Earlier in the week I wrote about Rob’s new course and my take on it. Many thoughtful people offered their comments (that was partially the point).

Here’s a recapitulation of my thoughts after reading those comments.

I’m not suggesting that weblogs + Internet + chat rooms = an education. I’m not suggesting that doctors can learn how to perform colonoscopies online and medical school.

I’m not suggesting that we drink virtual beer and have virtual sex with virtual coeds in lieu of doing those real coming of age things at university.

I’m not suggesting that there is no knowledge nor that there is nothing to learn.

I’m not even suggesting that everyone can learn anything they need on their own in a sort of self-reliant education libertarian paradise.

Nor do I mean to suggest that universities are such a bad thing.

But I do think that one thing that Internet + weblogs have allowed us to realize is that there are other ways of organizing our societal affairs, be it work, education, or otherwise.

I would never say that “we don’t need libraries because we have the Internet.” That’s not the point.

It’s not so much the utility of the web, as what the web allows to, inspires us to, demands us to think. So it’s not “web = e-library.” It’s “library = information” and “web = information” and “wow, that’s different; I wonder what that means.”

It’s how the web changes how we think about the world that interests me.

I think that some of the ways the Internet is organized (decentralized, ubiquitous, anarchic, open source) and some of the the ways weblogs are constructed (interconnected, distributed, personal, opinionated) have inspired me (and others, including Rob, I think) to realize that we can do other things — things that perhaps we’ve always done in a top-down, centralized, expensive, carefully controlled, closed source way — differently.

For example, the Zap Your PRAM conference. This conference had no outside funding, no advertising, required no meetings to organize. And yet we had people from three countries gather in one place, almost spontaneously, for an interesting weekend of discussion.

This is only “revolutionary” in the sense that the usual way one organizes a conference involves considerably more time, money, and effort. And therefore it’s usually only institutions and governments that have the resources to do so.

The lesson in the conference for me is not “hey, we used weblogs and the Internet to organize a conference: technology is great!” The lesson is that the Internet and weblogs allowed us to envision ourselves as powerful actors, the “kind of people who can organize conferences.” The rest was easy, but the rearrangement of the mental planets was a necessary precursor to everything that followed.

Another example.

Several years ago, the selfsame Rob invited me to participate in a project in Kinkora. The project, which started out originally to construct a building that would showcase different approaches to agriculture, development and ecology, had evolved away from a physical building, and into a series of “test case” projects that would serve a similar showcasing role. Rob asked me to come up with some ideas, and one of those that I presented I called “This Bag of Potatoes Has a Website.”

The idea was that every bag of potatoes leaving Prince Edward Island would have a unique website address attached to it, and at that address consumers would find the “provenance” of the potatoes: where they were grown, by whom, with what chemicals, and so on. The idea was that the “value add” in the industry, going forward, was going to be information; consumers were going to want to know where their food came from and how it was grown.

The idea had some traction at the time, and we pursued several stands of it, and got several farmers interested, but ultimately it withered on the vine.

Flash forward to the present, and the idea seems more relevant now than ever: the entire agriculture industry is seeing the need for “provenance tracking.” And in the world of BSE, every head of cattle does need its own website.

The lesson for me here is not “here’s this revolutionary use of technology.” The lesson is that someone like me, immersed in the decentralized, open source, web, can take some of the ideas that working on the web uncovers — simple, open, powerful approaches to solving complex problems — and translate them into a completely different domain where they take on a new life.

And further that someone like me, with no formal education, no experience in agriculture, no real credentials to speak of at all, can be virally inserted into a group of ecologists and farmers and bring something to the table.

Again, I don’t present these examples as “here’s how with weblogs we can change everything.” The key for me is how weblogs and the Internet and open source and Linux and hyperlinks and the like can inspire us all to reconceive of how we do things, how we arrange ourselves, how we work, and how we learn.

In light of all this, my original comments about Rob’s course were simply pointing out that it was ironic that someone like Rob, who I think generally shares my take, would choose to evangelize this inside an institution that has, in many ways, a vested interest in having these trains of thought not pursued.

That said, after reading the comments that were posted, especially Rob’s own comments, I’ve come to realize that it makes perfect sense for Rob to do what he’s doing.

Let’s say Rob used to live in the city, and suffered from the confining strictures of urban life. Then, by happenstance and effort, Rob found that there was another way of thinking about living, and left the city to go out on the open range to live the carefree, decentralized, open life of a cowboy.

My original critique would suggest that Rob should stay out on the range, and not return to the city to share what he’d learned. Obviously that was wrong. The key, of course, is figuring how to return to the city to share these lessons without having the very fact of being in the city make their value seem irrelevant.

And that’s where my thinking has landed at this moment. Additional comment welcome, of course. Ye haw!

The first time I ever heard about Yahoo! was on the phone from a guy in Newfoundland. I was working at the PEI Crafts Council at the time, and we had an early Internet project on the go; as a result, I spent a lot of time on the phone talking to Internet people and crafts people. On the phone to St. John’s with a guy with feet in both worlds, he used the phrase “I Yahooed for it…”. I had no idea what he was talking about, but I played along. When I got off the phone, I asked around, and this is close to what I found [thanks to Jason Kottke for the link].

Yahoo! turns 10 years old this week. It’s amazing to think that it was once such an important and central part of my Internet experience — the Google of its day. I don’t think I’ve visited the Yahoo! website for 5 years; it became drenched with for-pay annoyances, and with Google, it became obvious that search trumped cataloging.

As I type this, Catherine is explaining the premise of the television show M*A*S*H to our friend G., who has never seen an episode. It is very comical.

Here’s the new “brand positioning” statement for Prince Edward Island, part of the Tourism Advisory Council presentation of the 2005 PEI Marketing Plan:

Prince Edward Island is the Atlantic Canadian vacation destination that rewards visitors with a heightened sensory experience because it is an Island with distinct and vibrant people, places and experiences.

My friend Rob Paterson writes about a new course he’s teaching at UPEI and says its premise is, in part:

The foundation of mass media is eroding rapidly. The channels that mass media rely on are being disintermediated by direct web channels or by other media. Brand power is leaving the corporate centre and is being replaced on the web by the voice of the consumer. Trust in corporate and government leaders is falling. Customer attention, buffeted in a maelstrom of advertising noise, is falling.

And then, later on:

This course will justify this claim and will take you inside the minds and behind the actions of the revolutionaries. You will not only see what is going in real time, you will meet and talk to the key figures. You will be among the few who know that is going on.

I see a disconnect here.

Rob is positing that the elites are dying out, and that we can all go P2P. The “corporate centre” and “brand power” are out.

And yet Rob is suggesting that you come into the brand-powered corporate centre (UPEI) with him to join an elite bunch of “the few who know that is going on.”

Rob’s course seems, thus, to be a mediated approach to learning about disintermediation.

If the disintermediated webloggy future is so great, why do we need UPEI? Why do we need Rob?

Just wondering.

The CBC Archives website is a treasure trove of audio and video goodness from the CBC’s history. Every time I visit I find something interesting.

Today I stumbled across the page for Monday, October 17, 1977, part of their Days to Remember series because it was the first day that the proceedings of the Canadian Parliament were televised.

You can hear Max Ferguson interviewed by Don Harron on Morningside or watch Rex Murphy interviewed by Peter Gzowski on 90 Minutes Live.

Watching the technically awkward Gzowski clip reminds me just how technically revolutionary The Journal was when it came on the air in 1982. Right off the top of the first episode we got to see big heads of the interviewees projected on the wall of the studio, commonplace today, but an innovation back then. And oh how I loved that theme song.

Last year one of my father’s colleagues asked for advice on planning a family camping trip to Prince Edward Island. I just heard back from him that my advice was helpful, so I thought I’d post it here.

For campgrounds, I recommended:

Cedar Dunes Provincial Park: near West Point. Right on the ocean. Breakfast available from the local West Point Lighthouse restaurant. Very scenic — amazing sunsets.

Strathgartney Provincial Park: near Charlottetown. An excellent campground if you want to explore Charlottetown, as it’s only about 15 minutes east west (!) of the city. In the Bonshaw Hills, and very green and forested. Access to the West River for swimming. Children’s playgrounds and frisbee golf course. The Town of Cornwall, 1/2 way to Charlottetown, is very handy for groceries and supplies.

Panmure Island Provincial Park: on the eastern side of the Island. Beautiful beach. Quite isolated, and very scenic. Close to Montague for supplies.

Red Point Provincial Park: very very east, near Basin Head. Amazing beach, beautiful views, and a good reason to go this far east. Basin Head Fisheries Museum is next door, and is worth a visit.

For restaurants and things to do, I suggested:

The restaurant near the North Cape Atlantic Wind Test Site is excellent, and has a great view. The Wind Test Site is worth the drive to the far north-west tip of the Island: the giant wind turbines are now providing 4% of the Island electricity, and are a site to behold.

The MacAusland’s Woolen Mill in Bloomfield is very interesting, and much unchanged over the last 50, 60, 100 years. The turn raw fleece into great blankets, and you can walk around and see all of the machines at work. You should certainly buy a blanket as well, as they are top-rate.

The Brackley Drive In (www.drivein.ca) blew down last year, but if they manage to rebuild by the time you’re here [ed: they did!] it’s worth a visit. Very nice drive-in movie theatre in the woods near Brackley Beach.

Also near Brackley Beach is The Lobster Claw, an unassuming family restaurant with good food and excellent service, The Dunes, and architecturally interested gallery and studio, with a restaurant attached, and Shaw’s Hotel, which is a hundred-year-old seaside inn that’s a good place to splurge on a room or cottage if you’re looking to do that (reservations are needed well in advance).

In Charlottetown, we like the Formosa Tea House (186 Prince St.) for Taiwanese-inspired snacks and drinks, Interlude (Kent St. across from City Hall) for a different take on the same, COWS for ice cream, the Town & Country for a simple, uncrowded family restaurant with a great outdoor patio. Timothy’s on Kent St. or Beanz on University Ave. are both good for coffee. Sirenella’s is good for slightly formal Italian food (it’s across from the Delta Hotel on Water St.).

As I said, some of my advice seemed to have worked: the family did, indeed, visit MacAusland’s and bought a blanket. They stayed Cedar Dunes and Panmure Island, and went to the wind test site.

My friends John and Sherin at Yankee have been covertly distributing pirated copies of a hand-sketched map of PEI that I made to accompany them on their visit here a couple of years ago. I should try and track down a copy of that and post it here.

Look at me… I’m a budding Nancy Chandler!

Oliver got a new second cousin this morning, Tlell (reference), baby girl to Pam and Bill. Welcome to the world.

I sent the following letter to Sounds Like Canada in reaction to this morning’s broadcast:

Hello there.

I was very disappointed to hear, on this morning’s “50 Tracks” segment, your “bleeping out” of the word “fuck” in the Alanis Morisette song “You Oughta Know” (in the line “And are you thinking of me when you fuck her.”)

One expects this sort of gratuitous censorship from commercial radio stations; for the CBC to do so, especially in the context of a segment like “50 Tracks” that purports to be judging the “essential” quality of Canadian songs, it is unconscionable.

That line, it could be argued, is the emotional centre of the song; to lop off the word “fuck” is to rip out the song’s heart, and to neuter its power.

I think your listenership deserves to hear the song in its original glory.

I’m not smart enough to figure out which films should win what. But I watched anyway, and had these thoughts:

• I want to hire Morgan Freeman to narrate my life. Every day. You know, just like in The Shawshank Redemption.
• Is Beyonce really that good that she needs to be called in for two three (!) songs? Aren’t there other singers out there?
• I liked the “live from the seats” style of giving out selected awards (although there was that stunned looking guy on the lefthand side of the aisle who didn’t know what to make of it all). I liked it when the guy nominated for best short spelled out “I Love You” with his hands.
• I didn’t like the “lets bring all the nominees on stage while we announce them” trick; it’s bad enough to lose without having to stand beside the winner. And they only did this for the “don’t really matter all that much” categories anyway.
• I liked Chris Rock as host.
• How do they do that magical “show video on little panels on the roof” thing? Neato.
• Rene Zellweger was best dressed, hands down.