed, and that each participant has been offered a full range of training and practice resources and a blog in which to comment on them.
• She treats herself to a slow supper with an archived "Prairie Home Companion" playing on the kitchen speakers, spends half an hour with personal e-mail and another half responding to student entries in the blog, then catches up with the last two episodes of "The Mezzo-Sopranos," the crime drama to which she is unaccountably addicted.  She sets a few reminders for tomorrow morning's calendar, dozes reading another chapter of Powers on the tablet, and falls asleep with the Goldberg playing softly.

The student

• rises to a chirp from the coffee maker and scans the late-night and early-morning away messages on the various chat windows still open on the wall monitor.  He echoes this to his tablet, chuckles as he reads the messages, and settles for a minute with his own "Good morning, Haverford!" chatbot, adding a witty comment on last night's plenary and a mock-soulful prediction that "The Code shall pass."  He drags the (as yet unread) readings for his various classes from his blog's to-do panel to his PDA, pauses to record a witty wake-up message for his roommate, and heads off to the D.C., where he is still able to get breakfast and to find a deserted corner in which he can start reading this afternoon's assignment. He's inferred from their away message that __ will show up before he has to head to the library, and sure enough, they have time for a few words about last weekend.
• He spends an hour in the library, finding two books relevant to the topic he proposes to discuss with the prof as a term project and scanning several passages to which he wants to draw the class blog's attention.  His tablet feeds him a prioritized list of resources on his project topic, and he passes this on to his semantic indexing agent for retrieval this weekend.  He realizes he's unclear about incorporating classmates' RSS feeds into his indexer again, and he gets a librarian to walk him though the next several steps, as he logs the relevant URLs to his PDA. He really should set Saturday afternoon aside to think through the relationship between Freud's dream theory and “Mulholland Drive,” the film on which he is to lead next week's discussion in the Trico film club blog.  Since he'll be home, maybe he could suggest that he and __ could watch it at the same time on their laptops, with an open chat window.
• Back at the room, he discovers several surprises left by his roommate:

o a pop-up window springing from his away message, in which his roommate has combined a bit of patter from the original Robin Williams film with “Apocalypse Now”'s attacking helicopters.  (Maybe it was a mistake to agree to let each other hack their chat windows, so that group over at HCA never knows with whom they're speaking.)
o A screen shot of the new high-level Druid character the roommate's been playing on the MMORPG, with an easy-to-figure-out clue about where he'll be hiding in Fangorn forest later this evening.  There should be time to spend half an hour getting his Marrakesh-market trickster primed to rap with the Druid on the little stage in the side room at the "Entwash," if only those so-called "posthumans" haven't taken over the whole bar…
o An actual yellow post-it note stuck to his tablet's charger, saying that __ had stopped by on the way to class and suggested he come over after dinner to talk about the weekend. 

• He closes or suspends most of the windows on his PC, selects some classic rock from his media player (to get him in touch with his prof's retro perspective on things), and settles down to blog.