Newly Ancient

I am a producer. I like to produce things, whether that means businesses, websites, or blogs.

For the most part, education fails to thoughtfully educate producers. Over the centuries, schools have gotten very good at teaching consumers. We emphasize reading and math, so consumers can consume more.

There is nothing wrong with this. Many people are consumers, and everyone needs the skills to be one. However, a growing tide of people are producers — people who feel the unquenchable need to make. The education system fails to even recognize this trend, let alone teach to it.

From a purely business perspective, this is dangerous. Producers are responsible for a disproportionate percentage of the GDP, and giving producers better education will help to increase that. But it’s also important from a human perspective — education should match the personality of the student.

A good start would be to help students identify whether they are a producer or consumer. This is as easy as asking a simple question:

Some people are consumers by nature; they consume vast quantities of knowledge purely for learning’s sake. Others are producers; they consume knowledge with the intent of one day acting on the knowledge and producing something, be it a book, a song, a blog, a startup, etc… Neither is better than the other.

The key is to answer one question: which are you?

Beyond that, schools can give education appropriate to each type of student. For the most part, we are a mix of both producers and consumers; teaching consumption and production will help everyone.

The one additional component which producers absolutely need more of in their education is practice. Whenever possible, there should be time to practice (authentically) producing businesses, books, or music. Though practice doesn’t make you perfect, it does make you a whole lot better of a producer.

Schools need to recognize and identify producers, so a proper education can be given to them.

How do you teach producers?

Article found via Michael Mistretta

When I was younger, I thought history didn’t matter. To me, history was a dusty land filled with dates, maps, and death rates. I thought the inhabitants of this land — historians — were old, dusty people who had nothing interesting to say.

In short, I confused history with historical societies.

Right: An Aerial View of the Smithsonian

I was, and am, a person driven by change (action) and, to an unhealthy extent, power. Technology and politics, my passions, both move at a breakneck pace and are always focusing on the future. To my naive self, history was entirely antithetical to my entire philosophy.¹

As one might expect, school was at fault. School taught me to memorize dates and people.² We almost never explored the context of these events; we never delved into the legacies of the leaders beyond the most basic level. Timelines made regular appearances, as did color-coded maps. All this memorization took up time, time which would have been better spent thinking.

Naturally, given this context, I felt that history was something to be avoided like the plague.³

Now, of course, I know better.

Once I got teachers who actually understood and enjoyed history, I was able to see beyond the numbers. I discovered that history wasn't a textbook or timeline, but a story, and a damn good story at that. With this discovery, I was able to find the joy of the past.

Not to go all philosophical on you, but the past really is the present.

Society evolves, but evolution involves a lot of repetition. Each iteration is almost exactly the same as the last, with only minor differences. A knowledge of that past iteration helps you to understand the current iteration — and the differences between the two.

Understanding — truly understanding — the world (politics, society, technology, etc.) is an extraordinarily difficult thing to do. Thankfully, we have the past to help us. With the wisdom of the past, we can more easily understand the present. Instead of having to draw an entirely new map of the world, we only need to draw a map of the new parts.

Almost every situation we encounter, somebody else has encountered before. Even when we can’t see them, we’re walking in someone’s footsteps. Thankfully, that someone has probably already come up with a solution for or analysis of the situation. I am continuously reminded of this, whether in my daily Googling of technical problems or my comparisons between Palin and McCarthy. When it comes down to it, history is probably the most useful subject there is.

Sadly, far too many teachers get it wrong. Though I'm sure you're not one of them, you probably know some of them. History, more than any other subject, is really easy to get wrong.⁴ It is far too easy to get caught in the micro-history (who fought in what battle on what date?) and forget about the macro-history (why was he fighting?), especially because the micro-history is very easy to teach and test. Given this, it is no surprise that many history teachers don't teach history.

And every time it is a tragedy. When taught as a collection of dates, history loses its spark. A bad history teacher will — guaranteed — make history dull and lifeless. In other subjects, one can get by with a poor teacher and still enjoy it. History, more than any other subject, depends strongly on the quality of the teacher. A good history teacher⁵ will make even the most reluctant of students sit up in their chairs, but a bad history teacher will make even (or, especially) the future-historians start texting under the table. In no other class is this true: math people will always find numbers mathematical language interesting, and some never will.⁶ The cost of a poor history teacher is great, but the benefits are superb: history gives students a framework to understand their world.

So please, remember to take the hi- off history.

Of course, at some point the “facts” do become important. The dates and names aren’t entirely irrelevant, especially as one wishes to progress. To talk effectively and intelligently about the ideas, one must know the facts — especially if one aims to convince others. However, the ideas are indisputably more important — without them, history is pointless. Unfortunately, the ideas are generally only seriously discussed in the upper grades of high school and college. Up until then, the bare facts hold almost exclusive domain. By the time students reach the exciting parts of history, we have built a (false) image of history as boring and pointless — in fact, many never reach those discussions simply because they assume all history is as boring as 5^th grade history. Even at the unit level, history is taught in the wrong order. Most teachers start with the bare facts and only touch on the bigger ideas near the end of a lesson. This should be reversed on both the micro and macro levels, with grand ideas being taught first to build interest and discussion. Only with the themes in place should the facts be taught, to supplement and reinforce those themes, leading to continued investigation. The primary focus of history should always be the story.

Right: My countdown wallpaper from Mediumjones at Smashing Magazine

What do you think the proper order of history education is? Do you think schools need to focus more on the context of history?

Two thousand nine promises to be a good year for me. I have many plans for this year, but, first, a little history.

Two thousand eight could be described in many ways, but ultimately it was characterized by a feeling of slowness. I enjoyed the relaxation and deep thought that this slowness brought the time for. For the most part, I don’t have much to show you (yet!) from 2008; but the quiet reflection of this past year gave me opportunity to develop new ideas and views.

Among the highlights of the year, these stand out:

• In July, I abandoned my older blog, which I subsequently revived at its present location in November.
• My summer internship at GlobalClassroom was in my first “real” work experience, and a good one at that.
• Continuing upon this work trend, I was able to expand my business in new directions.

Despite these accomplishments, I am left with the feeling that I didn’t really do much in 2008. However, the slow thinking of the year has left me with some exciting ideas which I plan to implement in 2009.

If 2008 was characterized by intellectual laziness, 2009 will center on intellectual vigor. Much about the new year brings me hope, a hope upon which I plan to act. In all aspects of my life, I resolve to implemented this new vigor:

• I will vigorously blog more, since my thoughts don’t help if nobody hears them.¹
• I will vigorously pursue new work projects. I am extremely excited by Project X, but I want it to get moving faster.
• I will work to vigorously improve Students 2.0 in my new role as publisher.
• On a personal note, I’m working to vigorously exercise more. If I die at 30, my ideas won’t live on — and that’d be a shame, wouldn’t it?
• Similarly, I will vigorously throw myself into reading, particularly of a “print” variety. There are books from last Christmas which I still haven’t read, and I’d also like to spend some more time with “traditional” magazines.²

With those concrete resolutions set down on the stones of the interweb, I also would like to make 2009 a continuation of my media exploration. Over time, I work to master learn about specific mediums. Though I consider myself a decent writer, I would like to make the first half of 2009 revolve around improving my relationship with the written word, especially in terms of speed and editing. If the finity³ of time allows, I will also move into the spoken word in multiple incarnations: debate, speech, and podcasting.

In short, I have grand hopes for 2009, both personally and globally. In many ways, I hope 2009 will finally shake off the stupor of the past year⁴ in favor of direct action.

I’m ready, 2009.

Below: Happy New Year!

What does the new year mean for you?

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!

I will be returning to my regularly scheduled writing soon.

Printing press

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