Noodling New Media

So noodling a catfish means going under the water, sticking your arminto a nest of catfish, and when a lunker bites, you open your fist,grab, and pull the thing out, whole hog so to speak. I'm not sure whatthat has to do with new media except that I learned about this highlyrefined fishing technique at a lunch of our Franklin CenterHASTAC/MacArthur team, at a lunch meeting to plan our meeting afterThanksgiving with the UCHRI part of the team. The lunch, per usual,was part business, and part laughing and enjoying one another. It's agreat team, a little monkey business, and, despite the noodlingstories, nothin fishy. In fact, everything I have read about collaboration suggests that you need some face-to-face or it just doesn't work. Maybe that's why, in last Sunday's NY Times interview, Jimmy Wales, of Wikipedia, says he travels something like 200 or 250 days a year . . . online communities are brought together by lots of mutual trust and face time does that. I guess I better not push that too far . . . noodling is also, I suppose, a kind of face-to-face and look where that got our catfish friend. Enough of this silliness. Just thank you, yet again, to the fine tech teams at Duke and UCHRI. Thanks for a great planning session and a lot of laughter.