Wave, Current, Cascade 2.0 beta

Behold, the Rosetta disk, a product of an ambitious multi-year project to record examples of over 1,500 extant human languages for long, long-term preservation, courtesy of Kevin Kelly’s Lifestream:

The issue of durability has long plagued archivists, and has often been used as a convenient means for Earth’s 207 remaining holdouts to disparage electronic media – it’s a bit too delicate. (As vellum manuscript aficionados said of wood pulp, as stone scribes said of parchment, as tribal storytellers said of weathered rock.)

Now, hopefully you’ve already started to figure out that the entire history of media is implicated in each new inscription technology and the information coded into it. So I really think it’s funny when the post suddenly reads “the Rosetta disk is not digital.”

Of course, when the information is encoded by means of analog imagery requiring only magnification to apprehend the data (if not interpret it), that’s an easy claim to make. OTOH: could this object ever existed without electronic technologies of inscription? Decoding isn’t the problem: 1000x is fairly within range for optical microscopes. But who has the patience to work out that massive writer’s cramp after spending hours at a time with a hair’s-width stylus to mark up all that nickel?

… oh, they got a machine to do all that work?

Taking instructions from a computer?

… Huh.

Not to belittle the effort. Especially in a world that places increasing pressure on finding ways to preserve electronic works built on platforms with short shelf lives, the first step begins necessarily with accepting the limitations of the original medium of production. What’s needed, perhaps, is a simple change in perspective: the best archives (of which the Rosetta disk is a strong contender) go beyond the simple dualities of “delicate medium” and “durable medium” and take that LOCKS principle one step further: Lots Of Copies in several distinct media Keeps ‘em Safe.

And far more available to far more people now for making the world a better place. Or whatever else we’re making the world ;-)

!: Unless someone really did confiscate all the Bibles, Torahs, religious-text software and Good Books on Tape…. well, I can account for my copies, anyway.

This ABC News clip continues to sour my attitude toward closed-code proprietary media players, but it also offers the most thoroughgoing effort so far in reporting an emergent trend: colleges issuing iPhones to their incoming freshmen.

The early adopters play up – and justifiably so – how GPS and local network alerts on this system provide a needed security enhancement in the open space of the university. Of course the e-mail, the IM’s, the facebook and other apps available through the device make it the state-of-the-art in Weapons of Mass Distraction, and this scares the hell out of professors like Cornell’s Robert Summers, who apparently hasn’t quite embraced laptop computers, understandable if he began his Cornell tenure at about the same time as the first moon walk.

But give him credit for intuiting the dilemma: as laptops are to paper notes, as paper notes were to slates and tabulae, as mass-printed books were to the manuscript at the lectern, interaction with the iPhone produces a different cyborg embodiment – a different physical dynamic between the human and the requisite educational technology that produces that, oh, “student function.” IOW, pedagogy has intellectual and ergonomic aspects. IYOW, you learn with your body (as well as your “mind,” if you insist).

Stay with me here… if you change the embodiment of learning, you have to change the pedagogy.

Actually, this pedagogic shift will happen anyway. The deeper issue is whether we laborers in the knowledge industry are willing to retool accordingly.

If you insist that students only learn by showing up together at the same lecture hall at the same scheduled periods to listen synchronously to a live human deliver a lecture, for which the only remaining record should be a carefully-inscribed set of hand-written notes, you’re in trouble. Wireless technology has already disrupted this, and the iPhone will only push this further.

OTOH if you remember just how crazy a weed ivy is, and you’re willing to think creatively, you might find some new places to plant it, some (not all) of which might be surprisingly successful. Because reorienting the student-learning machine complex amounts to changing the soil, the sun, the availability of water for that ivy.

It’s academic climate change. It’s evolutionary pressure. And this breed of smartphones and UMPC’s, including those free student iPhones, may be the next major selector.

You in?