Author: AKMA

Michael Jensen gave a mind-blowing talk at Association of Aermican Univesity Presses conference; although I don’t think I was ever far-sighted enough to frame my own arguments in terms of global ecological catastrophe, his address captures and amplifies the urgency I try to stir up when it comes to reconfiguring the publishing industry. Please, world, listen to him! (Hat tip to Alex Halavais for the link.)

So, first question: I’ve had an iPhone for a year and a half, and am well-pleased with it. But I can’t simply hop over to Glasgow and keep using it, due to the onerous restrictions and back-breaking roaming charges that the telcos impose.
 
I know I can go to AT&T and ask that they cancel the remainder of my contract with htem, so long as I can prove that I’m actually moving out of AT&T’s empire. The quetsion is, What then do I do with the iPhone itself, and what do I do about mobile communications in Glasgow?
 
Option one might be to carry the iPhone around as an overequipped iPod Touch, useful in wifi-equipped locations (such as the University campus) but otherwise ust good for music, camera, and games. I’d then find a cheap mobile solution in the U.K. for phone and for texting with Margaret.
 
Option two would be to hand down the iPhone to someone else in the family, and start fresh in Glasgow. Although I’m an Apple enthusiast, I’m not opposed to experimenting with an Android phone, if there’s a plausible (and affordable) candidate.
 
I could also try to sell the iPhone, for that matter.
 
Option three would be just to start up a new iPhone contract with O2, using the same unit. Would I be able to swap SIMs in and out, so that I could use it with AT&T on a per-use basis here, and with O2 under contract there?
 
Option four is the one that I haven’t even thought up yet, but my savvy Net friends know right away.
 
I’m sure that someone out there has a better handle on this than I. We need to keep this solution affordable, because we have weighty expenses coming up; but Margaret and I also need to be able to keep in touch, and we’ve gotten accustomed to texting on our current plan. And mobile web use has become part of my daily life (I’d be embarrassed to admit this, except that it constitutes part of my vocation as a theo-technologian, so I can abashedly rationalize it.) But the experience of moving overseas underscores the absurdity of a telecommunications system where we pay so much to uphold barriers to useability.

Golly, I’ve been deeply touched by the out-pouring of comments here and on Facebook. We were already looking forward to Glasgow, but by sharing your enthusiasm and your joy, y’all have raised the pitch of our anticipation to an entirely new register.
 
Unfortunately, my flat for the first year (at least) will be small — tiny, by U.S. standards, especially for someone as far along as I — but we’ll see if we can work up to a space with adequate guest room. And even in my tiny flat for this year, there‘s a sofa-bed.
 
Much to do, now, and a whole mountain of questions that I’ll begin asking in separate threads. Again, though, my heart thrills at the awareness that y’all are with us in this adventure, and I’m all the more thankful that the internet affords us an easy way to keep in touch.

This morning, I received word that the Head of Department had requested that a contract be drawn up in my name. While it’s conceivable that something might go awry at this point, it all seems secure enough for me to tell my visitors that beginning August 1, I will join the faculty of the University of Glasgow’s Department of Theology and Religious Studies.
 
My biblical studies colleagues will be Yvonne Sherwood, Sarah Nicholson, and Ward Blanton; they’ve been marvelously encouraging and excited about my joining them, and it will be a royal treat to join forces with them. I gather that there’s some curricular revision in the offing, which may afford a chance for us to tailor the biblical courses to an integrated, harmonious whole. Plus, there’ll be doctoral students and eager undergrads along with the ministry students I’ve grown accustomed to teaching. The University was founded in 1451 by a papal bull — now, that’s historic!
 
Glasgow is a terrific city (based on my six days’ acquaintance with it), and there’s much to be said for living in the U.K. I’ll enjoy the chance to interact more richly with my colleagues in the U.K. and Europe, plus I’ll be living in my ancestral homeland, and the home terrain of Gary Turner and Euan Semple, perhaps getting acquainted in the physical dimensions with the tech community Over There. Maybe Will Crawley or David Efird will have a reason to visit.
 
For the coming year, I’ll have to leave Margaret and my family behind. That will be hard, especially after having had such an intensely lovely time with them all at Si’s wedding, but we’ll see what we can afford by way of visiting back and forth. After this year, we plan for Margaret to come live in Glasgow while we see what we can find for work for her.
 
It’s intensely exciting for what’s to come, and poignantly sad for what I’m leaving behind. The moving/storing/releasing process strikes my great weakness, with really very little time in which to arrange all these matters. Luckily, I have a flat already arranged; it’s furnished, and within walking distance of the university. And people are sending me the names of relations and friends in Glasgow; if I were to see them all, my social calendar would be full for weeks.
 
A great many people have been praying and hoping and rooting and encouraging and reaching out over the past year and a half; I have been upheld and sustained by your concern, and I can’t thank you all enough. I hope that years to come afford to me the chance to do some good on behalf of other struggling job-seekers. Please remember the unemployed and the under-employed, the homeless and the desperate, whose hearts and hopes have been abraded by the harsh economies of the twenty-first century world. Though Margaret and I have been pulled back from the brink of that steep hillside, we experienced enough of it to keep us mindful of how fortunate we are.
 
For now, I’m gathering my wits and figuring out how to make the intercontinental transition — because in a few weeks, I’m moving to Glasgow!
 

Open source software making inroads in academic administration (yay!).
 
Gary Turner will leave MSFT to serve as MD (“Paging Dr. Turner”?) at Xero. Fond memories, and best wishes from a compatriot in the Transitions Department!
 

 
And speaking of long-ago tech comrades, Marc Canter is leaving the Bay and moving to Ohio, where he’ll be working to put his ahead-of-the-curve visions into play for Cleveland and environs. The article ends by quoting Marc: “I don’t think they have any idea [what’s about to hit them].” I’ll bet that’s right.

I constantly see instances of the rhetorical gesture wherein an author or preacher claims that a whole page-worth of intense connotation, allusion, ramification, implication, history, and philosophical baggage are all implied by a single word. “It’s all in there,” they’ll say, or “With one word, he calls to mind the whole….”
 
I have a hard time believing that such writers and preachers actually believe what they’re saying. I suspect that they draw all these correlations, think they’re cool and provocative, think that the author whose work they’re discussing was terribly smart to have chosen a word that might trigger all these associations, and think that so neat an array of correlations must somehow be decisively attributed to the word itself — rather than to the interpreter, or to the (antecedent) writer’s imagination of what subsequent readers might think.
 
Is it truly so very weak to say, “Theses allusions, connotations, and so on fit such-and-such a context”? Or, “This word resonates with these other discourses”? Or, “Related words appear in these comparable circumstances”? Why do commentators feel obliged to ascribe intrinsic characteristics to words, when broader experience suggests (to me) that people rarely use words with any but a casual, conventional sense of what they’re doing?
 
It’s entirely possible for us to make warranted inferences about ways that a text coheres with other texts, contexts, usages, discourses, and so on, without making the (false) claim that “all of that” is somehow packed into one word. No, no, no, it isn’t.

The Times reports that John Henry Cardinal Newman, a theologian for whom I harbor a certain affinity, has passed muster for beatification. Sometime moderately soon, the Holy See will officially designate him Blessed John Henry Newman.
 
Plus, it turns out that this saintly man is good for backs. I will bear that in mind next time my spasms flare up.

We didn’t do anything particularly constructive today. We just rested and did things we wanted to. It felt good — we may do the same tomorrow.

It’s easier to point to other pages than to write out thoughtful (or facile) blog entries, so because today is Packing Day — in which the professional packers come to finish off what Margaret, Jennifer, and Pippa have not already done — I’ll simply point to other people’s thoughtful entries. Well, another reason is that the topic I most want to blog about is still embargoed.
 
So, today’s postings at Inside Higher Education include several noteworthy columns. Evidently the Obama Education Department wants to underwrite online courses at the high school and community college levels, which would then be “owned” by the feds and would be free and open to all. (I infer that this means “not for credit.”)This makes tons of sense to me; it’s the sort of educational initiative that I’ve been pushing for all along. “For credit” is a cost-intensive system that’s easily open to abuse; “not for credit” depends on the student’s own interest, makes available the skeleton of guidance toward deeper understanding, and can persist without constant intervention for evaluation and updating. I just hope that their express interest in “vocational” course offerings doesn’t tie the courses to transient topics and phenomena (“Introduction to Cobol”).
 
In related news, the government is announcing a study that shows that online (or, especially, mixed-format) courses produce superior results compared to face-to-face courses. Big caveat: if I read the article correctly, the more precise reult of the study is that the amount of time a student puts into their studies — which turns out to be greater in online courses and mixed courses. My takeaway is not so much that digital trumps carnal, but that effective teaching requires that teachers elicit voluntary interest from their students. If you interest students in the topic under examination, and demonstrate to them that they can learn what they want to (at least, some of it) if they put the time in, they will be more likely to put the time in. Online courses tend to have more elastic schedules, so that students have access to more time in which to pursue their interest. The principle doesn’t favor online education; the contextual framework for teaching favors online. In an all-face-to-face setting, such as in many conventional schools, teachers will be able to amplify the effectiveness of their teaching by eliciting willing participation in study — not a news shocker, but well worth remembering anyway.
 
I was interested by the article on administrators who deal with campus crises mostly because it supports the research of Gary Klein on “intuition” and decision-making, and hence coheres with my arguments relative to the Aristotelian practical syllogism, signifying practices, and ethics, interpretation, and pretty much everything. The administrators on whom the column reports knew the rules and procedures well enough, but they made their decisions based on experience, intuition, and a sort of pattern-recognition that enables them to spot the key relationships and mechanisms that would bring about the best results. Plus luck.
 
Last, a chain of links led me to this powerful comics-form comparison of Orwell and Huxley, with acknowledgment to Neil Postman. I’m not uncritical of Postman and his technological Cassandrism, but the comic makes its worthwhile point quite vividly.

The Rev. Jim Adams points to Sam Rocha’s series on Jean-Luc Marion’s God Without Being.
 
Mark points to a guide for Delivering a Presentation Like Steve Jobs.
 
Most interestingly of all, Mark Brown (founder of the Anglican cathedral in Second Life) posts what Paul Fiddes writes about the possibility of digital Eucharist.

I don’t have time to go over the past few days in detail, but I’m back in Durham, where the family is packing up our temporal goods to go into storage, and thence to begin our Summer Of Transformation. I anticipate being able to make a major announcement sometime next week, but so far there’s nothing definite for me. Margaret will teach in Baltimore again next year, our possessions will have their base camp in our friend Sarah’s garage, and Pippa will begin her formal art training at Interlochen.
 
But the most important thing, and I’m sorry I was too distracted to post about it on the day, my long-time blogging friend Dorothea Salo is closing up shop at Caveat Lector. It sounds as though she’ll continue her online presence at a different venus — at least we may hope so — but CavLec will begin accumulating dust and cobwebs.
 
Dorothea taught me (and many of us) a lot from her insight into ebooks, mark-up, digital librarianship, repositories, and women in technology — among only a few topics. We haven’t been trading links and comments as often as we once did, but I’ll certainly be keeping an eye open for whatever Dorothea does next. I have a lot left to learn from her. Thanks, Dorothea, and I’ll miss CavLec. (Regards to David; by the way, I have this ring….)

Lest anyone suspect that I’ve gone hiking with Mark Sanford: that’s a good guess, but not exactly correct. Of the last few days when I wasn’t blogging, I spent some time fretting and editing and daydreaming and pondering my presentation for tomorrow morning, and some (not enough) hanging out with Margaret, and the last twenty-four hours or so traveling and getting situated for my talk/interview. I’m about to head out to scout the terrain this afternoon, so that tomorrow morning I won’t have to puzzle out the pertinent locations de novo while also trying to get to my appointments on time.
 
Having a lovely time; wish you were here. (And I found out that there are no mailboxes in Newark Airport, perhaps none in U.S. airports altogether; I wrote some notes on the first leg of my flight and went to mail them, when a somewhat condescending official advised me to not even try. I suppose this makes us all more secure, but I’d want to hear from Bruce Schneier before I accepted that premise.)