I’m quite sure they have the Internet in Buffalo. If not, head for Canada… :-) (Sorry, couldn’t resist!)

Please, take some time out and go see the wonderful scenery! (And take pics, and post them!)

Enjoy your stay. (I came for a vacation, and only went home because the INS insisted… Maybe it was my beloved? :-) )

Carolyn Ann

I experienced something a similiar quiet time due to connectivity issues I experienced when I was at an HRD conference in Oxford two weeks ago. Since I did not have wifi, but did have my computer, I decided to liveblog my experiences using Ecto, and offline blogging program, and have been uploading my posts since then.

While I am going back to my roots and am planning to again formally study philosophy, I have been doing social science and business research for the last several years, and noticed that there is little research about the experiences and learnings that can occur through liveblogging a conference. This is something I am beginning to explore, and in continuing the idea that Alan Contreras raised in this week’s Chronicle of HIgher Education, I think that the experts and those who have traditionally listened to them at academic conferences, may be in for a new experience.

Jeffrey, if you go on to get a phD in philosophy or sociology you could blog for Talking Philosophy; you fill all the necessary criteria. ;)

Let’s see what the future holds. That is the plan for now, and since my education has been circuitous through more silos of knowledge and experience than I can count or easily follow, nothing at this point will surprise me.

That is one of the things I have found most interesting in my academic and professional work using technology, it provides a public place to think and consider issues and concepts that might not otherwise be expressed across a wide area with people who may or may not be more than their names on a screen. I like the ability to read about the experiences of others and then respond to them as they trigger ideas. Julian’s post is an example of this.

Now that I am starting to bring my laptop with me on trips and the like, I find I can blog (journal? write? narrate?) about my experiences as they happen to help me process them (including those comments that I make in the wee hours of the night (such as those above) that upon reading with more of a sound mind now appear a bit in need of editing!). I have become captivated with liveblogging at academic conferences because I think it allows me to begin to share and process my experiences and, perhaps, allow others to see some of what I see and hear while there. From this perspective of not being at the Center for Inquiry’s summer school, I only wish I could have a glimpse of those experiences as they occur for the participants before they have the opportunity to process them (which separates them from the events somewhat). I think there is a lot to be learned in this raw before and then polished after.

Actually I was just making reference to Julian’s earlier comment when he announced two new bloggers:

[quote]Before anyone else says it, you don’t have to be white, male, in possession of a PhD, under 45 (Jeremy??) and have a first name starting with the letter J to work here, but clearly it does help. If all goes well I think we should record a sixties Motown style soul song and release it as the Four Js.[/quote]

You fulfill all the criteria except the phD =)

Actually I was just making reference to Julian’s earlier comment when he announced two new bloggers:

Before anyone else says it, you don’t have to be white, male, in possession of a PhD, under 45 (Jeremy??) and have a first name starting with the letter J to work here, but clearly it does help. If all goes well I think we should record a sixties Motown style soul song and release it as the Four Js.

You fulfill all the criteria except the phD =)

P.S. Other comment can be deleted, how do i use quotations and italics etc? HTML / bbcode doesn’t seem to work…

They probably do have the internets in Buffalo, but we’re not exactly in Buffalo (Julian is a little shaky on geography*), we’re in Amherst, which is a suburb of Buffalo. Man is it a suburb. It’s the most suburban suburb I’ve ever seen. It’s like a Platonic suburb. All the roads are four-lane highways (at least) with a speed limit of 45 mph (at the slowest). Even the dang campus of the University (SUNY Buffalo, north campus) is full of 45 mph freeways - which seems very bizarre, to me, used as I am to the campus of the University of Washington where the speed limit is 15 mph.

Anyway, internet is patchy at the Center and non-existent at the guesthouse where we’re living, so we really can’t do much internets stuff.

*(joke!)

Julian did his lectures last week, Jeremy is doing his this week and next; I did the keynote address at the beginning. The three of us rented a car and drove to the Finger Lakes on Thursday; it was great fun, especially since we had the rare perfect weather for it - bright, clear, sharp, ideal for gazing at long blue lakes with rolling country around them. The last bit was slightly hairy, because we dawdled too long in Seneca Falls (the Stoical birthplace of US feminism) and we had to be back by 6:30 because Jeremy was scheduled to give Opening Remarks at the dinner that launched the second set of lectures. Jeremy doesn’t drive and Julian hasn’t driven a huge amount, especially on US freeways, so I drove, and I went 10 to 20 miles faster than I had in the morning, but the time still kept sliding away and our ETA kept changing - 6:00, Jeremy will still have time for a shower; oh dear, 6:10, Jeremy will have to swipe his armpits and let it go at that; uh oh, 6:20, we’re just plain going to be late, but they’ll be eating, the remarks come after the dinner, it’s okay - and then I took the wrong exit, and mass despair took over. But in the event Julian skillfully navigated us through some squalid bit of outer Buffalo and we weren’t late after all and Jeremy smelled like a rose (well not really) and all was well.

He’s been working on his lecture for today, with me kibbitzing (Julian’s in Toronto, and he’s going back to the UK tomorrow); he may use some of the thought experiments he’s done here; we’re talking about Jonathan Haidt on disgust and purity and so on. It should be a very interesting afternoon.

Was the lecture recorded, or will we otherwise get an overview here once things return to normal (if there is such a thing as normal given the institutional name of Center for Inquiry)?

No, the lectures aren’t recorded, and they’re not written down either, so alas you have to be here to get them. My address will be in a future Free Inquiry.

This is 2007. I’m sure you’ll be on YouTube if it was any good ;)

In all seriousness, some people record everything these days, give it a week or so for people to upload stuff and for Google’s bots to spot them and you might be able to find an audio clip somewhere… How many people were at the lectures?

I am not so interested in recordings or the transcripts, since I personally have trouble reading / paying attention to them without being involved in the tone and setting of the experience.

My interests are more about how learning occurs and how information and experiences are processed during the attending of the sessions themselves. As I have been doing a lot of writing about liveblogging on my own blog, I am interested in seeing how ideas develop from a comment here and a feeling over there with some content from this one and a paper I may read from that one–all of which happens simultaneously at times. When we write things later about how we have come to understand something, it takes all of the initial work and shows us the results. My interest in this is in the initial work and process itself.

My theory is that the more we learn about the process, the more we can take that into account while we are presenting our work to help our attendees and learners see what we are trying to communicate.

I think I am going to blog about this in more detail on my own blog as well.

I move we ban Carolyn Ann for 3 and a half days for her lame post up there