Archive Fever: Writing and thinking with oceans, memory, and attention.

Tom Cruise...critical composition pedagogue!

I'd be interested to see an outline of proposed social science inquiry based on this chicken scratch...non-industrially farmed, of course.

A pretty spectacular phenomenon... The Aurora from Terje Sorgjerd on Vimeo .

So, following up on NCSU's Ag Week momentum...is there "awareness" through juxtaposition? How so? Two videos below might edify any takers on this question. The first is from "Portlandia" on IFC and the other is a talk by NCSU's own Tom Regan some years ago.

Any thoughts here? 10 Things You Can Do To Change Our Food System . Also, some further edification vis-a-vis the Food Inc. trailer.

What can we learn from First Nations peoples about sustainability? I have to believe that there are important practices and epistemologies that can be learned and honored from peoples and cultures who have a proven environmental consciousness. For instance, if we read Jimmie Durham or even Chief Seattle's purported speech there must surely be some takeaway for those of us looking to build a 21st century environmental consciousness. I recently listened to Jay Walljasper discuss his new book "Field Guide to the Commons" and I am curious about what a synthesis of Durham and/or Seattle would look like when applied to some of the suppositions Walljasper introduces.

What sort of ethical or moral commitment does a government have to the environment? Does it matter if it's the federal, state, or local government? This story from Treehugger about the GOP's disdain for the EPA speaks to a certain contingent's notions about these concerns. Of course, I read the Treehugger account after a class discussion on public transportation, one that used Portland's TriMe t as a jumping off point. Pretty cool TriMet video below.

So, I wonder about the meanings that are made, symbolically and spiritually, in our everyday "environments". I especially wonder about what epistemologies have been levied upon us due to technology fetishism and detachment from our natural surroundings in favor of consumerist built surroundings (think detachment from and abstraction of nature here). It's for these reasons that I like the narrative of the spirit bear. Do we have these narratives today, or does our technology-driven industrialized scam only allow for consumerist fantasies articulated in the hyperreal ?

On the heels of the Derrick Jensen post, I wonder how many individuals can immediately identify where their drinking water comes from. That is, where is your watershed? How would you find this out? Google it? Try a search and see how "easy" that is. Can you get this information from your library or librarian? I'd argue that this is critical (information) literacy that we are missing . What research or practical questions are raised here? What, if any, academic disciplines offer a useful lens to examine this lack of information and broader environmental problems? After you've tried this little exercise you may want to check out any number of resources, and even post what you find here. I've got a couple below. The Global Water Policy Project and "Water: Adapting to a New Normal" Adopt a Watershed web site

Wow...Derrick Jensen continues to inspire and to call people on their proverbial shit. If you care about sustainability and consider life to be a good thing worth continuing, you should watch or listen.

And it is this other place that we can find ourselves retreating. Bathed in copper light we hold this position in haphazard happiness and makeshift security. Kind of like satisfaction from perfectly sweetened tea made yourself... pristine moments of solace if only for minutes.

Cleaning out my Inbox and rediscovering this "cartoon" depicting ever so accurately and appropriately Derrida and graduate school agenda absurdity...f-ing funny.

The music probably isn't as sing-songy good but the fans are "better", certainly less frat-tastic.

Ning announced that it will collaborate with Pearson "to develop a program that will help educators keep their Ning Networks running for free". The deal is apparently that "Pearson will sponsor Ning Mini plans for free for all K-12 and Higher Education networks in North America". Librarians and others involved in information literacy work might want to find a way to leverage this, especially in times of budget crunch and in efforts to erase the boundaries between social and academic learning spaces. Of course, any effort to detourn, or use said technologies in creative ways to radicalize curriculum, would be cool too.

I ran across this great essay, "What is Cyberpunk?" , today by Rudy Rucker . Its title pretty much sums it up...good stuff. Here's an excerpt that struck me. The real charm of punk is that stupid hippies dislike it as much as do stupid rednecks. “What’s the matter with them? What do they want?” Anyone who was ever a hippie for the right reasons — a hatred of conformity and a desire to break through to higher realities — is likely to appreciate and enjoy the punks. But a lot of basically conventional people slid through the ’70s thinking of themselves as avant - garde , when in fact they were brain-dead. What’s good about punk is that it makes all of us question our comfortable assumptions and attitudes. Wait . . . look at that last sentence, and you can see I’m forty. How complacently I slip the “us” in there — trying to coopt the revolution. How Life magazine of me, how plastic, how bullshit. What’s good about punk is that it’s fast and dense. It has a lot of informat...

This is an interesting development with Elsevier, often the bane of libraries' budget decisions. I wonder what impact this will have on my project at NCSU where I will focus on development of Graduate Student and Faculty Spaces and Services in the Research Library . Verbiage-wise, this is a perfect match with what a research and graduate commons should do, but historically Elsevier has been the imperfect match for many libraries. Press Release Blurb (lifted from TechCrunch) Elsevier, a juggernaut of a global publisher of scientific, technical, and medical information products and services, announced today the acquisition of assets from Collexis, a developer of semantic technology and knowledge discovery software. According to Elsevier, the combination of Collexis’ semantic technology and its own content will provide institutions and researchers new ways to collaborate, showcase accomplishments and improve grant related workflow efficiencies.

Still figuring on this one, but I guess this does mean something paradigmatic...can't be just one tech company growing larger than another tech company. I do think this is a milestone that signifies a dramatic change of computing: Windows is in decline, and technologies like the iPad and iPhone, Android and Google Search, and Cloud Computing are on the way up.

I have been meaning to post this. Lee Dirks, Director of Microsoft's Education & Scholarly Communication External Research Division, gave an incisive talk a couple of months ago at the OCLC/Frederick G. Kilgour Lecture in Information and Library Science. Dirks provided a pretty solid thinking through of the major paradigms we've got upon us in these times of big (and even chaotic) data. Technically and epistemologically his talk was pretty tight. The video and the presentations (more than one) are available from the UNC SILS website: http://sils.unc.edu/news/releases/2010/04_dirks.htm

The 21st Century Learner Re-Imagining Learning in the 21st Century There's also a pretty fantastic MacArthur page with findings and videos located here: Creating a 21st Century Library

I am in the midst of revising an article that chronicles the intellectual history of "reform" in educational settings. Consequently, all sorts of half-baked suppositions swirl regularly in my head. However, I think I'm on to something here. Seeing as how "reform" and "innovation" are potentially different sides of the same coin I am going to make a seemingly bold claim. The intellectual prototype for the iPhone (and iPad) was the Speak & Spell . Now, you probably are re-reading the previous line that includes the phrase "half-baked", but hear me out. I don't mean to say that the technologies of Texas Instruments' Speak & Spell and Apple's iPhone/iPad are in any way related or intertwined. But, I do mean to claim that the the social and intellectual conceptualization that enables us to view, understand, and revere the iPhone/iPad---the intellectual history if you will---germanated within the historical era of the Speak ...