Archive of 2008
For an interesting assignment for both English and History, I wrote a dialogue exploring Lord of the Flies from the viewpoint of Enlightenment thinkers. Upon the encouragement of Grady, I am posting it here. My apologies in advance for the poor style and tone.1 In lieu of more focused posts, enjoy!
Scene: A smoke-filled room, somewhere in London. The dark walls are hung with remnants of a bygone age, with paintings hanging in the backdrop of three men and their thoughts. Sitting around an oaken table, the men are absorbed in a game of poker. One man (Hobbes) scowls at his hand as he places the first bet.
Hobbes: “Three quid.”
Locke: “I’ll see your three, and raise you five.”
Machiavelli (his face hidden in shadow): “A fearsome hand I have here… I’ll raise you thirty.”
Hobbes: “I fold.”
Locke: “I’ll see your thirty.”
Hands shown.
Hobbes: “Looks like you were too optimistic again, John.”
Machiavelli: “You should know by now I’ve always got the upper hand.”
A servant walks in, head down, and hands Machiavelli a note. She quickly hurries out, with fear in her footsteps.
Machiavelli: “The boys have landed on the island.”
Locke: “I’m sure they’ll be fine. Nature has an abundance for them to harvest.”
Hobbes: “I wouldn’t count on it.”
Locke: “Want to bet?”
Hobbes: “How does two hundred quid sound?”
Locke: “Sounds like I’ll be buying a new watch.”
Machiavelli (dealing): “Place your bets.”
Locke: “Maybe I’ll have better luck this time. 5 pounds.”
Many hands later, the servant enters again, handing another note to Machiavelli, who growls at her to get out.
Machiavelli: “Looks like they’ve elected a leader through democracy.” (disparaging tone)
Locke: “Great! They’re already on their way to civilization.”
Machiavelli: “Hardly… unless this Ralph character bucks up they’ll just weaken.”
Hobbes: “There’s no chance any government will be able to exist on this island. All of them will just look out for themselves.”
Locke: “We’ll see…”
Hobbes: “Back to the game… I raise you 5.”
Locke: “I’ll see your 5.”
Machiavelli: “As will I.”
Hobbes discretely slips some coins back into his pocket.
Locke: “Hey! You’re cheating.”
Hobbes: “Says who? If you want to keep your propety, keep a better eye on it.”
Machiavelli: “I do, that’s who. Unless you want to leave in a rather unpleasant manner, I suggest you put those back.”
Machiavelli: “Jack is proving himself to be a far better leader than Ralph.”
Locke: “Never… Ralph was chosen by the people.”
Machiavelli: “And the people are idiots. Ralph is weak. He’ll never maintain power.”
Locke: “Thomas, back me up here. Ralph is the good leader, right?”
Hobbes: “I’m going to have to side with Niccolò. If anyone can exercise absolute power, it’s Jack.”
Machiavelli: “Exactly. He protects his power through military might.”
Hobbes: “A bunch of boys running around with sticks isn’t a military.”
Machiavelli: “Maybe, but Jack is explointing fear well. If the others think he is the only one who can protect them from the beast, they’ll trust him.”
Hobbes: “Stupid kids.”
Many games later, Machiavelli gets another note from the fear-stricken servant.
Machiavelli: “Looks like we’ve had a death.”
Hobbes: “See, what was I telling you John. Who?”
Machiavelli: “Simon, the recluse.”
Hobbes: “Serves him right for not protecting himself.”
Locke: “It must have been an accident. They’re just kids after all.”
Hobbes: “Kids are closer to human nature than we are.”
Locke: “Hardly… most of them don’t even have any thoughts yet. Some of them are barely beyond the tabula rasa of infancy.”
Karl Rove and David Axelrod enter, led by the butler.
Axelrod: “Mind if we join you, John?”
Locke: “By all means, sit down.” (Glances at Machiavelli.) “That is, if Niccolò is okay with it.”
Machiavelli: “As long as you’re ready to pay.”
Rove: “As long as he can tax a little first.” (Laughter.)
Hobbes: “We were just talking about the experiment island.”
Axelrod: “Who was running that, again?”
Machiavelli: “Golding is. He’s sending my updates.”
Locke: “So, David, who do you think is the best leader?”
Axelrod: “Well, I think Ralph is wise to listen Piggy, but his weakening of intelligence concerns me.”
Rove: “Well of course you’d say that. It’s always about smarts with you liberals, isn’t it.”
Hobbes: “Save it for RNC meetings, Karl.”
A few hand later, the servant enters again and gives Machiavelli another note.
Machiavelli: “Well, Ralph finally got some guts. But it’s too little, too late.”
Rove: “What’s going on?”
Machiavelli: “Well, the ocean is enjoying Piggy’s guts. The tribe is hunting Ralph.”
Axelrod: “Savages, but they probably just think its a game.”
Hobbes: “Or maybe they’re showing us what humans are really like.”
Rove: “Brits, maybe.” (Axelrod and Machiavelli laugh, while Hobbes and Locke glare.)
A few minutes later, Machiavelli is given another note.
Machiavelli: “Will is calling off the experiment, says it’s getting too dangerous. He sent in a Navy officer.”
Axelrod: “Finally, these boys should have been taken home a long time ago.”
Hobbes: “Nay, they gave us some good insight into human nature. Speaking of which, it’s time for John to pay up.”
Locke: “What for? I was right… none of them starved.”
Hobbes: “How can you say that when two boys are dead?”
Locke: “Well it proves nature is abundant. The island had plenty to eat.”
Hobbes: “No, it just shows that human nature creates scarcity everywhere.”
Locke: “Fine, I’ve got to leave anyways. Here’s your money.” (Leaves)
Machiavelli: “Well, they would have done better if Jack had led from the start.”
Rove: “I agree. He saw that fear controls people best.”
Axelrod: “A fat lot fear did for you in November.”
Rove: “That was just “straight-talk” John doing what he does best–screwing things up.”
Axelrod: “Or maybe the American people have finally caught on to your game.”
Machiavelli: “No, I just think your ridiculous term limits are to blame. What’s the point of designing a government to be unstable?”
Rove: “Exactly. I had them under my thumb, but Montesquie’s stupid balance of powers kept us from total control.”
Axelrod: “Thank god.”
Rove: “Save it for the stump.”
Machiavelli: “That’s enough, boys. We better quit before you fight even more.”
Rove: “Fine, but David better watch his back.”
Hobbes: “And you better watch your winnings… you have no right to them.”
Machiavelli: “I’d like to see you try, Tom.”
Hobbes: “If I were younger…”
Axelrod: “Thanks for hosting this, Niccolò”
Machiavelli: “Good night, everyone.”
exeunt omnes
I will be returning to my regularly scheduled writing soon.
We have built a culture of immediacy, which started long before the internet, but which has been stimulated and expanded within our digital realm. This culture of immediacy puts time above, and at the expense of, all else.
In no way is this a new trend: as Clay Shirky says in Here Comes Everybody, the pendulum of time has slowly swung towards the miniaturization of culture. When scribe was a profession, every word had great value. With the printing press, each character lost a whole lot of its worth when hundreds of siblings could be created concurrently. With innovations in technology (phone, tv, email, etc.), culture has been continually abbreviated.
This is not a bad thing. In many respects, it is actually good. Shorter and less valuable writing is often far more accessible on both economic and intellectual scales. There are thousands of great ideas in the world, many of which would be lost if they were presented in long and scholarly essays.
Unfortunately, the interweb culture has taken this concept (the abbreviation of culture) too far. Instead of taking good ideas and abbreviating them, we are making short ideas without respect to quality. This has led to an excess of dirt which makes finding the gems increasingly hard.
Here Comes Everybody is an excellent summary of social media by Clay Shirky.
Clay Shirky is a great believer in the doctrine of publish-then-filter, where the best will rise to the top. I remain skeptical, given what I know of people:
People are lazy.
Even when all it takes is the click of a button, filtering takes effort. Unfortunately, most people don’t want to exert that effort. Think about it: many people still watch commercials, even when a show is TiVoed.
The majority of Westerners now self-identify as consumers. Where we once had the working (producing) class, we now have the consuming class.1 We are no longer, by nature, filterers or producers.
Of course, most blogs do have to engage in some form of filtering — it would be impractical to share everything. But then bloggers realize the very direct correlation between number of posts and income/popularity earned. We continue to tinker with the formula, trying to increase the percentage of incoming content converted to outgoing content. Unfortunately, it is easy to lose track of why we are sharing at all, in the effort to maximize the yield. Many blogs become the proverbial newspaper so filled with “advertising” that there are no longer any stories.
We, being the consumers we are, mostly ignore this: even when it takes effort to read a short post, it’s “easier” than unsubscribing entirely.
The response to this abbreviation of culture and thought is slow blogging, a movement which seeks to critically evaluate and think about ideas before publishing them.
Though I always respected the ideals of slow blogging, there has always been something about it which didn’t sit right with me: it sounds a lot like traditional media and academia, two things which I dislike even more than our culture of immediacy. The methodology of filter-then-publish is the same technique which traditional media has been using to control culture and society for ages. Additionally, many “slow bloggers” write in the style of academia: using a paragraph when a sentence would suffice.
When I took my hiatus from blogging this summer, this was one of the issues I struggled with: how to balance quality thinking and the seemingly implicit “schooliness” of slow blogging.2 S.P. Greenlaw recently wrote a piece which brilliantly articulated those regrets I had been feeling:
My use of the internet is, it turns out, abuse. I have traded away my brooding study in exchange for an all encompassing buckshot of skim reading, estimation, and chiding. I have not got very much to say anymore, but very many topics on which I feel required to speak. In high school I would spend whatever money I had ordering books, and I would wile away an entire weekend dissecting Kropotkin’s The Conquest of Bread. Now I struggle to get through an abridged edition of Marx’s Capital, and I spend no more than fifteen minutes on it at a time before I go running for my RSS Reader to see if XKCD updated. In my youth I spent time writing epic (and awful, as most youthful writing is) novels on reams of loose leaf paper. These days I have to force myself to sit down and drag a short story to a conclusion, if I get that far.
In short, I let the desire for brevity and popularity come before my capacity for critical thought, because I saw the two as mutually exclusive. I wanted to think long about topics and delve deep, but I also wanted to keep my writing accessible.
A realization came to me from, ironically, a blog which touts the very techniques central to the culture of immediacy, in the form of a quote attributed to Blaise Pascal: I have made this letter longer than usual, only because I have not had time to make it shorter.
Contemplative work can be the shortest work of all. It is a slow process to think through an idea, write it, then shorten it. This realization is supported by the Slow Blogging Manifesto:
Slow Blogging is speaking like it matters, like the pixels that give your words form are precious and rare. It is a willingness to let current events pass without comment. It is deliberate in its pace, breaking its unhurried stride for nothing short of true emergency. And perhaps not even then, for slow is not the speed of most emergencies, and places where beloved, reassuring speed rules the day will serve us best at those times.
In a world where words are practically free, the best way to make them valuable again is to use fewer of them. For the scribes, words were valuable because they were hard to produce. Now, words must be valuable because they are hard not to produce. The fewer words we use, the more thought that must be behind them.3
I embrace slow thinking and short blogging.4
Below: Pond Memories by antonychammond
Of all the amazing social media tools in the world, one of my absolute favorites is drop.io. They provide a dead-simple way to share media, but also realize that there is so much more to that than simply sharing files. Not only is it easy to share files, voice and communication can be shared in the exact same interface. Essentially, drop.io supports a plethora of outputs and inputs without complicating things. Drop.io realizes that the point of technology is to make complicated things (like sending a message across the globe in seconds) easy (with the click of a button). Drop.io provides an excellent service with a minimum of effort and cost.1
Given this unique set of features, drop.io is perfectly suited for use in the educational market. The base service is free, so there is no need to purchase additional hardware or software. Additionally, there is no need to register for an account at all – thus, no emails needed. Finally, drop.io is by nature non-permanent and private – drops are erased after 1 year of disuse and will never be monitored or searchable (unless you ask them to be). For this minimum of effort, a lot is accomplished. You can upload any kind of media, whether through the web interface, email, a Firefox extension, or even your phone.2 This media can then be shared through email, RSS, iTunes (dropcast), SMS, Twitter, Facebook, or the plain old web interface. In short, drop.io provides a plethora of ways to share educational content freely.
Once you have mastered the basics of drop.io, you begin to realize its potential. One of the best applications is giving students a way to easily record a podcast without any additional hardware. Though there are other ways to do this, I believe drop.io does it the best as you will shortly see.
First, you need to create a new drop. This drop shouldn’t include any media, but a unique name will help you to remember it. The name can be changed by clicking it. If you would like to block outside access, just click the “additional settings” dropdown and adjust settings accordingly. Once your settings are confirmed, just “drop it.”
Right: You should definitely set an admin password, as it will let you make changes later.
Once you have a drop ready to go, copy down the voicemail address (it is in the top right corner, under “Contact this Drop”). If you give this number a call, you are prompted to enter the extension of your drop and are then taken to a recording section where you can immediately leave a message. Seconds later it will show up in the web interface as an mp3 file.
Right: Just call the listed email to record a voicemail, like I did with this sample drop.
After your content is recorded, it is easy to syndicate it out through other services – like RSS or Twitter. Since this is a podcast, syndication through iTunes is the best method. To do so, just click share, then RSS/Dropcast, then subscribe to Dropcast. iTunes will open up and you will have a simple podcast which can automatically be updated from your phone.3
As you can see, drop.io offers a great way to podcast with your students – all you need is a phone. As helpful as this is, it is only scratching the surface of what drop.io can do. What else can you think of using a ubiquitious sharing service like drop.io for?4
The crucial flaw of NCLB, in my opinion, is that is fails to inspire. The law has many other faults, of course, including its lack of funding and regimented focus on testing. However, the root problem is that NCLB is attempting to use an evolutionary methodology for a truly revolutionary goal – almost total proficiency. There is no easily articulated goal which all citizens can rally around: the standards are convoluted and the metrics for success are continually redefined in contradiction with themselves. Doug Noon perfectly captures this, in the context of Kennedy’s space program:1
If we’d have used an NCLB-style approach to the Apollo moon mission, President Kennedy would have simply ordered NASA to fly conventional airplanes higher and higher until they fell out of the sky, and then blamed the pilots for lacking the will and the know-how to get the job done.
How can we reach for the moon with education?
What is creativity? I doubt many people, including teachers, could give you a good definition. In simplest terms, it is the ability to create. However, I like to use a more specific definition:
Creativity is the ability to transcend traditional ideas, rules, patterns, relationships, or the like, and to create meaningful new ideas, forms, methods, interpretations, etc.
Above: Leonardo da Vinci was a master of mixing creativity and art.
The key to creativity is the ability and act of transcending tradition. Using this definition, I think creativity is exceptionally rare in schools. Students are almost never asked to transcend tradition and think outside the box.
In fact, doing so is punished. This rarity arises from a confusion about what creativity really is.
If you were to ask most teachers or administrators, you would hear a distinctly different story. Most will says their schools/classrooms stimulate and “unlock” creativity1. Doing a word search on school mission statements will turn up an inordinate number of references to creativity. Someone should replace 99% of those occurrences with the word “art.”
What many school officials and teachers mean by creativity is really art. Art is all about practice and method. Art is about the perfection of technique. Art is about applying techniques rigorously in pursuit of a goal. In short, art is studied action; artificiality in behavior.
Painting yet another landscape is art, and neither is solving a mathematical equation. Both of them involve substantial practice and application of traditional rules.2 Make no mistake: both can be very difficult. The level of effort it takes to perfect any art is astounding. However, this is distinct from creativity. Remember, creativity is all about transcending tradition. In many ways, creativity and art are polar opposites.
Actually, creativity and art are not so much polar opposites as two sides of the same coin.3 Creativity is used to think of new ideas and sources of ideas. Art is used to translate those ideas into presentable forms. To create a brilliant work, both creativity and art must be used.
In many ways, schools fail to recognize this. Art is constantly drilled in schools: when not directly transferring content, teachers often focus on teaching new skills4. However, very little attention is paid to the application of those skills in novel ways. Writing thousands of 5-paragraph essays will give you perfect form and will make you a very precise writer, but it will not make you a great and innovative one. Translating notes into a science fair board will, optimally, teach art to a degree. However, none of these things will teach creativity. When schools talk about their wealth of creativity, they usually mean art.
To a certain degree, I do not think creativity can be taught. The very nature of it makes creativity unteachable — you cannot teach someone to positively ignore convention, since in doing so they would simply be internalizing another rule. However, creativity can be practiced. Constantly making new ideas teaches you to see which work and which will not. Searching for pattens helps you to see patterns faster in the future. Luckily, art can be taught — and it should be taught. Without art, nobody will respect your creativity. The point is, creativity can be practiced but not taught.
Right: A great example of tilt-shift photography from Vincent Laforet.
The next time you brag about how much creativity you foster, ask yourself if you really mean art.