I put Mega in the title because I live on Hyperbole Mountain.  The air is thin up here but you get used to it.

So 2010 is done, finished, dead.  Long live 2010.  It was a strange year at times and filled with enough plot twists to embarrass Tom Clancy, but we made it through.  I wanted to do something a little special for the Commons to celebrate so I went through all of this year’s Footenotes and pulled out my 5 favorite moments from the blogs.

For starters though – New Years always makes me a little sentimental so I just want to say thank you to everyone on the Commons team for being the best crew of people I’ve had the pleasure to work with.   I’ve worked a lot of places and I’ve never worked with a crew of folks so excited about what they’re doing and dedicated to building something that matters.  From everyone I’ve had the pleasure to meet on the CAT Sub-Committee to my fellow Community Facilitators, it’s an absolute privilege to be a part of this project and I’m looking forward to everything ahead of us in 2011.

With that said I’d also like to thank everyone on the Commons.  It’s been amazing to watch this community grow (in fact double it’s size!) in the last year and I look forward to reading all of the blogs every week.  The wit, insight and enthusiasm here is contagious.  I’m grateful that you in the CUNY community come to the Commons every week to share yourselves with everyone.  Thank you for helping us build a community that spans across the university and helps bring CUNY together.  I know blogging can be a chore sometimes and I know that there’s tons of other places you could do it at so it’s no small thing that you choose to make the Commons a home for your voice.

Alright, alight – before we all have to break out the tissues…in no particular order I bring you Footenote’s 5 favorite moments in Commons blogs!

5. The Obama Presidency.  There wasn’t one particular moment on this blog that I can really pin down as outstanding – it’s the whole thing.  I don’t just mean the content, which is always good reading, but the whole phenomenon.  This blog crept up on me.  It started quietly with little posts here and there and then suddenly there was this whole cadre of writers making like 5 posts a week.  All of the post, ranging from sharp policy analysis to the downright bizarre, deserve a read and I’m glad they’ve kept up the pace.  I admittedly failed my CUNY pedigree.  A good CUNYite keeps pushing and after the election I was just glad to see the old crew out and Obama in.  Sure, he’d break my heart here and there, but I was always the first to make excuses for him.  But the good folks over at ‘The Obama Presidency’ are putting in the work to keep us critical of the president.  Good on ya.

4. I know we’re all a bunch of serious academic types but we’re also New Yorkers.  The hard fact is – you can’t be a New Yorker if you don’t know nothing about pizza.  I know it’s cruel.  “But I’m a vegan!” Don’t worry, we got that.  “I can’t eat gluten!” Seriously relax, we got that too.  Face it, there’s no way around it.  Fortunately here on the Commons the good people over at CUNY Pie are ready to go.  Forget for a moment that a bunch of the folks from the Commons team are in CUNY Pie.  Footenotes wouldn’t put them on the list just because I like the guys.  No no friends, what earned CUNY Pie a spot on the list was this gem from back in May:

“As understood by those who tout the project as an extended experiment in academic social spaces, CUNY Pie bears a weight far greater than even the low-grade mozzarella heaped lovelessly on a Sbarro slice. Is pizza and beer the lubricant for an academic conversation of more significance? Are instructional technology and postulation on the future of university just excuses to go to Patsy’s? Or does the situation of CUNY Pie within the CUNY Academic Commons or even CUNY as a whole challenge the presumption that there is a justifiable distinction between social and academic behavior? In what can only be described as an instance of academia’s tragic instinct to overtheorize the beautiful, pie theory threatens to outshadow pie eating.”

I mean come on…the give awards to whole books that don’t have half as much heart.

3.  Way back in June Aaron Kendall @AKendall took us all to Iceland.  What would he find?  What treasures were out there in the earth?  We spent weeks with Aaron through some ups and downs as he and his student crew walked us through the excavation process.  Then we hit paydirt! There were pipes and dice and a knife and some buttons!  It was a lot of fun watching Aaron and the crew get to work out there and made for some pretty compelling reading each week for all of us around this summer.  This was exactly the kind of thing we hoped people would do with the blogs on the Commons and I’m glad I got to see it.  Thanks again Aaron and we’re looking forward to next summer.

2.  Joseph Ugoretz posted ‘What “Online Lectures” Can and Should Be‘ back in June and it’s stuck with me since.  There are two reasons I keep coming back to it.  For starters, this was the first place I saw the amazing David Harvey lecture on the financial crisis posted in the link.  If you missed it somehow you should definitely watch it.  In light of Ireland’s recent financial troubles it’s incredibly interesting to see where we’ve landed 6 months since I first saw it.  But more importantly this post deserves another look from everyone here on the Commons because it raises some points we should continually be considering.  As hybrid classes and online education continue to grow and become the norm for higher education, we’re all going to have to seriously think about what the limits of the recorded lecture are and how we can best maximize all of this wonderful technology at our fingertips to push the envelope and makes more out of the medium of the internet.  I realize we don’t always (ever…) have access to a talented team of animators to help bring our lectures to life, but this post raised some salient points and it deserves another go-round to keep it front of mind.

1.  In the middle of the summer the Commons got it’s first and only music blog.  Helldriver pulled up and started posting some of the best writing on music I had ever read.  I learned about artists I had never heard of.  Notes became technicolor as I dutifully tracked down whatever jazz or classical piece he recommended.I mean we followed him to the Brooklyn Masonic Lodge to catch Immortal.  Then suddenly it was as if someone dragged the arm of a turntable across a record.  It was as if a champagne glass were dropped on a marble floor.

Helldriver fearlessly blogged about his love for Rush.

None of the warning signs were there.  I mean you think you know someone.

But there it was.  About 12 paragraphs worth of Rush apologia.  I’m sure the first time I read it must have slowly stopped chewing whatever pen cap I had and sat there blank faced scrolling down in disbelief.  All of that writing talent summoned up to defend the band that spawned an army of shifty red-headed music step children with black jeans and old Air Jordans doing air drums in their Mom’s Buick Regals.  Helldriver knew the risk, he said as much:

So … to post or not to post? This will throw a ghastly light over all my previous posts, I’m sure. All trust will be lost (trust is such a fragile thing, and so dearly earned!), all previous thoughts discredited, all endorsements made suspect. It’s a skeleton key for understanding my whole listening past, some vulgar Freudian plot worthy of ‘40s Hollywood, my musical primal scene disseminated throughout the web. I was supposed to get over this. Really. But I keep listening. That’s bad, isn’t it. Is it? I like dinosaurs, too. Sometimes, I watch Shark Week on the Discovery Channel. Jesus, Shark Week. That is bad. Should I have said that? Get out your little notepads, all of you. Scribble scribble scribble. Ah, see, I told you, didn’t I? I’m afraid that’s very bad. Ve-ry bad …

It was a scandal to be sure, but I must say…it was one of the finest moments on the blogs as far as Footenotes is concerned.  If I was hard on you in that week’s round-up I apologize.  It took guts and that’s what the Commons blogs are all about.  Stand up and be counted Helldriver and thanks for all the great posts.

***

Thanks again everyone for a wonderful year on the blogs.  Tim Wilson, Tony Picciano, Appalachian Anthology, there’s too many to keep going. To all the blogs that have gone fallow and all the blogs on their way – thanks again for sharing here and I look forward to it every single week.  Have a wonderful, wonderful New Years!

See ya next week.