Pondering Ponderables

Hi everyone. It has been nutty around the virtual homesteads these last few weeks. The good doctor and I partook of heady discussions today in Senate around the future of our university as an independent, non-affiliated star in the glittering constellation of provincial universities. Needless to say, everyone is pretty much tired of listening to me harp on about projected library costs through to 2013, so I began pondering where Dave and I should wander next in the podcast.

One thing I would like to go back to at some point is some sort of comparison of Creative Commons, CopyLeft, etc. to other periods of intense thinking of rights, relationships, and all that jazz (do not tell the RIAA! -- I'm only going to take some of that jazz). Where have these come from? What cultural elements combined, and especially what is lacking in our society that has led to all sorts of people defining rights, drafting mini-constitutions and so on.

Woodrow Wilson liked to do that sort of thing for fun as an academic (and I suppose as President, SEE League of Nations), but it seems a lot of people in their own way have become Locke and Hobbes, Mill and Bentham, and so on. If I can re-word Kant: Is it Enlightenment? Or do we just have a lot of little sandboxes being fenced differently?

Dave and I also have been involved in some "blue-skying" about using Web 2.0 tools for recruitment and marketing. It was interesting to mix with different sorts of people from the campus who would come at the final product(s) from different perspectives. And of course everyone around the table brought different awareness levels of the big bad Web 2.0 world, so that made it interesting and could make for something to yap about.

Anyhooo, we will get back on the tubes as soon as possible. Thanks for your patience and comments. And remember... it looks like BSG will be back in April!