I sit at the coffee shop table writing in one of my myriad paper notebooks, at a table well away from the power outlets (I’ve learned that if I sit too near an outlet it isn’t too long before my space is being eyed hungrily by someone wielding a laptop, all of whom have learned– as I have on those rare occasions that I fire my own up– to always plug in when possible same way it is wise to always fill your water containers when trekking through the desert, into the Appalachias, or around and around the shopping mall).

At one of the window tables with power and a view (the owner has literally screwed the cord powering the open/closed sign to one of the outlets using the kind of one-way screws usually seen only in bathroom stalls and prison visiting areas) a girl has nested with her canary yellow notebook computer, a stack of CD-Rs and DVD-Rs at her side. A friend joins her and she talks about the mixes she is making for friends and family she has recently left to come to school here in the wild north. I have my crazy earbuds in with my ridiculously capacious digital music player’s sound turned off, the highest-tech way of enabling old-fashioned eavesdropping I am capable of.

The girl tells her friend about the video she has shot of her dorm room, the campus, and the dusty musk-oxen and reindeer at the agricultural farm. Right now she is mixing them in with a bunch of photos on a DVD for her grandparents. She has to write the name and date in large letters on this particular DVD because the last one she sent stymied her nearsighted grandpa who refuses to wear glasses and repeatedly tried to play the DVD upside down. She laughs and says she’s going to send the same DVD to her best friend but “obviously with a different soundtrack– I have this great stuff downloading– do you want some?” The friend does want some, so she grabs a CD from the stack, but the friend confers and in a moment is raiding the tracks from her shared iTunes library using a free utility someone turned her on to.

Around her on the table, the girl has homemade greeting cards fanned out, printed with photos she has taken since she arrived a few weeks ago but has purposefully marked as private on flickr so the recipients won’t see them before they receive her card. Each of them is destined for someone who helped her get here– friends, teachers, family. She’s overwhelmed at some of her parent’s friends who have sent her off with unexpected money to help her settle in and she Googles for both new and dimly remembered quotations that she will casually handwrite in the cards. Of course she’s already printed out postage with custom pictures that I can’t make out but which make her friend laugh out loud.

They talk for a bit about their new classes… the friend, who was here last year, shows her the site for consolidated University library database access and while they are in there she downloads a few articles and has another ordered through Interlibrary Loan, which should be available on the web site well before she’s ready to think about it again Monday morning. While doing this they are apparently commenting on some MySpace pages where they exchange rapid messages in a kind of slow-motion instant messenger sequence.

Both lament the price of textbooks and discuss the various unaffiliated services they used to get theirs at steep discounts, without standing in line. They also debate whether they would actually textbooks if they were completely digital. It’s a split decision: one would like the convenience, but only if she still had the print version, the other doubts she’d use it much at all. Both have at least one class through the Center for Distance Education (where I work), though one lives on campus and one lives a few miles away in a typical Alaskan college student cabin, half-loft and water-free.

After a while they are talking about movies and browsing the IMDB, I think, following the innumerable rabbit trails of actors and directors and familiar looking Hollywood faces in bit parts and backgrounds. They discuss whether to watch the latest Seth Rogen movie or go for something “less Hollywood” at The Blue Loon, an old Fairbanks bar that is currently featuring an odd couple: Sicko and Ocean’s Thirteen. Either way they’ll find out what is on, make a decision, and purchase their tickets without a thought of the newspaper, the telephone or, most likely, the human being giving tickets out to the old and credit-card free folks queued up at the theater.

Watching and listening to these two is better than any instructional video, though I wish I could capture it all and put it on YouTube for instructors here to watch. Not to chastise them or denigrate the teaching experience as they know it, but to let them see what their students are doing and hopefully interest them in finding a way to accommodate that enthusiasm and the riches of information and communication at their students fingertips.

These are living, breathing students outside of the classroom searching, connecting, communicating and constructing. These are students making things because they want to… students who need to learn to write papers and give lecture-style presentations, but who also need to write blogs and contribute to wikis and discover and use (and discard) information from all over the virtual landscape. These are students who need to be part of classroom discussions and dialogue with their instructors during office hours, but who also need to have discussions with people they don’t know who have different perspectives and relevant “real-life” experiences that can be brought to bear. These students need to stake claims in the wild intellectual world, defend them, find themselves in the right and in the wrong, and create artifacts of their learning process with their brilliant and not-so-brilliant ideas alike, and they need– and most of them want– to do so on a larger stage. Why not let them?

While I am in my revery the two girls pack up and disappear, all their messages sent, DVDs burned, files shared, articles grabbed, quotations and references snagged and tickets procured, their social mesh a little thicker and stronger. As is my own. And in a town this small– on a globe this small– their activities will continue to reverberate, the proverbial butterfly’s wings in China, in their own networks and now through the reflection in mine, a dance that is in each instant familiar in form but unique in execution, a dance that never ends and to which we are all constantly learning and re-learning the moves.