Thursday, October 4, 2007

Prof Pausch's Last Lecture

I've played Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon before, and you'd think as many movies as I watch, I'd be better at it. This is sort of like that, only there are just two degrees of separation here.

I sat at a conference room table today at a sadly ill-attended meeting of the Faculty Forum at the academic institution where I taught for a total of eight years before moving over to the administration building. I haven't been in the classroom in over a year, but I still attend meetings of the faculty group, to which I still belong. Across from me sat Professor Barry Fagin. I wouldn't say we are friends, exactly, but we are certainly steadfast acquaintances. That is, though we come to the table from widely different disciplines (Computer Science and English), and seldom see each other away from these meetings, nonetheless, when we do run into one another, even off campus, we can still greet one another by name. And, more often than not, we find ourselves on the same side of most issues.

So, though I haven't yet watched the video to which I'm going to provide links here, Barry has, and Barry knew Professor Pausch well, and if Barry says, in his op-ed piece in today's paper, that I should see it, save it, and watch it with my kids, then I'll take his word for it.

For a small taste, here is a brief summary of news coverage, lifted from Prof Pausch's own site:

- There has been a lot of media coverage : The Good Morning, America piece is available here. Their followup piece (answering viewer's questions) is here. The Wall Street Journal article is here, their online video coverage is available here, their follow-up article is here, and a followup video is here. Steve Hartman and the CBS Evening News piece is here, with additional "only on the web" footage here.
The lecture is part of the Journeys series at Carnegie Mellon. And I look forward to having the time soon to watch it myself.

Here is the text.

Here is the video.