A little gif(t)

Had a surprise waiting for me in the mail this week: Virtual Publics: Policy and Community in an Electronic Age, edited by my friend and one-time member of my dissertation committee, Beth Kolko. And yes, I only mention it because chapter 10 is a little essay called "Where do you want to learn tomorrow? The paradox of the virtual university," authored by myself.

Every academic, I suspect, has stories of that one essay that was written only to have publication held up by the process, and "Paradox" is that essay for me. In this case, there's a little bonus irony to the fact that it's a book that specifically surveys technology and makes some attempt to be current. And it would have been, back in the year 2000. I'm sure that there's more to the story than this, but it appears that Columbia UP has been sitting on it for three years now, and I'm sure that this will have an effect on the quality/currency of the work that we did as contributors. In my case, writing an essay on distance education that doesn't make mention of course management systems like Blackboard and WebCT seems inadvisable at best, even though they were only just emerging as legitimate options when I wrote the chapter.

But then again, it's not really all bad. Any essay that cites Antoine-Nicolas de Condorcet, a 19th-century French historian, can't exactly lay an absolute claim to the cutting edge, now, can it? The point of the chapter is really more philosophical than technical, I suppose. Had I been told 3 or 4 years ago that only now would people be reading the essay for the first time, it wouldn't have made a whole lot of difference. Yes, I know that I'm assuming that people will read it. Still, it makes me wonder how/if our scholarship would improve if everything we published had to endure a 3 to 4-year lag. There aren't too many essays that I've written that would suffer terribly for that. And yes, I know that this speculation is taking place in the land of daily updated, spontaneously gratifying weblogs.

Thanks for reminding me.