Random bullets of “AAAAARGH!!”

I would like to rejoice that it is Friday. And yet, as the end of the semester draws nigh, the press of Tasks That Cannot Be Deferred Any Longer is sucking a good bit of the Friday-ness out of this Friday.
So, I suppose this post is the cyber-equivalent of an itemized primal scream:

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My dinner with Bora.

I got a chance to have dinner with Bora last night in San Francisco on the eve of his job interview with PLoS ONE. This gave us the opportunity for a free-wheeling discussion about the potential of new technologies to change the ways scientists communicate with each other (and with non-scientists), the ways that conversations (and drawing people into them) aren’t coupled too tightly to the fancy technical thingies (the “aps”) that carry them through cyberspace, the ways that interfaces and functionality can exert subtle influences on the ways people interact with ideas and with each other, and all sorts of other issues pedagogical and blogospheric. There were also a number of gratuitous references to “framing” and “memes”.
PLoS arranged for Bora to stay at The Mosser (in whose lobby we are pictured above). It’s one of those great small hotels that San Francisco has a bunch of, and the lobby feels like something out of a classic movie.
As I hit the “publish” button, Bora will be starting his action-packed day with the PLoS folks — wish him luck!

Any questions for Secretary of the U.S. Department of Education Margaret Spellings?

This Friday, as part of my university’s sesquicentennial celebration, there’s going to be a two hour session on “The Future of Higher Education”. The keynote speaker will be Margaret Spellings, the U.S. Secrtetary of Education. There will also be a “panel discussion with national experts”, after which they will entertain questions from the audience.
So, what questions about the future of higher education would you like me to ask?
In case you’re stuck for ideas, here’s a potential prompt: Spellings’ Commission on the Future of Higher Education has been hailed as a way to bring No Child Left Behind-like reforms to colleges and universities. How does that idea sit with you?
Thanks in advance!
UPDATE: SInce the link to information on the Spellings commission is apparently a little pokey today, here’s a viewpoint piece about the commision. It’s a critical view, but may be useful in illuminating some of what the commission is asking for. Also, here’s a page with links to the extensive coverage of the commission at Inside Higher Ed.

I thought I understood the extent of the bureaucracy here.

I haven’t mentioned it here before, but I’m currently working on a project to launch an online dialogue at my university (using a weblog, of course) to engage different members of the campus community with the question of what they think the college experience here ought to be, and how we can make that happen. The project team has a bunch of great people on it, and we thought we had anticipated all the “stake holders” at the university from whom we ought to seek “buy-in”.
As we were poised to execute the project, we discovered that we had forgotten one:

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Reeling from today’s news.

Today was fully scheduled for me. Prepping for class, participating in a phone interview, teaching, midday meeting with my department chair and a dean to discuss developing an ethics module for an intro class in another department, more teaching, power-photocopying for this week’s Socrates Cafe, then a dash to the car to get the sprogs in time for elder offspring’s soccer practice.
It wasn’t until about 20 minutes into my drive home that I heard the news about the shootings at Virginia Tech.

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Cyberspeech and cybersilence: thoughts on the Kathy Sierra matter.

In case you somehow missed it: tech writer and blogger Kathy Sierra cancelled public appearances after receiving death threats. In addition to the death threats, she called attention to some posts about her that were threatening in tone (though probably falling short of actual threats) and definitely mean on now-defunct sites set up by other A-list tech bloggers. Since blogging about this, SIerra has received more threats. A number of bloggers think Sierra has smeared the people who ran the now-defunct websites by not drawing a clear enough distinction between the death threats (which they did not make) and whatever their involvement might have been with the posts (not comments) on the now-defunct sites. There are about a gazillion posts you could read on this whole firestorm (here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here, to give just a sampling).
I had never heard of Kathy Sierra before this firestorm struck, but for the last few days I’ve been thinking a lot about issues around online interaction and communication. These thoughts are running in lots of different directions, so rather than try to hammer them into a coherent “manifesto”, I’ll just lay them out and let you tell me how they fit together.

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Welcome NYTimes readers! (Plus a few words on my linkage luck.)

If you got here by following the link from Dennis Overbye’s story about the movie Dark Matter, you may want to read the post he quotes about Theodore Streleski and the dangers of extreme power imbalance between graduate students and their advisors. (It’s also possible that this time next year I can post a follow-up about the less extreme but still real power imbalances between the tenured and the untenured.)
And now, let me indulge in a tiny bit of grumbling about linkage:

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