Date: Fri, 24 Oct 1997 08:08:08 MDT From: Robyn Meta Herrington Subject: SUB:CONTEST: Reflections in Cybershades Reflections in Cybershades He picked up the old volume, and opened it, and read. "In the name of Allah, the Compassionating, the Compassionate! Praise be to Allah, The Beneficent King, The Creator of the Universe, Lord of the Three Worlds, Who set up The Firmament without Pillars in its Stead and Who stretched out The Earth even as a Bed; and Grace, and Prayer-Blessing be upon Our Lord Mohammed, Lord of Apostolic Men, and upon His Family and Companion-Train; Prayer and Blessings Enduring and Grace Which unto The Day of Doom shall Remain. Amen! O Thou of The Three Worlds Sovereign!" "And afterwards. Verily the works and words of those gone before us have become instances and examples to men of our modern day, that folk may view what admonishing chances befel other folk and may therefrom take warning; and that they may peruse the annals of antique peoples and all that hath betided them, and be thereby ruled and restrained:..." He raised his head in time to see one of the three students in the classroom shake his head, flick his notebook shut and stand up. It was just two steps to the door. He'd hoped that one might stay. Anyone who used one of the old electronic notebooks was a masochist at heart anyway. He felt the shaking start, somewhere in his stomach. Early this week, the dean of undergraduate reengineering initiatives had announced that any faculty who didn't have at least five live students in class on a regular basis would be reviewed for possible outplacement as part of the continuing drive to academic excellence through downsizing. Telestudents were one thing, but the dean was sure that "face-to-face" teaching was the real mark of the professor. He closed "The Book of a Thousand Nights and a Night" and leaned over the lectern. "So what about you two? What kind of literature do you like?" After a minute of silence, he realized that their shades weren't even tuned to him. They might be recording for later review, but from the dancing movements of their hands, shaping, both of them were actively communicating with the web. He watched their hands for a moment and bit his lip. He wanted to put his own shades on and link in so bad. He could feel his hands move in the warmup sequence, the login and handshake that put you in touch with your own webwomb, that started the feed of new/old/excitement trickling and flashing and bouncing across the surround. He gritted his teeth and squeezed his eyes shut. He gripped the edges of the lectern. Then he took a deep breath and looked up, around the room. Blackboards. Real chalk. Empty chairs, with their worn red seats flipped up, the tiny wooden desks swiveled down to the side. And the two netheads enjoying web life instead of listening to him. He pushed the volume of Burton aside, and pulled out another book. "I sing the body electric, The armies of those I love engirth me and I engirth them, They will not let me off till I go with them, respond to them, And discorrupt them, and charge them full with the charge of the soul." His left hand starfished and scratched, and he waited. What was wrong with his hotlink to... He shook his head and chuckled at himself. He'd left his shades in the office along with his gloves. But he wished now that he had ignored the one day challenge from the provost to teach without augmentation. He flipped the pages. There must be something here that he knew... "I celebrate myself, and sing myself, And what I assume you shall assume, For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you." "I loafe and invite my soul, I lean and loafe at my ease observing a spear of summer grass." The video pickup for the world feed was glaring at him. Funny, when he gave the normal lectures, he never noticed it. Of course, he normally didn't look very much at the room while teaching, he had to keep track of the displays in cyberspace, weave the students' irc chatter, run the realtime video productions, and keep the audio bouncing along. That stupid glass eye in the ceiling with the dead black box behind it didn't need his attention, so why was he looking at it now? He shook himself, looked down at Walt's tome, and tried again. Wasn't there...yes! "Hark, some wild trumpeter, some strange musician, Hovering unseen in air, vibrates capricious tunes to-night." "I hear thee trumpeter, listening alert I catch thy notes, Now pouring, whirling like a tempest round me, Now low, subdued, now in the distance lost." He closed his eyes and repeated the words. "Hark, some wild trumpeter, some strange musician..." His stomach gurgled. The air, blowing against the windows, whispered softly. And he heard it. Not the music of chaos theory, shaped by interacting students and wild connections in the depths of the information mines, but a wild trumpeter, a strange musician, playing in time to his heart beating. "Hovering unseen in air, vibrates capricious tunes to-night." He saw the unseen glistening, the colors that hide behind the eyelids, the hovering sparkles gliding down the dark. And capricious tunes shook him. "I hear thee trumpeter, listening alert I catch thy notes, Now pouring, whirling like a tempest round me, Now low, subdued, now in the distance lost." He grinned, opening his eyes to the whirling dance of the room, the spinning, the wood sliding past, the clunk of his head hitting the wall, the dark, the dark. When he opened his eyes, he automatically reached up and adjusted his cybershades. Then he pulled his gloves snug and stretched, before making the login and handshake and pulling his webwomb online. The message from the provost had enough priority to surface quickly. "You fool! I can't believe you tried to go the whole day without augmentation. The doctors say you passed out from sensory deprivation--and I have a court injunction barring me from endangering anyone else in a similar manner without a full medical team standing by." "Oh, and don't worry--the dean didn't even get ONE student in his class." He laughed, then pulled up a fully interlinked version of The Arabian Nights and started that running along the bottom of his surround. He ran the comic versions on the left, with the serious and exotic versions on the right. He let the text, movie, and other sensory versions mingle as the links ran. In moments, he stretched his right finger down into the information tides and yanked up a network of references to "Leaves of Grass." He let those trail across the background, gently accenting phrases here and there as they caught his percepts. And in the middle, he took the moments of his lecture, stepping through the available data in slowtime, annotating it, adding his own feelings, linking in search results and fragments of information picked up by bots he sent scurrying happily into the information catacombs. He mumbled as he let his hands shape connections. "I sing the body electric...I celebrate myself, and sing myself...and some wild trumpeter, some strange musician, Hovering unseen in air, vibrates capricious tunes to-night." The students' quickpatched their own hotwired satire of the decline and fall of faculty in nature...and in the background of the endless story loop, they ran grey ghostscript subliminal quotes: "'Tell on' quoth the King who chanced to be sleepless and restless and therefore was pleased with the prospect of hearing her story." "So Shahrazad rejoiced; and thus, on the first night of the Thousand Nights and a Night, she began with..." "...Now when the old man had ceased speaking the Jinnin shook with pleasure and gave him the third of the merchant's blood..." "And Shahrazad perceived the dawn of day and ceased saying her permitted say.... Then thought the King, 'By Allah, I will not slay her until I hear the rest of her tale, for truly it is wondrous.'..." -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- ---------------------------------*=*=*=*=*=*-------------------------------- Robyn Herrington,Editor rmherrin@acs.ucalgary.ca InfoServe www.ucalgary.ca/~rmherrin New Currents in Teaching and Technology Communications Media MacKimmie Library University of Calgary Ph: 220-3716 (temporary) == Inter tormentia latitia == ---------------------------------*=*=*=*=*=*--------------------------------