What do Bruce Sterling, Twitter, Emily Dickinson, and the bava have in common?

They’re all recommendations in this week’s New York Times Magazine.

NYT Magazine

As you can see the bava keeps only the best of company 🙂 More seriously, I’m really not sure how or why the hell this happened, but I find it pretty crazy—there isn’t even mention of EDUPUNK. So, in the words of Jello Biaffra, “Rick Wakeman eat your heart out.” Looks like it’s bava big time now, bitches, let the hating commence—I’m ready for all y’all!

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23 Responses to What do Bruce Sterling, Twitter, Emily Dickinson, and the bava have in common?

  1. Gardner says:

    No hating here, just an “attaway.” Eye-opening is right. Keep ’em coming, Jim, and congratulations.

  2. John Maxwell says:

    Hey, forget hating… How about some simple pagerank-whoring? I have no other reason for commenting than to hitch my boxcar to your glitzy locomotive. Except maybe to say congrats!

  3. Reverend says:

    Thanks Gardner,

    It’s funny how odd I feel about all this, and sometimes fell like my blog persona has taken over. I make no money doing this and I get little or no recognition from my institution for the work I have done there with edtech. So I guess these days I’m just grasping at straws. But let there be no question about it, this blog has been the best therapy a psycho like myself has ever gotten. I can pretty much say or do whatever I want, and have yet to be truly called on it. Even when I was sure what I was writing would bury me, it has seemed to do exactly the opposite—it is all so weird. I really don’t know how to think about it, so I guess I won’t all that much.

    @John,

    Page-rank whoring, now you’re speaking my language 😉

  4. jmcclurken says:

    “I make no money doing this and I get little or no recognition from my institution for the work I have done there with edtech.”

    Okay, I don’t have any money to give you, but I did plug you and the way you and DTLT have allowed UMW to participate in national conversations on the cutting edge of academia to a group of alums today. [I even pointed out this mention in the Times.]

  5. Matt says:

    Even when I was sure what I was writing would bury me, it has seemed to do exactly the opposite

    But that’s the beauty of blogging, Jim. When one’s shots are fired simultaneously from the hip and the heart, they always find their mark.

    Congrats, Jimmy — very well deserved!!

  6. Reverend says:

    @Jeff,

    See, now I feel like a jerk, because it is the backs of faculty members like you that I am riding on, so it is all so complex and stupid. And recognition and money are just two cheap ways out of how uncomfortable I feel. So, let me be clear, you and every other faculty who have paved the way with all this stuff are far more derserving than I, and it is why I have been feeling so strange about things. I should want to celebrate the change in this blog over the last year, but I just can;t help but feel it has further alienated my own idea of what the hell I am doing. The internet will give birth to a whole new strain of schizophrenia, believe you me.

    @Matt,

    I guess I am having a hard time distinguishing between my hip and my heart these days, and the deserving part just sends me in to a tailspin. Deserving of what? Simply because I speak my mind? It just goes to show how many people are still petrified to do so, and that just makes me more depressed. And the day this all comes back to bite me in the ass is one a am currently cherishing.

  7. Steven Egan says:

    So does this mean you can have a Wikipedia page?

    Oh, and you’re not alone with speaking your mind. 😛

  8. jmcclurken says:

    No reason for you to feel like a jerk. Half of the innovative stuff that we do wouldn’t get noticed if it wasn’t for you A) pushing us to do it and B) publicizing what we do in a New York Times Magazine-celebrated blog.

  9. Gardner says:

    Ok, as long as we’ve got the dogpile going:

    It’s ironic that I just finished watching “The Wanderers” at long last. I had to watch most of it with the commentary track on, as I needed a Virgil to guide me through a land that’s pretty foreign to me. Phil Kaufman’s a pretty fine Virgil, so no complaints there. But I did feel afterwards that I understood something about Jim Groom that I hadn’t quite grokked before. Strangely, I also felt more connected in terms of our very different pasts that aren’t quite so different after all, though you’ll find more of me in “Spencer’s Mountain,” a movie that can’t hold a candle to Kaufman’s masterpiece….

    I’ll speak from my heart here. The whole UMW phenomenon happened and keeps happening because of and in spite of a lot of things. If we wrote ’em all down, no one would believe us. We all rode on each other’s backs, and we’re all riding there still. Every lead role and every bit part had some weird, uncanny, often counterintuitive part to play. Smooth inside game, erratic outsiders and outliers, anarchists, punks, rockers, hippies, web artists, media experts, suits and nuts and dreamers, all. What ignited in the spring of 2006 came out of fires that were burning for decades before the Dream Team came together, and will keep on lighting the way no matter what comes of LMS’s Sharepoint, Higher Education, Twitter, or SXSW.

    Whether any of your efforts or anyone’s efforts are noticed or celebrated for the right reasons, the work we’ve done together will never go away. What the students, faculty, and staff of UMW were and are able to build and share with the world will persist and be built on. They can’t put that genie back in the bottle. So I’m marking the NYT’s celebration of you and the bava as a win for real school. Real school’s always got your back, bava.

    I know there are plenty of conflicting and conflicted feelings going around. I’ve had my share and no doubt will continue to have them. Speaking for myself, I probably won’t ever get to the bottom of that. But I don’t have to figure any of that out to know that this one’s a win for real school, if that’s what we say it is.

    So I’m raising my glass to you, Jim, and to the bava. Congratulations. Keep on speaking the password primeval.

    I speak the password primeval, I give the sign of democracy,
    By God! I will accept nothing which all cannot have their counterpart of on the same terms.

    “Have you blogged yet today?”

  10. If it makes you feel any better, Jim, I’m h8ing on you and the bava both. “Don’t hate me because I’m beautiful!” Zombie, please.

  11. Reverend says:

    @Jeff,
    You rule.

    @Gardner,
    What can I say but I’ll drink to that!

    @Trip,
    As you can see I’m not entirely comfortable with all this, in part because I am, indeed, a zombie 🙂

  12. chad black says:

    The New York Times? Oh, that is so NOT punk. What’s next, bava makes the pages of The New Republic, or would it be Billboard Magazine? 😉

  13. Reverend says:

    Chad,

    I was hoping for Playboy, or even Playgirl 🙂

  14. Mike Bogle says:

    Some well-deserved recognition if you ask me. Congratulations 🙂

  15. Ed Webb says:

    Sterling company indeed, Jim. I must say I read it as a desperate grab for cred on the part of the NYT.

  16. Mikhail says:

    Wow, congrats, Jim. Bavabigtime, baby.

  17. Virginia says:

    I’m a huge fan. You made the Sterling, like so much else, clear to me. Thank you.

    Virginia Heffernan
    desperate grabber for cred
    NYT

  18. Reverend says:

    @Mike,
    Well, this is not what I expected, you’re all be too nice, still waiting for the modesty squad up North to get on this blog and start heckling me.

    @Ed,
    Now there’s a new reading, the bava is all about credibility and all the b-media fit for print.

    @Mikhail
    And just think, you were there at the very beginning with thisevil and planetmiles—how far we have come 😉

    @Heather,
    Well thank you, I was pretty blown away by the blurb, and it’s very cool to associate that now with a person, I do appreciate the kind words—even if they make me all self conscious as you can see above 🙂

    And I have to say the fact that Sterling’s talk is not yet online is killing me, cause I still don’t know how off the mark my reading of his thoughts truly is yet with that Connectivity as Poverty post.

  19. Ed Webb says:

    Don’t get me wrong – I love the NYT enough to subscribe to the dead-tree version seven days a week, eco-scruples be damned. It’s a marvelous institution. But it’s not very street, is it? Not down with the kids, or even the middle-aged edupunks and futurists. Maybe this kind of association with the bava will save the ol’ grey lady yet.

    And yes, Jim, it’s killing me (as someone who couldn’t be there) that Chairman Bruce’s words are not roaming the net for me to hunt down. Perhaps he can be induced to do one of these – http://blog.wired.com/sterling/2009/03/what-bruce-ster.html – now that the INS is (we hope) not trying to break up his marriage.

    On which point, I feel a blog post coming on about what Egyptian Islamist radicals and the INS have in common. Best get my Green Card renewed first, though.

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