Andy Carvin's Waste of Bandwidth

“Somebody needs to fire Johnny Damon,” I remember saying to Susanne several days ago, after the Red Sox outfielder had whiffed another at-bat. “And Mark Bellhorn while they’re at it.”

Like so many lifelong Red Sox fans, I was frustrated. Damn Frustrated. Ever since watching that ball go through Buckner’s legs nearly two decades ago, I’d questioned whether the Sox would ever get it right. Last year just exacerbated that sense of doubt. My faith had lapsed long ago.

So as the Red Sox fought their way back against the Yankees in game four, I felt very happy for them that they were regaining their dignity, but I refused to let myself believe they really stood a chance of capturing the pennant. The players said they’d take it one day at a time, which seemed like sound advice, but in my heart I knew that Beantown was setting itself up for another heartbreak.

Then I watched game five, just down the street from Fenway at An Tua Nua. When they finally won after nearly six hours of play, we rushed into the streets and joined the throngs of people exiting the park. Like I wrote in my blog that night, it was like Paris for New Years 2000. Sheer joy, sheer revelry. (I even screamed “Bonne annŽe!” in the Red Sox parking lot.) Of course, the Sox had two games to play in the Bronx, so I decided to enjoy the moment and not worry about the potential let-down that lay ahead.

But as game six played itself out, with Curt Schilling pitching a masterful game as blood ran through his sock, I realized that while my faith had been shaken badly over the years, this team’s faith had not. Stat for stat, they may not have been the better of the two teams — I still am in awe by the Yankee’s lineup — but the Sox had a fighting spirit that burned in their souls. It was a spirit that seemed sorely lacking whenever you watched Jeter, A-Rod or Matsui at bat. They may be great players, but their hearts didn’t seem in the game. And as Schilling left the mound for the last time, I felt that ray of hope. Is this really the year?

Last night’s game was sheer anxiety. It didn’t matter they spanked the Yankees from every conceivable angle; even until the bottom of the ninth I wondered exactly what the Yanks would do to pull it off. In retrospect the anxiety made no sense, but 86 years of history tugged at my rationality. I had to spend the rest of the inning standing; I just couldn’t sit down knowing what was about to happen. The Red Sox were really going to beat the Yankees and go to the World Series.

My mom called me at midnight from her hospital room in Florida, in the final commercial break before the game ended. She was recovering from surgery and had a bit of a fever, but she sounded on top of the world. The game wasn’t over, but for all intents and purposes, we knew it really was.

“Your grandfather is smiling right now,” she said. He was a star high school pitcher in Worcester back in the 1930s, and even tried out for the Boston Braves, just before he got drafted – by the army. The Red Sox last won the Series when he was six years old, and he spent the remaining 72 years of his life wondering if they’d ever do it again.

They haven’t done it yet, Grandpa. But they beat the Yankees in seven, and that’s one hell of a start…. -andy

Some of you may have noticed a slight change to my blog. A few weeks ago, I bought the domain name www.andycarvin.com so I could start using it as a new shortcut to my blog. The original address, www.edwebproject.org/andy/blog, still works, but it was always a little hard for people to remember. There’s no need to update your bookmarks or anything since both addresses will work, but hopefully www.andycarvin.com will make it easier for people to figure it out. Same bat content, same bat channel; just a different bat URL… -andy

For those of you watching the Red Sox battle the Yankees on TV, have you noticed the industrial hum while listening to the game? It kinda sounds like the background hum of the ship on Star Trek: The Next Generation. If you don’t hear it, listen to the game carefully and wait for a commercial break, and you’ll notice its absence as soon as they go to a commercial break.

Anyway, the reason I bring it up is that my entire apartment sounds like that at the moment — and it’s not because I’m watching the game. It’s coming from outside.

You see, we live less than a mile away from Fenway, and the entire neigborhood sounds like we’re all hording electrical generators in our backyards. At first I thought it was just coming from the TV, but then I turned down the volume and noticed that I could hear the same hum in every room of our apartment.

What’s causing it, you might ask? I’m not positive, but if I ventured a guess (and I will, since that’s what blogging’s all about), it’s the numerous blimps and helicopters hovering over the neighborhood. The last time I looked outside, there were two blimps and at least one helicopter hovering over Fenway. Since they have to travel in wide arcs over the sky, they’re constantly coming into the airspace over our apartment: hence the perpetual hum. I’d noticed a similar phenomenon during previous Sox games, but with the attention of the entire sports universe focused on Fenway, there’s more air traffic than usual over Kenmore Square and eastern Brookline.

It’s strangely comforting hearing that hum outside; after going to bed last night around 11:30pm I certainly didn’t expect a repeat of it. If I were an optimist, I’d say I’d hope to hear it again some time next week. But that would betray the whole ethos of being a Red Sox fan, right? -andy

Hi everyone,

This week marks the 10-year anniversary of my educational website, EdWeb: Exploring Technology and School Reform, and my personal website/blog, Andy Carvin’s Waste of Bandwidth.

For those of you who weren’t online then, in the summer of ‘94 I was on Northwestern’s Annenberg-Washington fellowship at the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), where I was encouraged to find a research project and self-publish. I decided to look at the confluence of education technology, school reform, attempts to overhaul telecom policy and the birth of the “information highway.”

Over the course of that summer, I spent a lot of time emailing people on various listservs and researching gopher servers to collect my data. A handful of very kind people — Bonnie Bracey of the NII Advisory Council, Patsy Wang-Iverson of Research for Better Schools, Larry Irving at NTIA, Jamie Wilkerson at Kidlink, Larry Anderson at Mississippi State — all took the time to reply to my questions and help me think through these issues, which as a lowly grad student were still quite new to me.

Based on all the information I collected, I wrote a series of essays about education, telecom reform, this new “World Wide Web” and what it would mean for schools, etc, then broke them down into small blocks of information that would be hyperlinked together, modeling them on “Engines for Education,” a hypertext book written by a former Northwestern professor of mine, Roger Schank.

Since CPB didn’t have a web server at the time, I learned HTML and converted my rickety old Mac into a server. Along with the collection of essays, I created Andy Carvin’s Waste of Bandwidh, a personal web page to update friends and family about what I was doing at any given time. Every now and then I’d update it with a new blurb: a link to an essay I’d written, a travelogue, conference updates, etc. (After many years I got sick of hand-coding the page, so I converted it to a blog so posting would be more automated.)

Both EdWeb and Andy Carvin’s Waste of Bandwidth went online the week of October 12, 1994. I announced it on several education listservs, including edtech and lm_net. A copy of my original announcement can be found in my October 1994 blog archive.

Little did I know it at the time, but EdWeb set me off on a new career path. The response to the site was overwhelming. It was the first website reviewed by Harvard Education Review, and was plugged by Esther Dyson in her writings about the Internet. I began to get so many emails from people wanting to talk about the role of the Web in education, I created an email discussion list, WWWEDU, which will celebrate its 10th anniversry this December 1st.

Soon my fellowship at CPB turned into a full-time job as a program officer developing grant programs to promote constructivist edtech initiatives and community networking grants to fund the development of locally relevant content. That work later led to my five years at the Benton Foundation, before moving up to Boston with Benton’s Digital Divide Network to launch the EDC Center for Media & Community last February. Who knew that a crudely designed website would lead me this way…

Over the years, EdWeb and my Waste of Bandwidth moved from a server at CPB, to CNIDR in North Carolina, to Global Schoolhouse in southern California, and finally back to North Carolina as part of the UNC Sunsite/Ibiblio.org project. Ibiblio still hosts all of my content for free, as did the others, and I’m grateful for their assistance over the years.

With all the other projects I do now, EdWeb is largely a snapshot in time, a look at the issue of education technology as it was being examined during the early years of the Internet. Meanwhile, I still use my EdWeb domain to host my blog and a collection of other websites, including travelogues and my history of the rise and fall of the Khmer Rouge, From Sideshow to Genocide. I’ve recently set up andycarvin.com as a shortcut to my blog, but it’s still hosted at EdWeb as well.

So if you haven’t visited in a while, please come to http://www.edwebproject.org and take a walk through my small contribution to edtech. And if you get a chance, post a comment on my blog and say hello when you get a chance… -andy

My buddies at the Omidyar Network never cease to amaze me. About 24 hours ago, I reported that several forum members were discussing a strategy to mobilize biking enthusiasts to help get out the vote on election day. It seemed like a great idea — if it only had a cool name and a website to get the campaign going.

Well, I went to bed, woke up this morning and quickly discovered that the idea had quickly evolved into Spokes4Votes.com.

Operating under the slogan, “Get on your bike and ride the streets like Paul Revere,” Spokes4Votes wants to encourage as many people as possible to hop on their bikes on election day, ride around to cafes and other hangouts, encouraging people to vote, while swinging by the local bicycle shops to rope in other volunteers. For people who want to do their part but haven’t gotten involved in a campaign, it’s a great way to promote civic participation — and get some exercise in the process.

So come November 2, do your civic duty and vote. Then get on your bike and earn some political karma by getting others to do the same — then ride like the wind, baby…. -andy