You know David, I kind of wish you’d stop using this technique to get your point across. I read the Stanford article a few days ago and thought “Wow, Williams too!” It’s certainly not clear from your post that this isn’t happening.

The Williams admin is way too hidebound and conservative to ever embrace technology in the same way. As several recent experiences with Committee reports demonstrates, the Williams culture is rather hostile to the open sharing of information. The Admin here likes to run things in the old fashioned way; very few of them have any understanding of the web’s power.

It doesn’t help that, unlike at Stanford and MIT (with its opencourseware project), most of our faculty have zero interest in technology. We certainly have the resources to do some pretty innovative things; the problem is, we’re too cautious. They don’t want to open up systems like the Confluence wiki, Blackboard, or the ContentDM media server to students, because they’re afraid that students will put something irresponsible or illegal on it.

A great recent example is the URL wiki.williams.edu. Instead of being used for a lively and open project like the WSO wiki, it is a tightly controlled and practically useless system used for OIT documentation and not much else.

I expect that likewise I would have been gulled by Welles’ War of the Worlds!

Really friggin irritating. I ended up searching iTunes repeatedly. Disclaimer before (or after) you change things around would be appreciated David.

In class discussion on Monday, one of my fellow students talked about “Williams on iTunes” while we were discussing podcasts. The kid took your post at face value and ended up floating some information that was just factually incorrect.

The purpose of this blog, to the best of my knowledge, is not teaching us critical reading skills. It is to be used a source of information, and I can’t see how rhetorical tricks can be justified if they detract from this. We don’t fall for stuff like this out of stupidity. We see Eph in the title and assume that someone from our community should be taken seriously. Cashing in on this trust is sort of disappointing.

I was using the technique to be clever and interesting. Since virtually no reader seems to find it clever and interesting, I’ll stop now. (Or, I won’t use it again without mentioning at the end of the post that I have done so, just like a columnist like Paul Krugman would.)

Williams Towner-

I know exactly what you’re saying. David’s postings (of this nature) are confusing, and given that not everyone reads ephblog closely, probably lead some people to incorrect conclusions.

When I first read this through I was incredibly surprised and excited and got halfway through an email about it to a friend before any amount of suspicion kicked in. If I hadn’t checked the comments on this board before sending my email I would have looked pretty stupid (and I guess in a certain sense I would have been, but that’s a separate issue…).

Anyways, I think my raised and subsequently dashed hopes aside, the confusing nature of these sorts of postings is a good thing. I certainly thought about this posting far more than I would have otherwise had it been worded in a more traditional manner. I think the same could be said about each of Dave’s use of this technique. The one particular use that I would be hesitant to endorse was his purposeful misquoting of an administrator–but that’s a debate I don’t want to renew here.

Ronit and all,

This touches on many old frustrations of mine: after all, in that wonderful satellite course Mark Taylor taught with Esa Saarinen years ago, we dreamed that the lectures of Lacan (and many others) would be available online…

and Mark recently wrote me with the frustration that so much of what we believed would occur– and which would be so simple to create– has not happened. My frustration is likely greater than Mark’s, …

But imagine the frustration of my friend Ted Nelson!, who has been preaching the same song for decades.

In response to Fred Dolan placing a cartoon on his door critical of new technologies, I once remarked that he and his collegues might as well be among the Greeks who bemoaned the faults of writing. Writing and “speech” in oral cultures– are all techne, technologies. A message that the Department of Rhetoric at Berkeley was hardly warm towards.

It is hard to parse your (Ronit’s) commentary above. Williams has very specific (historical) reasons for not moving forward with technological innovations (which I will publish later). I also believe that most of the historical lessons that the institution has learned, have been the wrong lessons to draw from the experiences.

I want to hear Steve Fix’s lectures, of course, and Mark’s; and I, like Brewster Kahle, want those materials available to the daughters I hope to have. MIT’s OpenCourseWare, which I often visit, is a far cry from that.

Williams, for its part, is also far too provincial compared to Stanford. Stanford and MIT are both part of the grand research and development plan outlines by Vannevar Bush; Williams is simply not on that map. Doug Englebart demonstrated the idea of the “mouse” at Stanford nearly 40 years ago; other than the brief years of Tripod and Dick Sabot, I fear Williams fears such a foreign culture more than embraces it. But it’s hard to live amid Ted and Doug’s culture, and not realize how far away Williams remains from their world, how (unnecessarily) opposed to their patterns of thought, and how much current students may not be given.

Footnote: Mark Taylor’s own exposition of his path through these issues.

Regardless: I have some ideas on how to proceed, and on what Williams students might achieve and create, to be published here in coming weeks or months.