Bakhtinian through and through. Perfect.

I sure do miss our dialogics. But it’s also wonderful, even though tinged with melancholy, to watch even at a distance as you continue to do your amazing Martha amazingness. The whole P2 thing–whoosh, that’s all, just whoosh.

Keep that spiral ascending, my friend.

One further wrinkle however. The long tail makes even more-or-less nonce sites like this one unpredictable in their effects as time goes by. Sorta like teaching that way. So long as these narratives, resources, and so forth persist, they can be discovered and used as models, as inspiration, etc. etc. Stuff to point to. A mountain called Faculty Academy, with clear mountain streams, fragrant forests, and the world’s best lodge at the summit (or, perhaps, just beneath the summit).

Maybe there’s a lesson here. Plan for the wrong kind of permanence, and you get the Pyramids. Impressive, but after all, they’re tombs. Write stories in letters to your kids, and eventually you get “The Hobbit” and more.

What we really need to talk about here is the notion of sustainability. When sustainability becomes a set of deadly concrete overshoes, well, then what we really need to talk about here is sustainability.

I’ve been thinking a lot about these issues lately. Your blog posts crystallizes these issues beautifully. I have faith in network effects even when the analytics aren’t demonstrating how they’re happening.