The Known World

I think that all of you know that I write a column for a professional magazine that is called "The Known World." The publisher has just released the blog to support the podcasts. It is at www.computer.org/theknownworld. You will find that it is much like the podcasts that you have heard in class.

DAG

Building the Community

You will see that I have added a new Gizmo on the right for other Blogs. I am very interesting in keeping a collection of your writings and comments. At the moment, it has one entry, that of Jake Melville. Melville is in South Korea at the moment teaching English. It is, of course, a tense time on the peninsula. We hope that peace prevails not only for his sake alone but for all the residents of the region. No one needs a conflict.

I have been reading your letters and blogs from near and far for many years. I appreciate them not because they are profound, as profundity is difficult to achieve, but because they are honest. After a few postings that are filled with the excitement of a new country or a new job, they tend to stall as you look for something important to say. After some interval, long or short, when you realize that importance is oversold, you start looking for what is interesting, what is engaging, what is the part of the world that lives in you. A Thanksgiving in Siberia. A baby in California. An Internship in DC that is pretending to be a job. A store in Brooklyn that is searching for a market. All of these are good stories and all are welcome here.

The Ceremonies of Email

I spent much of the weekend sitting in ceremonies and emailing. That seems to be the tradition of modern ceremonies. We go to the events to experience them with our friends, even if we are located in different parts of the venue. I published an essay about this phenomena two years ago. I suppose that the only change has been an increased demand on bandwidth. I noticed that on the big Sunday ceremony, emails sometimes required 20 minutes to leave the outbox.

Greetings & Graduation

It is graduation season, a time of celebration for students and a period of sheer bliss for parents, who revel in the realization that their parenting theories worked. I approach the season with mixed feelings, as I will not be teaching for a full year. I'm taking a year away from the classroom to write and do the sort of scholarship that professors do.

Yesterday, was the Elliott School ceremony. Instead of spending the evening milling on the second floor and practicing their networking skills, a small group of this years graduates gathered in my office and talked about words and speeches, Mozart arias and the Dave Matthews Band. Graduation is on Sunday. A new life begins on Monday. We will see how things unfold.

For those of you who never experienced the Mozart/Dave Matthews lecture, you can find an article about it here.

DAG