From Putnam, 1995:

The most whimsical yet discomfiting bit of evidence of social disengagement in contemporary America that I have discovered is this: more Americans are bowling today than ever before, but bowling in organized leagues has plummeted in the last decade or so. Between 1980 and 1993 the total number of bowlers in America increased by 10 percent, while league bowling decreased by 40 percent … The broader social significance … lies in the social interaction and even occasionally civic conversations over beer and pizza that solo bowlers forgo. Whether or not bowling beats balloting in the eyes of most Americans, bowling teams illustrate yet another vanishing form of social capital.

Edupunk* that I am, I occasionally feel the weight of the world on my shoulders. I have this theory, shared by many, that the Local Internet can start to rebuild the local communities that national TV destroyed over the past 60 years.

And then I think I’ve got to join the struggle and use my knowledge to help fix this. And that’s what I feel I’ve been doing, in one way or another, for quite a few years now.

But occasionally I happen on something that is just *happening*, happening naturally and organically. Something that feels less like rolling rocks uphill and more like bodysurfing the revolution.

XBox Live is such a thing. Until recently I had no idea what this was. I mean, one hears the talk about Second Life, and about World of Warcraft — those efforts and their relation to culture have been dissected quite a bit by academia — themes of value, life building, construction of self and problem solving have been analyzed in these arenas.

But what no one ever mentions is XBox Live and Bowling Alone.

Put simply, here is what I discovered on XBox Live. I started out several weeks ago playing other people nationally that I didn’t know. Random people. I got bored. It was too Compuserve chat room circa 1984.

So I started to badger my friends with XBoxes to get online so I could play them. We got five local people together and broke into teams, playing at three different houses and having one of the most amusing nights in recent memory. We’re now looking at forming a league team together and taking on other teams, or challenging others locally.

And what I found out in the process is that to varying degrees this is how many people are using XBox Live. The kid across the street plays his school friends on XBox live. People friend people they know or invite them to join games they are in. Leagues form, teams are forged. The patter in the games is a combination of tactic talk (“He’s on the balcony — try going up the back stairs while I distract him with a grenade…”) and the regular social patter one hears during any group game.

There is nothing revolutionary about this to anybody doing it. Yet look closely and you’ll see that this is the Local Internet, the process of the Internet rebuilding what the Broadcast Era destroyed.

At the end of the original essay Bowling Alone, Putnam delves into technology’s relation to the erosion of social capital:

In the language of economics, electronic technology enables individual tastes to be satisfied more fully, but at the cost of the positive social externalities associated with more primitive forms of entertainment. The same logic applies to the replacement of vaudeville by the movies and now of movies by the VCR. The new “virtual reality” helmets that we will soon don to be entertained in total isolation are merely the latest extension of this trend. Is technology thus driving a wedge between our individual interests and our collective interests?

The answer to that question, is no, not necessarily. In fact, writing in January of 1995, Putnam may have been marking the high water mark of technology’s power of separation and isolation, the last point where someone could talk about a virtual reality helmet without realizing that it gets awful lonely in that VR world if it’s not populated by people you know.

* I have chosen to spell “edupunk”, when used as a reference to a person, in lower-case. EDUPUNK the movement is, of course, in all caps, ala Jim Groom.

Jim Groom brings a new term into being in a recent post — edupunk.

There’s a couple reasons why I find the term useful, but the most important is that it captures the cultural revulsion many of us feel with the appropriation of the Learning 2.0 movement by corporations such as Blackboard. Learning 2.0, like punk, is a DIY movement. Like punk it favors technical accessibility over grand design.

And to people like us, Learning 2.0, if it is to remain relevant, must not be relegated to the dustbin of “features” or “products”. It’s neither a product or a process, but a way of approaching things, of which products are only one of the results.

Yet all the 2.0 formulations — Classroom 2.0, Learning 2.0, and even Web 2.0 itself — work against this very notion that what we are chasing here is not product, but style. What does the 2.0 version number symbolize if not a shrink-wrapped box or set of features?

What began as a clever pun has outlived its usefulness to us. We’ve known that for a while, but as companies begin to reduce the social web to a set of ingredients in their products — we have to go further than whether product x allows trackbacks or not.

“Edupunk” gets us there — with its implication of technical accessibility, a DIY ethic, quick and dirty over grand design, and a suspicion of corporate appropriation it hits a lot of the right notes.

The wrong notes it hits are mainly historical — because of course punk had surprisingly little social impact — and it’s worth remembering the same attitudes that kept it pure relegated it to being a tribal phenomenon rather than a broad cultural movement. Punk culture valued its exile from the mainstream. We want to change the world.

That inevitiably leads to a lot of compromises. But when we stray too far into the world of enterprise software, three-month timelines and eight page budgets — when we have to concede the assessment system will likely be a centralized corporate affair — on days like that, maybe edupunk is the cassette we throw into the tape deck on the way home, the tape that reminds us loudly of who we are, in three chords or less.

It’s obviously late here … thoughts?

I always *felt* like I should be a gamer. After all, I built educational games for a good portion of my career — first for children (reading readiness software), then for Columbia University and Cable & Wireless, where the name of the game was social simulations — choose-your-own-adventure style scenarios where you interacted with professional environments — and if you made the wrong decision you could bring your team/company/state/country down with you.

So I tried to play recreational computer games. I really tried. Since I like to solve puzzles I kept buying PC based “adventure” games. And since I’m not a violent sort I steered away from the gore.

But every game I played seemed like the same game. And that game was “Try to figure out what the game designer thought an appropriate action would be in this context.”

I’m sure you know this game. It starts with you watching a film intro, and then some objective is voiced. Maybe you have to get to Room 306 or something. Maybe you have to find the crystal ionizer.

So you walk around a room, and the first steps come easy. Wow, there’s a note there! What does it say?

But then you try to exit the room for 30 minutes without success. Why won’t that door open? Am I at the wrong door?

And then the answer, stupid me, would be that the card under the coffee cup was actually a key card for the door. It goes (don’t you know) in the slot you saw on the floor on the other side of the room.

That’s thirty minutes of my life I’m not going to get back. And it’s thirty minutes of trying to guess what an “appropriate” solution is.

Worse, it’s thirty minutes of trying to figure out what an “appropriately creative” solution is. And that’s just maddening.

So I gave up on games for a while. Until one week I decided to borrow my brother’s XBox and see what the hullaballoo about Halo 3 was. And from the moment I started playing it, I realized I had it backwards on games.

Whatever your feeling about the subject matter, the battle games are the educational games. Why? Because as you run through scenarios dying repeatedly, you are forced to look at the thing, not from the perspective of WWGDD (What would game designers do?) but from the perspective of systems analysis. Have you chosen the correct weapons to make it through the hall? Would a short range weapon with a bigger kick be more appropriate? Are you dying because you are trying to take out too many of the enemy before proceeding — or do maybe you need to dash through *more* quickly? Is the risk of making the dash to the weapons cabinet worth the pay off here? What’s the optimum route through the level?

You have resources and potential paths. You can combine them in ways the game designer might not expect. There are multiple working paths to any achievement. You play co-op mode with others, and you develop team strategies (“You go this way with the gravity hammer and I’ll snipe with the 50 cal…”). And every time you die (which if you are me, is a *lot*), you evaluate that crucial question Seth Godin refers to as the question of “The Dip”: Is my set of tactics sound, but requiring more polish in execution? Or is my approach fundamentally flawed?

And, again, you do this all by studying the way the system operates instead of playing a senseless game of WWGDD.

You may find the content disturbing. Personally, as silly as it may sound, I can’t play games where I’m shooting realistic humans in a current war. I have to shoot aliens, or people so far back in history that I’m removed from the geopolitical implications.

It’s an odd line, but somehow it works for me.

But strip away concerns about the violence and the process of playing Halo or Gears of War is more educational, and will teach you more about analyzing problems than any “intellectual” game on the market. There’s an honesty to these games, and within tight constraints, an emergent element. No, it’s not Spore, or Civilization IV. And you can’t build your own weapons or design your own level (it turns out you can design your own level, see comments). You can’t mashup elements from other games into Halo.

But you can study a system that operates in a discoverable way, and develop an approach that makes the best use of tools and available cover. You can develop a strategy that it’s just possible no one has discovered before. That beats trying to figure out what cleverly hidden object you need to open a door any day of the week.

Vista on my budget laptop was the straw that broke the camel’s back. (really, there must be a better and more current saying for that, but I’m pre-coffee today).

I was losing an untold amount of time clicking links and x’s and waiting for Vista to do something (anything!). I was watching as Vista crashed — loading Flash. And most disturbingly I was spending a half hour a night shutting down my system, navigating a complex maze of hung processes and nonsense prompts (and yes, even “shutdown -f” did not solve it). I ended up leaving my laptop on all night, because I simply did not have time to shut it down. This, of course, further exacerbated the slowness.

So I tried to downgrade to XP, but it was a disaster. I mean, it didn’t even recognize my CD drive. I actually installed XP onto the laptop from the CD, and once it was installed, it didn’t recognize it.

I know I was installing a 2002 version of XP onto a 2007 laptop. But still, that’s capital-C crazy.

Plus, to get the pleasure of a broken installation I had to run around the house for 4 hours trying to find the key to the legal disk I bought 4 years ago. And I was not a pleasant person during those four hours.

Things like that can really damage a marriage. So I finally decided, since the XP (contrary to my instructions) had already cleared my hard drive, to try and install Linux. I’d tried this before on a laptop four years ago. I steeled myself for the worst.

I got Mandriva, because my research showed its installation was the best out of the box fit with my hardware. I popped it in.

And in 30 minutes my sytem was working. And not just working — flying. I mean, I’m writing this post and you know what I did? I started my laptop (up in 60 seconds). I clicked the firefox icon, and firefox started in under 5 seconds. I sent it to my wordpress page — instantaneous!

That’s less than 90 seconds to get here and start doing something productive. With Vista under my laptop specs I couldn’t get here in under 10 minutes.

It’s hard to fully explain what that means to a person who steals what moments they can to blog — but I think some of my readers will get it.

The fact I waited so long to do this can only mean I was suffering from some sort of battered OS user syndrome. Life with my new OS isn’t perfect — the wifi card ain’t working, so I may have to get something external. But I’m spending so much more time doing things rather than watching my system think. I’m loving it.

More as this develops…

So I was unaware until I got a twitter from Jim that the UMW faculty academy was on UStream.tv.

They are off air right now, but they should be starting up around 11:15. I’ve embedded the Ustream below.

Live Videos provided by Ustream.TV

The Janet Murray presentation was wonderful, and the the faculty participation was absolutely stunning. Whatever they are putting in the water down there, I want some of it.

I’m a big fan of Ning, and lately I’ve been gearing up to launch an Alumni site in it. The first email invites will go out tomorrow.

Well, not exactly the first invites. And therein lies a story.

See, before I launched this, I tried a little experiment and invited a few of my alumni friends to a prototype site. The site grew by leaps and bounds until it reached 31 members, most of them not invited by me. Many invited by people not invited by me.

There were postings, reconnections, forums. For that period of time people were addicted, clearly stopping by the site obsessively. From February 13 to March 20, it was *the* place to be.

Then suddenly — not so much. I mean *really* not so much. Everybody disappeared, almost overnight.

There’s a number of reasons, I think. One being that initial activity was heavily about reconnecting and once new people stopped coming in, the site died. Another being that at thirty-one members, the site was just too small. The people that post the majority of content in things like these seem to number about one or two in a hundred — at 31 people, the flow of content was too unstable. (At Blue Hampshire we got well over a thousand members, and 600 readers a day, but the site is still dependent on 12 or so regulars who post).

I also think that a lot of times you set it up to have this explosive activity, but after the dust settles if you did it on a large scale you’re left with your regulars. So some amount of contraction is expected.

Still, I can’t help thinking of that Annie Hall quote about the shark (first 10 seconds of this trailer):

Do online social networks have to keep on moving forward or they die? It’s definitely something we’ll be looking at as we launch the alumni site. There’s nothing more unattractive than a dead shark.