Last month… NASA updated the most iconic photograph in our civilization’s gallery: “Blue Marble,” originally taken from Apollo 17 in 1972. The spectacular new high-def image shows a picture of the Americas on January 4th, a good day for snapping photos because there weren’t many clouds.

It was also a good day because of the striking way it could demonstrate to us just how much the planet has changed in 40 years. As Jeff Masters, the web’s most widely read meteorologist, explains, “The U.S. and Canada are virtually snow-free and cloud-free, which is extremely rare for a January day. The lack of snow in the mountains of the Western U.S. is particularly unusual. I doubt one could find a January day this cloud-free with so little snow on the ground throughout the entire satellite record, going back to the early 1960s.”

In fact, it’s likely that the week that photo was taken will prove “the driest first week in recorded U.S. history.” Indeed, it followed on 2011, which showed the greatest weather extremes in our history — 56% of the country was either in drought or flood, which was no surprise since “climate change science predicts wet areas will tend to get wetter and dry areas will tend to get drier.” Indeed, the nation suffered 14 weather disasters each causing $1 billion or more in damage last year. (The old record was nine.) Masters again: “Watching the weather over the past two years has been like watching a famous baseball hitter on steroids.” — Bill McKibben, Why the Energy-Industrial Elite Has It In for the Planet

shared CC by rskoon (Richard)

Asked this month, the Harris Poll finds the lowest number [of Americans] who believe in global warming since the question was first asked in 1997 (44% now do, down from 51% in 2009 and 71% in 2007).

The fossil-fuel companies, with their heavily funded denialism and their record campaign contributions, have been able to keep at bay even the tamest efforts at reining in carbon emissions. With each passing day, they’re leveraging us deeper into an unpayable carbon debt — and with each passing day, they’re raking in unimaginable returns. ExxonMobil last week reported its 2011 profits at $41 billion, the second highest of all time. Do you wonder who owns the record? That would be ExxonMobil in 2008 at $45 billion. — Bill McKibben, Why the Energy-Industrial Elite Has It In for the Planet

Did I dream the last three weeks? It was lovely while it lasted.

I was bemused by the backlash against GoDaddy from opponents of SOPA. Sure, heartened to see some pushback for the company’s short-sighted and hypocritical stance, but surely this was a company that had failed ethical tests long ago? Better late than never, I suppose… though Paulina Borsook’s decade-old book comes to my mind every time I see someone trumpeting their sudden decision to boycott.

But even if it is simple self-interest, the GoDaddy boycott contrasts with the relative apathy about SOPA amongst educators. It is well-understood by solid, well-meaning, mainstream organizations that the effects of the Act could be disastrous, and those solid, well-meaning, mainstream concerns have been waved away by ignorant lawmakers just as they always are…

Yet among the official supporters of SOPA are pretty much all the major players in academic and educational publishing: Elsevier, Pearson Education, Cengage Learning, McGraw-Hill Education, Macmillan, Scholastic, et al…

So, are there examples of universities re-assessing their purchases from corporations that are actively lobbying against their interests? Hell, are there any individual professors taking a stand, taking textbooks off of syllabi? If there are, I haven’t heard of any. (I did see this call to boycott Elsevier, though it comes from outside academia.)

And lest we think of DIY DIO-powered open educational production as an alternative…

SOPA would also expand the definition of copyright infringement to include hosting a single link to a site that is alleged to contain infringing material. Thus, if an author’s blog, or a book discussion group, attracts a single post that contains a single link that goes to a site that someone accuses of copyright infringement, that site becomes one with the alleged infringer, and faces all the same sanctions—without any proof required, or due process.

And…

Many OER platforms are nonprofit, operating with Creative Commons licenses and allowing global users to upload content on the honor system. The scope and size of OER platforms makes it difficult to monitor them in real time. Under SOPA, if any copyright-infringing material is discovered on an OER, the organization “could potentially have their domain name blocked by the goverment”—even if platform staff are unaware that it’s been uploaded. And because OERs are by definition open to anyone, entire sites could become “unavailable due to the behavior of a tiny minority of confused or malicious users.”

Come on, feel the FUD! I suspect that to the academic publishers named above, the resulting chilling effect is a feature, not a bug.

And as ever, as a Canadian I can watch this process, and know I will be affected, but I don’t have a vote, or a member of Congress to call… Ain’t global corporate dominion grand?

I am tempted to wrap up 2011 with some sort of epic jeremiad in which I dismiss the preceding twelve months as the year in which all hope was lost, and acknowledge that the 2012-dead-enders might be on to something. But I can’t write a better version of that than Mr. Kernohan already has… So I find myself in the unlikely position of poking through the embers in search of light and warmth.

And if I am wholly honest, this year-old Abject space is very much a product of 2011… While it is safe to say that this blog did absolutely nothing to make the world a better place, it did provide me with a space to get my hands into the gears of webwork again, to spew verbiage as I see fit. The readership here is miniscule, but if I had to draw up a select list of people whose work is most important to me, the ones I most want to interact with for inspiration and for laughs… well, I pretty much have that here. So if you have spun by this little lovenest of ed tech subversion for whatever reason, and especially if you ever cared to toss off a comment or a link, I truly appreciate it.

My bit of year-end good cheer is drawn from someone who has been in this field doing great work ever since I got here, Sebastien Paquet, who a few weeks back Tweeted:

The slight shift to “DIO” from “DIY” is obvious enough, and if I think about all the fun and all I learned this past year through, say, DS106, it’s equally obvious I didn’t do any of it myself. I can’t do anything by myself… but maybe I can help kick out the jams, because WE ROCK:

Onward to a loud and rowdy 2012 my friends. Nobody’s gonna do it for us, we’ll have to do it ourselves. Mess with the bull, you get the horns.

cc licensed ( BY NC ) flickr photo shared by D’Arcy Norman

Catching up on my RSS feeds, I enjoyed reading this post by Darren Barefoot about the “restricted cat” (or cougar), an oddly innocuous and kid-sweet warning about impending adult-only content:

Watching that cute pre-picture cat reminded me of when we lived in Hermosillo, Mexico in the late 90′s. We went to a lot of movies because they were fairly cheap and air-conditioned. The films often sucked, but I always loved the cute pre-picture cats that sang a song about the importance of not talking during movies, reminding us to turn off our cel phones. I can’t find the exact clip they played, but this more recent production starring “Front Row Joe” (el gato Joe) is a less charming example.

Segurito y el Gato Joe – Dentro de la Película from Sólo por las Niñas on Vimeo.

Thinking back to those cinema trips I remembered another pre-movie short they would always play. The explicit message is “vive sin drogas” (live without drugs), but the trippy visuals and hypnotic aesthetic undercut that ostensible moral:

The vive sin drogas campaign was bankrolled by TV Azteca, Mexico’s second-largest network, privatized in the 90′s by since-disgraced President Carlos Salinas. At the time, I remember reading reports in the Mexican and international alternative press alleging that TV Azteca owner Ricardo Salinas Pliego was linked to narco-money. More recently, Salinas-Pliego (currently the second-richest man in Mexico) has called for the legalization of drugs.

The vive sin drogas rap, its conflicted aesthetic, the whole concept of psychedelic-inspired children’s programming reminds me of one of my favorite comedy shows ever, Mr. Show, and their sketch Sam and Criminy Kraffft present The Altered State of Drugachusetts:

As an aside, my favorite podcast these days is Comedy Bang Bang, hosted by Mr. Show alum Scott_Aukerman, and featuring others from Mr. Show including Paul F. Tompkins.

As another aside, the Mr. Show character of “Drugachussets” Professor Ellis D. Traills is played by Tom Kenny, who would go on to voice Spongebob Squarepants. Nothing weird about that one…

Apparently “The Altered State of Drugachusetts” is a fairly straight take-off on H.R. Pufnstuf, a kids show reputed to be steeped in drug culture:

Marty Krofft has neither admitted nor hinted in occasional interviews that the references were made knowingly; in one case, a writer reported that when pressed as to the connotation of “lids” in the title Lidsville, “Well, maybe we just had a good sense of humor,” Krofft said, laughing.^[21] His comments to another interviewer were more direct; in a Times Union profile whose author observed, “Watching the shows today, it’s hard to imagine a show with more wink-and-nod allusions to pot culture, short of something featuring characters named Spliffy and Bong-O,” Krofft conceded that the show’s title had been an intentional marijuana reference, as had Lidsville, but “that was just a prank to see if they could get them past clueless NBC executives”.^[25]

Of course, the notion of entertainment or art for children being suffused with themes and tropes of surreal intoxication predates 1970′s television… Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass come immediately to mind. Lewis Carroll is just one of the writers who receive critical treatment in Marcus Boon’s The Road of Excess: A History of Writers on Drugs (title drawn from William Blake). Boon’s book is by far the most thorough treatment of the subject I have ever read. Around the time the book came out, Boon gave an interview on WFMU with the riotous on-air personality and renowned proud plagiarist poet Kenneth Goldsmith (AKA Kenny G). You can listen to that interview here if you still have RealPlayer installed.

That chain of reference and reminiscence got me wondering what Marcus Boon is up to now… Turns out he has directed his efforts In Praise of Copying. Besides publishing that volume, he has turned the tables and interviewed Kenny G on appropriation, contributed to a diverse and mind-bending collection edited by “intellectual property theorist and prankster [and roboprofessor] Kembrew McLeod and dada scholar Rudi Kuenzli” entitled Cutting Across Media: Appropriation Art, Interventionist Collage, and Copyright Law. He was interviewed again recently on WFMU, this time by DJ Rupture. About this point, I’m having to work hard at not descending into envy at the orientation of this dude’s career. I have worked my various levers to acquire legal copies of all this stuff, and am working through it now…

If the digressive trajectories of my approach and work have confused you in the past, this post may serve as something of a Rosetta Stone.

The Noise Professor's rig

A sudden chorus of whoops and yibbles burst from a kind of juke box at the far end of the room. Everybody quit talking. The bartender tiptoed back, with the drinks.

“What’s happening?” Oedipa whispered.

“That’s by Stockhausen,” the hip graybeard informed her, “the early crowd tends to dig your Radio Cologne sound. Later on we really swing. We’re the only bar in the area, you know, has a strictly electronic music policy. Come on around Saturdays, starting midnight we have your Sinewave Session, that’s a live get-together, fellas come in just to jam from all over the state, San Jose, Santa Barbara, San Diego”

“Live?” Metzger said, “electronic music, live?”

“They put it on the tape, here, live, fella. We got a whole back room full of your audio oscillators, gunshot machines, contact mikes, everything man. That’s for if you didn’t bring your ax, see, but you got the feeling and you want to swing with the rest of the cats, there’s always something available.” — Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49, 1965

One of the things I love about #ds106radio is how it continues to mutate into new forms. The latest wrinkle brought about by yet another Grant Potter inspiration, taking the existing station configuration (one stream running uploaded AutoDJ content, which is overridden by the live stream whenever anyone takes it), and allowing for new streams to run concurrently off of the same server and IP address (off of a different Mount Point).

Part of the result was captured and I share it below. Essentially, DJ Dr. J, AKA @draggin, AKA Jason Toal laid down relatively minimalist beats and soundscapes, perfect for manipulation by the @noiseprofessor AKA Zack Dowell. Zack’s rig is pictured above.

The first seven and a half minutes is Jason, Zack’s stream kicks in then… I mostly followed him from then on, occasionally switching back to Jason just to get a sense of what the source sound was.

Listen (23:27): draggin-noiseprofessor.mp3

Download – (17MB MP3)

With multiple streams, the listener becomes a mixer as well, conceivably able to spin out yet more streams — which is where I see some real potential for future experimentation. I kept the streams more or less distinct, but you can also check out a more integrated mix of the two via Nigel Robertson:

Draggin’ & Noiseprofessor on dual stream by easegill

Yeah, I kinda had fun with how it all played out…

UPDATE: I just had to move Zack’s comment into the text:

In case anyone is interested in the chain:

@draggin on ds106radio /newmount -> Droid 2 (via A Online Radio app) -> Ernie Ball VP Jr. (volume pedal) -> EHX Ring Thing (single sideband modulator – a pretty sophisticated ring mod of sorts) -> Subdecay Noise Box (crazy octave generator/unstable oscillator that makes Atari 2600 sorts of noises) -> CoPilot FX Android II (another ring mod, though I use it most often as a choppy tremolo) -> Digitech Screamin’ Blues (overdrive) -> EHX Big Muff Pi (king of classic fuzz pedals w/ tone stack and voltage sag mods) -> EHX Tube Zipper (envelope follower, something like an auto-wah) -> EHX Small Clone (chorus) -> EHX Flanger Hoax (through-zero flanger/phase shifter) -> EHX Deluxe Memory Boy (analog delay) -> EHX Stereo Memory Man w/ Hazarai (digital delay) -> Boss RC-50 Looper (looping pedal) -> Fender Hot Rod Deville 212 (tube amp) -> iPhone (via Papaya app) -> ds106radio /live

Image by Wikimedia Commons user -pc123

There are many that I know and they know it. They are all of them repeating and I hear it. I love it and I tell it. I love it and now I will write it. This is now a history of my love of it. I hear it and I love it and I write it. They repeat it. They live it and I see it and I hear it. They live it and I hear it and I see it and I love it and now and always I will write it. There many kinds of men and women and I know it. They repeat it and I hear it and I love it. This is now a history of the way they do it. This is now a history of the way I love it. – Gertrude Stein, The Making of Americans, 1934

This passage introduces Marcus Boon’s 2010 book, In Praise of Copying, a copy of which I have acquired once again through the graces of my university’s library.

I’m reminded of a night back in Montreal when I was in grad school, reading passages from Stein’s The Making of Americans out loud for some hours with my roommate. As anyone familiar with the text might guess, something like an altered state of consciousness was achieved. I recommend the technique to psychonauts everywhere.

Here’s to you Gabrielle, it’s been too long.

Off-campus today, so if I want “24 hour access” to this article, it will only cost me… Actually, I can’t find out how much it will cost me until I give Wiley my credit card information. Can you imagine any other online retailer trying that?

I have no original observations to offer, but I’m disturbed on a few levels.

The ironies of publishing a paywalled article entitled “Higher Education and Public Good” are obvious enough. (Thanks to Dean for providing the title of this post.) It’s one of those cases where it seems someone, somewhere is clearly missing the point entirely.

It’s a shame, because I read this article a few months ago, and I recall thinking it made some good points. I had recommended it to colleagues, and one of them asked me about it today. That’s how I came to attempt access from outside the safe, comfy confines of my public university. I wish I could reread the piece to get a sense of why I liked it, but thems the breaks. I did happen to snip this excerpt when I saved it to Delicious. I hope the gods of fair dealing will not smite me if I reproduce these words written by Simon Marginson here now:

The global public space lies mostly outside direct governance, in collaborative networks, non-government organisations and cyber-space, where higher education is helping to build the future global society.

…Many universities are good at the one-way broadcast of self-interest, in the manner familiar to capitalist societies. Though most universities neglect two-way flows and flat dialogue, they have the technologies and discursive resources to conduct plural, de-centred conversations. If so the university needs to more explicitly value its own contributions to public debate and policy formation; and in its incentive systems to favour not just the creators of saleable intellectual property but socially communicative faculty.

Indeed. [Thumb-Up; LIKE; ReTweet; +1]

Towards Open Sustainability Education shared CC by giulia.forsythe

I used up too much of my limited presentation time at Open Ed 2011 ranting about the proprietary barriers around the work higher education performs, which I find especially troubling when it concerns public engagement and the need for urgent public action. It was not one of my more coherent episodes, I’m grateful that Giulia Forsythe took the time to write up and illustrate more lucid versions.

What disturbs me most is how rarely I reflect on how powerful the privileges conferred on me are, thanks to the ten million dollars or so that my employer pays in annual licensing fees. When I read “Higher Education and Public Good” on-campus a few months back, I did not appreciate how fortunate I was to have unhindered access to scholarly work. But privilege is often invisible to those who possess it.

If I take my role as a “public servant” seriously, might I be obligated to take direct action to free up these resources to the wider world? Knowing that sort of action will be dealt with harshly.

Related and better reading: Jon Beasley-Murray has posted the text of his rich, passionate and erudite keynote at last month’s Access 2011 conference. And Martin Weller is his usual sensible self in his recent post, Yeah, but who pays? Both of these pieces deserve posts of their own, and I’d like to delude myself into thinking I will write them someday.

See also parts Two, and Three. There is also a version specifically edited for fans of The Runaways.

The 1978 Rock and Roll Sports Classic would count as must-see viewing if you, like me, have often lain awake wondering things such as:

* Who would win a race between Joan Jett, Anne Murray and Tanya Tucker? What if they were on bikes?

* Which bearded musician is the faster swimmer, Kenny Loggins or Hugh McDowell from ELO?

* How was Michael Jackson in the 100 Yard Dash? Or was he more effective in the pool?

* Would an all-star team drawn from Boston, The Jacksons, and Sha Na Na make up one of the greatest basketball sides ever?

* How powerful would Rod Stewart be in a tug of war? What if he had Freddy Fender anchoring him?

The festivities ably hosted by noted rockers Ed McMahon and Phyllis Diller. One of those instances where reality outweirds even the most demented satire.

INTRODUCTION:

Disconnectivism is driven by the delusion that decisions are made on any basis of reality whatsoever. New information is continually being discarded when it conflicts with dominant interests. The inability to draw distinctions between important and unimportant information drives our collective discourse. The inability to recognize when new information alters the landscape defines how power asserts itself.

Today’s Disconnected news:

The classic example used to explain how FERPA works: you can’t post a list of students’ names and grades on a bulletin board in the hallway.

But what about posting students’ work publicly online?

…Yesterday, Georgia Tech deleted all student history and participation from the school’s “Swikis,” the wikis that students use for their coursework. Georgia Tech has been using wikis for this purpose since 1997, pioneering the usage of the collaborative tools for undergraduate education. One of the features of the school’s wikis was that they allowed for cross-course and cross-semester communication. You could, should you choose, remain in a wiki for a class you’d taken previously, for example.

Which means…

We can no longer have students construct public entities on the Web anymore for education at Georgia Tech. It may be that FERPA demands that no school can use the Web to post student work publicly.

In completely Disconnected news elsewhere:

During our coverage of the eviction of the Occupy Wall Street protesters early this morning, a NPR reporter, a New York Times reporter, and a city councilmember were arrested. Airspace in Lower Manhattan was closed to CBS and NBC news choppers by the NYPD, a New York Post reporter was allegedly put in a “choke hold” by the police, a NBC reporter’s press pass was confiscated and a large group of reporters and protesters were hit with pepper spray. According to the eviction notice, the park was merely “cleaned and restored for its intended use.” If this is the case, why were so few people permitted to view it?

…Police began vigorously jamming the torsos of those who stood on the sidewalk with their batons. One officer mockingly shouted, “Shame! Shame!” as he angrily shoved protesters further back up Broadway. A strong scent of vinegar punctuated the air, and a row of protesters groaned in pain. Water materialized out of the crowd and the demonstrators began pouring it into the afflicted’s eyes.

CONCLUSION:

Disconnectivism presents a model of knowledge that confuses the shifts in a society where living is no longer a cooperative, mutually beneficial activity. How people work and function is defined by the inexorable self-destruction brought about by disembodied power. The clueless have been slow to recognize both the inhuman autonomy of the political-economic system and its insatiable lust to consume all living things. Disconnectivism provides no insight into this hopeless reality, nor does it offer any strategies needed to survive with dignity in a post-connected era.

(With apologies to George Siemens.)