... just reading again bryan's conversation with howard rheingold (M-learning for generation txt) on the "swarming nomads" invading US colleges & universities. maybe it's different in the US, but i haven't seen many of them here in non-Scandinavian Europe. they are more like an avant-garde which is interesting for predicting future developments, but ... 90 % my students seem rather disorientated. so what about the mainstream of rootless media fugitives, young and old, camping out in the deserts of the real, after the Big Wall has finally been broken? while the old reliable structures (old media structures, knowledge structures) have been pulverized, and while new media/knowledge structures are not really here yet? trying to warm themselves on the old TV-fireplaces, sending desperate messages in digital micro bottles (e-mails, sms-as-sos). Talking all the time into their mobile phones alright, but without having a clue how to use those 'warm' communication devices as 'cool' media. Staring into the web screens, helplessly questioning the Google Oracle, but still craving for the lost Emperor's Grand Library and Archive, back then, when the Forbidden City had been in bloom. (Of course they never really had a chance to see anything of this library's contents, except the corrupted, out-of-context excerpts, with which the cities and villages had been flooded by the Emperor's lying envoys ...)