Me and Sparky before the End - photo by Joe Bustillos (cc) 2009

My proposed consultancy was to help an independent folk artist, Neva, with her website, to take her web-presence to the next level and leverage the tools out there for many many others to discover her music and great onstage presence. Sparky has known me for a long time, going back to getting my masters degree at Pepperdine in 2002, so to him it probably looked like Joe was just doing another web project and not stretching himself all that much. Though he would never say this directly, he was asking me what makes me think that I deserve to be part of their “doctorate club,” what do I bring to the table that might permit me to add “Ed.D” to the end of my name?

Kirk: Captain of the Enterprise, huh?
Picard: That’s right.
Kirk: Close to retirement?
Picard: I’m not planning on it.
Kirk: Well let me tell you something. Don’t! Don’t let them promote you. Don’t let them transfer you. Don’t let them do *anything* that takes you off the bridge of that ship, because while you’re there… you can make a difference. – Star Trek: Generations (1994)

I had a friend who became my friend after he beat me, getting the job that I wanted as technology coordinator for the school district we both worked in. He was the much better choice for the job. I’d go to his office every once in a while and he’d be required in a hundred places at once and after the dust settled, he’d ask what I was working on in my lab. He’d listen carefully and then say how much he missed crawling under tables, connecting CAT-5 cables, setting up servers and making the hardware and software work. I don’t doubt that there were days that he’d easily give up the suit and tie for the cable-ties and dust-bunnies, but he did so much good setting the policies, practices and standards that enabled the school site tech-coordinators to be education- and student-centric, to drive the technology to do what the vendor promised in pursuit of delivering the best educational experience. I was told that he was a pretty damn good teacher in the computer lab. But the circle of his influence reached so many more students when he left the classroom and started enabling teachers and tech-coordinators to do their best. That’s what I wanted for myself when I began the doctorate program five years ago, to take the good that I’d learned with my classroom of students and enable other teachers to give the same opportunities and learning experiences to their students.

When I began the doctorate program I was a computer lab teacher working at a K-5 elementary school, seeing about 600 students per week, working on everything from basic keyboarding, to teaching PowerPoint to first graders, Excel to second graders and HyperStudio to everyone else. Beginning the second year of the doctorate program I took a job teaching print media/technology and math to sixth, seventh and eighth graders at the middle school level. The transition wasn’t particularly smooth and I ended up taking a leave of absence from Pepperdine after the winter term in order to adjust to my new assignment. Before taking the middle school job I had applied for the same tech coordinator job that I’d lost out to my friend, who was being kicked upstairs to an assistant superintendent job. It was another “no,” and I knew that I lacked secondary ed experience, so that was one thing that was in the back of my mind when I took the middle school job. At the end of three years teaching at the middle school level I could say that I was pretty good at what I did but I was still working on a level that wasn’t really reaching much beyond the walls of my classroom. Fortunately, the opportunity presented itself to break free from my former classroom’s walls and teach online at the masters level for Full Sail University.

Stickam screenshot by Joe Bustillos (cc) 2009

While not as influential on a policy level as a district tech coordinator might be, I was influencing a new group of teachers every month, making a difference in their professional lives, helping them develop new tech and media skills and enabling them to deliver a better educational experience to their students. Thus, working at Full Sail has definitely helped me realize part of the dream to be an influencer on a much bigger level than my previous classroom had afforded to me. And while there are monetary benefits that would come from having the doctorate, the job is not depended on adding three letters to the end of my name.

What still lacks, though, was something that I knew when I set about to get my masters degree. At the time I was teaching video journalism to fifth and sixth graders as part of a Magnet school program that I had helped to develop, but I knew that my position was dependent on the whim and choices made by people further up the chain of command. And sure enough, at the end of the grant I was “encouraged” to find another assignment and ended up at the K-5 computer lab, switching districts. Then four years later it happened again (funding changed and my job was eliminated) and that’s when I switched to the middle school job. The masters degree was supposed to help me keep my tech position and it did help me keep my middle school job because I didn’t have a single-subject credential or a computer science undergraduate degree. But I still was working at a level where if someone up the chain sneezed, I caught the cold. These days there are no teaching jobs with 100% security, but I think what I’m really driving at is working on things that are much more fundamental to teaching and technology than ensuring a cushy teaching position.

The research that I was beginning to work on, before my disenrollment from Pepperdine, was what impact might happen if a public school district were to switch from printed textbooks to e-textbooks delivered on small devices like iTouches and Kindles. I wasn’t thinking in terms of literacy improvement but on bottom-line TCO level and the possible shift away from fixed, one-size-fits-all curriculum to dynamic, interactive, current, classroom-specific curriculum where the expertise of the classroom educator and familiarity with specific class’ strengths and need might be drawn into the process of what e-textbooks are used in the classroom. I was also thinking about the destabilizing factor this shift might have with the powerful textbook lobby as far as reducing their part of the budget which might also reduce their influence on the politicians who determine which curriculum to follow. Then, of course, the governator announced his proposal to go computer-based e-textbooks to save the California millions of dollars. I guess I was on the right track.

So, if I were to continue this research than the whole state of California might become the testbed. The point is that as I was watching the deployment of this technology into the general public over a year and a half ago and I could see how it would benefit educational users in terms of TCO and, more importantly, in terms of shifting towards a much more flexible system for delivering educational content.

Raising my sights from this particular example to the larger picture of my life’s mission, which is what I think Sparky was trying to guide me toward, I have to lock on to the common threads that I have seen since my masters program days:

• The power of online technology to enable deep, long lasting, life changing communities of practice,
• The need to balance measurable learning growth with the fact that education is at it’s heart a human endeavor, and while we humans are forever capable of exceeding anyone’s expectations, we do not do so on anyone’s set schedule or according to anyone’s predetermined quotas,
• After 30-years in the classroom the problems with Technology are not about the need for more teacher training or even better technological tools. The problem is a persistent “school” culture that is still run on the competitive factory manager model where little unformed minds come in one door and little learners walk out the other, having all had the same coat of paint and varnish applied to their outsides.
• The world of technology is changing and moving forward at a pace that the traditional world of education cannot hope to keep up . But we have to find meaningful ways to keep up, which means we might have to abandon fixed mindsets about education and the classroom and teaching that were from a time when a high school graduate could enter the job market and build a lifelong career with one company.

What this means to me is that I see my position at Full Sail as a foundation to enable my graduate students to mine the depths of community, to change their learning environments one student and one classroom at a time, to reflect the best that we can accomplish by efficiently using technology and media in our instruction and interaction with our students, and to learn from every success and every set-back. This also means that I must dig deeper into my own community of learners and be less of a lurker and more of a participant and agent of change. Too long the writer in me has enjoyed the anonymous vantage of the untraceable voice making sarcastic comments from a hidden perch. And it is too tempting to let myself get distracted in my little cubicle by all of the shiny gadgets being introduced on a regular basis and to favorably compare my lack of progress with those around me who have no calling in their lives. It’s time to occupy the Captain’s chair.

It isn’t about getting a doctorate and then “retiring” on some level. Perhaps that’s part of my previous caution, is that I didn’t want to expend so much energy in the pursuit that I wouldn’t have anything left for the post-doctorate part of my life. I don’t know where I got that notion from but it seems pretty stupid as I commit the thought to words on the screen. Anyway, I don’t come from a family with too many doctoral academics. There are plenty of masters graduates among my siblings and cousins (amazing when one considers that a high school diploma was the terminating degree of almost 100% of my parents’ associates who graduated at all). So I don’t come at this with any sense of expectation beyond acknowledging that I have been one lucky kid who worked to keep his options open to pursue his academic musings. I guess it’s time to be the adult and not the lurker, to do more than guide the next generation, but to have part in changing the paths that they will follow.

I think that drive, the intellect and passion behind it are the keys to my entrance into the hall of academics, the mythic doctorate club. I will not check my ID or my iPhone at the door.

Sources:
images: Me and Sparky and 090723 stickam session by Joe Bustillos (cc) 2009

Quote: “Captain of the Enterprise?” from the movie: Star Trek: Generations, story by Rick Berman, Ronald D. Moore and Brannon Braga, http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0111280/quotes retrieved on 7/23/2009

YouTube video: Leading the Nation Into a Digital Textbook Future – Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger (Teil 1), posted by http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9hPi1hrJxFQ retrieved on 7/23/2009

Mentoring Analysis – The Benefit of Learning By Example

dad workin

I can’t believe how my brother betrayed me. There he was, just rambling on, completely oblivious to the betrayal. I can’t believe he’d forgotten the vows we’d made during those numberless sweaty Saturdays out in the backyard under the heartless afternoon sun as our father rained down on us pruned branches to be cut and dissatisfaction at our efforts.

I thought that it was understood that once we’d successfully escaped our father’s unsatisfiable tutelage that we’d never ever again spend another day toiling under the sun, pruning trees, or doing anything beyond the minimum necessary to keep the lawn from over-growing and swallowing up the patio furniture. But there he was proudly displaying his garden and the huge ears of corn he was expecting in a few weeks. Damn. I guess new homeownership does that to a person.

Okay, so not everyone takes the vows of teenage-boys seriously (brother!), and it wasn’t exactly the “Grapes of Wrath.” But it was negative enough to leave the above “not-so-fond” memory. Let’s just say, when I began to read Shea and recalled the nurturing/supportive characteristics we all agreed a mentor should have, my father silently slipped off the list . . . at first.

Based on Gordan Shea’s list of twenty characteristics about “What Mentors Do” (p.14) my father exhibited eight of the twenty characteristics (usually having to do with doing the job right, and his quotable quote was, “Can’t you guys do anything right?!,” so I wasn’t sure whether I should count that one). Of the twenty-two characteristics (see below) that we cooked up in Colorado his numbers dropped to just two. Actually, this whole business of going back and mining my memory for mentoring moments and/or relationships was getting pretty depressing for me. As I worked my way through my list there was an obvious pattern of learning from a distance so as not to get too close to whichever leader (and suffer from his/her potential wrath). It’s pretty clear where that pattern came from.

It was many years later in the middle of one of my child-development classes, when we were discussing the Characteristics of Play, that it suddenly dawned on me that my father’s endless weekends of yardwork was his form of leisure. It was his form of play. Of course, none of this had made sense to my brother and I as kids because this was anything but fun to us. But to my father the “work” meant a great deal to him and having us there to “share” it with him also meant a great deal (even though we were anything but receptive to any message at the time). And even odder still was that he worked in landscaping and spent his whole week doing pretty much the same things for a living. The only difference, on the surface, between his work-a-day world and what he did on the weekends he was working on his yard with his boys. But at the time we never saw it.

In one of last term’s readings Frank Smith made it clear that learning happens whether we want it to or not, more from the people we’re around than from the words of teachers.

“We learn from the people around us with whom we identify. We can’t help learning from them, and we learn without knowing that we are learning.” Frank Smith. The Book of Learning and Forgetting, 1998, p.3

So when I look at the person I’ve become and look at the long hours that I put in and the high expectation that I have for myself and the work that I do, I now know where those values came from. Those were values that were important to him, values that saw him through the early years of his own life when he didn’t have a father to lead him. And just as he never looked at the difficulties of his own up-bring for an apology for not having had a “perfect childhood,” I don’t expect or want an apology from him for the often vitriolic relationship that we had as father and son. I understand that he was just being a man, a man true to his core values and those values didn’t always translate well to squirrely seven- and ten-year-old boys.

cloudy sunset over Mission Viejo CA circa 1977

Dear ol’ dad, whatever his conscious intentions may have been (prune trees, cut branches down small enough to fit into trash cans), he taught my brother and I a great deal more than the “joys” of working with small hand tools on mountains of orange and olive tree branches. I love him for instilling those values in me. But I’m still not going to pick up any pruning shears anytime soon. I’ll leave that to my silly younger brother. JBB (Spring 2002)

NOTES:
Colorado List of Mentor Characteristics:
trust
honesty
respect
clarity
non judgmental
guidance
empathy
dialogue
mutual benefit
sense of humor
compassion
availability
willingness to negotiate
personable
supportive
caring
intuitive
respectful
visionary
lead by example
interpersonal skills

Sources:
“Crisp : Mentoring , Third Edition : How to Develop Successful Mentor Behaviors – Crisp 50-Minute Book.” by Gordon F. Shea

“The Book of Learning and Forgetting” by Frank Smith

All images by Joe Bustillos

New to Florida

it’s been an amazing year. A year ago February I decided to accept the challenge of moving across country to step from the safety a public school teaching job to try something new: teaching a masters level course at a new online program in Florida. I looked at my life in Southern California, having no permanent ties, save my siblings and nephews and nieces, and decided that I needed to make this change, to take my gifts and skills to the next level. It was a logical choice. But it also meant that I was permanently closing the door on a relationship that I’d been unsuccessfully pursuing over the past five years. I could either take this job or I could stay in California, woeking as a largely thankless classroom grunt waiting for a relationship that might never become what I wanted it to become. The choice was pretty logical. But I was also walking away from something that I had defined myself by. I’d poured everything I could into this. This was who I was. This was who I wanted to be with. I felt connected in a way that I couldn’t explain, yet it had somehow completely failed when it came to what she needed at the time. So I left and shut the door to that part of myself.

Then as I began to build my life here in Florida I grappled with how I would express my relationship to God, The problem was that this was something that I had re-discovered in my life because of the power of the relationship I’d just left. It was something we shared. It was something that seemed real because of the power of the love I felt for her. But given the ease with which all of that just went away without a single tear shed, I was left to think that that relationship had been largely in my own head, and this led me to question what else might have largely just been in my head.

It’s not so much that because I didn’t get what I wanted, I was just going to stop believing. But given how much I had opened my heart to the possibilities, only to be set aside and rewarded with the sound of silence and a completely affection-less life, I lost my certainty and thus another way that I had defined myself by slipped away. Another door closed in my life.

So this brings me to this past week. i had just returned from a great trip to Washington DC.

Brad, Jenith & I at the Newseum porch overlooking the Capitol

I was just getting to the point where I felt comfortable with my new cadremates, after having been away from the doctorate program for three years. Then when I got back from DC I received the letter from Pepperdine telling me that the Educational Technology Doctoral (EDET) Program committee had met and decided that my time at Pepperdine was done. In a nutshell, I’d requested for an incomplete for a research course so that I could get further along with my research and have something to write for my chapter 2 and chapter 3 of what would become my dissertation. The course professor felt that I didn’t deserve an incomplete and that I should just retake the whole course when it was next being given. Alas, this meant getting an “F” for the course which would mathematically drop me below the required B+ GPA to stay in the doctorate program. The committee agreed with the professor and now I’m no longer connected with Pepperdine. I knew for some time that this was going to happen, but getting the “disenrollment” letter very much left me with an unsure sense of self. More than just another door closing, having suffered the loss of these defining aspects in my life over the past year, I was losing track of who I was.

Dr. Spark & I at the Feinstein Breakfast in the Hart Building

The irony of this was that my last conversation with my good friend Dr. Sparks in DC was about me having greater vision for myself beyond being the guy building PCs, blogs and websites for others and taking my own vision for myself to the next level. Other cadremates in DC were meeting with their senators and representatives and agencies and national policy makers while i was struggling to maintain some sense of self. Dr. Sparks had no way of knowing that the hammer was about to fall on my career at Pepperdine. Also a bit upsetting was that I knew how other doctoral students in my program had spectacularly failed (for example, showing up for the end of program oral comprehensive exams unprepared and rip-roaring drunk… twice), I knew that a different choice could have been made. But my path was apparently meant to take me in a different direction. Things could have been different, but I alone was responsible for things not turning out as hoped for.

As the days have passed I wish that I could confidently agree with my friends and advocates that this change is for the good, that something better is going to come from this. But the sound of so many doors closing tends to undermine any sense of confidence or promise. I just know that it’s a waste for me to remain a candle hidden under a bushel basket. It’s not much to go on, but it’s better than assuming that I am now whatever I was meant to be or that the best days are in the past. I refuse to believe that. jbb

Click here for my flickr set from my trip to DC.

Having attended four private Christian universities my impression has been that there are very smart people on both side of the discussion. In fact, in the movie, Maher expressed frustration when addressing the “Truckers for Jesus” gathering that they appear to be intelligent gentlemen, but he couldn’t reconcile that with how they could believe in a literal talking snake from the Expulsion from Eden narrative in the book of Genesis. Looking for a different take on this possible conflict between rationalism and religion, I explored a book titled, “Did The Greeks Believe In Their Myths,” by Paul Veyne (1988), professor of Roman history at the University of France.

When I began this exploration I assumed a basic Western point of view, being that before the Renaissance and the following Age of Reason and Science, that the centers for learning, philosophy, government and culture were interpreted through religion and faith. Given this general understanding one might also be led to assume that the Ancients were somehow less intelligent than modern men. Stone and bronze tools versus lasers and computer-precision tools, astrology versus astrophysics, mythology versus historical critical analysis, one might see some credence to this sense of “less intelligent.” Of course all of this comes crashing down when one considers the surviving record left behind by Aristotle, Plato, Socrates, Galen the physician and the obvious brilliance of the whole chorus of ancient voices. So how did these brilliant thinkers deal with the religion and mythology of their day? For some reason the lyrics, “Same as it ever was” runs through my mind. Same as it ever was indeed, but Veyne would point out some noted exceptions.

In the opening chapters of his book Veyne (1988) noted several factors that need to be taken into consideration when attempting to consult with the Ancients. The first concept that may seem foreign to modern historians and academicians was that before the modern era, ancient historians and writers felt that it undermined their credibility if they cited sources for their stories. Veyne noted, as late as 1560 C.E., French scholar, Estienne Pasquier, was criticized for including footnotes in his writings (p. 5):

“… For the ancient Greeks, historical truth was a vulgate authenticated by consensus over the ages. This consensus sanctioned the truth as it sanctioned the reputation of those writers held to be classical or even, I imagine, the tradition of the Church. Far from having to establish the truth by means of references, Pasquier should have waited to be recognized as an authentic text himself. By putting his notes at the bottom of the page, by furnishing proofs as the jurists do, he indiscreetly sought to force the consensus of posterity concerning his work.” (p. 6)

So Pasquier’s use of footnotes ran contrary to the idea that he should have waited for his work to be accepted because he himself would be proven over time to be a valid source. Veyne compared this with the modern practice of trusting journalists without requiring them to reveal their informants. The idea of citing sources, according to Veyne, didn’t come from ancient historians but from judicial practice where trial proceedings would be cited or from theological controversies where the Scriptures were referenced. But in the case of the writings of ancient historians, which were often just the collections of local folklore gathered during the writers’ travels, Veyne quipped, “It would be futile to include the list of informants. Who would check them?” (p. 9)

Another practice that may run contrary to modern thinking was that these ancient stories were always connected with real place-names and recognizable historical figures. Mount Olympus was a real place and the locations of the graves or shrines of legendary persons were universal across the ancient world. In fact there seemed to have been an imperative that there be a story or legend behind the founding of any community generally ascribed to some legendary persons for whom the town, city or region was named.

“Indeed, what was strange in this local historiography was that is was reduced to question of origins. It did not tell of the life of the city, its collective memories or great moments. It was enough to know when and how the city had been founded. Once created, the city had only to live its life, which could be presumed to be comparable to what city life can be and which would be what it could be. It was not important. Once the historian had narrated its foundations, the city was fixed in space and time; it had its identity card.” p. 77

Thus, ascertaining the “where” of a story was completely disconnected from a judgment of “truth.” The historian Heroditus, wrote, “My business is to record what people say; but I am by no means bound to believe it” (p. 12). Where this trips up modern historians is that it’s a bit of a two-edge sword. Modern historians are used to starting with the place and date to begin the investigation. But if the tale seems to clearly be “mythical” the tendency has been to throw out the whole thing: the date, place and event. For example, historians had long dismissed the Trojan War as described by Homer, and generally threw out the place and the tale. But all of this was thrown into confusion when Heinrich Schliemann declared that he’d found the ancient city of Troy in the 1870s. So, the connection with a specific place was never part of the determination of “truth,” it’s just the way stories were told. Question then becomes whether the writers of the biblical narrative, who were contemporaries, would have operated with the same understanding of place-names. We’ll pick this thread up a bit further in this essay. Suffice it so say that unlike modern historians, establishing a story with a very real place-name was never used as a validating factor. Now as to the use of the question of “When” which generally followed the “Where” question, well, that’s another place where modern historians differ from ancient writers.

When modern readers see the words, “Once upon a time,” they automatically think, “fable, myth, fiction, not-true.” Journalists begin their investigations with the five W’s: who, what, where, when and why and if the “when” cannot be reasonably determined then the whole story is thrown out. Ancient writers, however, understood that by definition these stories took place in a time before the current “mundane” time. Again, the Ancients disconnected “when” from any verification of “truth.” And to them it seemed perfectly logical and rational to accept this “non-time” for the same reasons that modern historians would reject the entire story.

Veyne noted,

“These legendary worlds were accepted as true in the sense that they were not doubted, but they were not accepted the way that everyday reality is. For the faithful, the lives of the martyrs were filled with marvels situated in an ageless past, defined only in that it was earlier, outside of, and different from the present. It was the “time of the pagans.” (p. 17-18)

This reminds me of the phrase, “In those days,” used in the early chapters of the Book of Genesis and frequently in the Book of Judges in the Hebrew Old Testament. Using this idea of “otherness” used by contemporary ancient writers, one can guess that the idea is not only meant to designate things that happened a long time ago, but things that happened in a time that was foreign to this time. Veyne paraphrased Epicurus as writing that “men of olden times, more vigorous than those of today, had eyes good enough to see the gods in broad daylight, while now we can manage to capture only the emissions of their atoms through the channel of dreams.” (p. 99)

So, Time is useless as a measure of validity, just as determining “Where” these stories took place was treated as part of the places’ “history” in an origin-story fashion, neither confirming nor denying the validity of these stories. It’s this kind of circular reasoning that prompted Maher, In the movie Religulous, to express frustration when speaking with Francis Collins, a scientist, evangelical Christian and former director of the Human Genome Project. Collins quipped to Maher that his problem was that Maher was asking the Bible to hold to a level of historical veracity that no book from that era could stand up to. One might think that Maher might have understood some of this when he interviewed Father George Coyne, former director of the Vatican Observatory, during which Coyne pointed out (with a great chart) that religion and the Bible, more specifically, spoke for the era from roughly 2,000 B.C.E. to approximately 400 C.E. and that science has held rein over the past 400 to 500 years. I’m not entirely sure why Coyne felt that religion lost hold so early, but it might have had something to do with the formalizing of the Canon of Scripture at the Council of Nicea. But the point seemed clear that there was a wide gulf between the era of religion and the era of science and that the only conflict seemed to be when people tried to force one to speak on the other. In essence, the writers of the Bible knew nothing about the scientific method and used the conventions of storytelling of the time and that this reflected the origins of these stories beginning as an oral history. Equally, there are limits to Science if one is strict in holding to the scientific method and observational query. Just as the Ancients’ use of time and place, Maher should have understood that just because Dr. Andrew Newberg, research neuroscientist from the University of Pennsylvania, can make map and measure brain activity of people in various religious states including Glossolalia, this neither validates nor invalidates the participants’ experiences or interpretation of said experiences.

Toward the end of my Bachelor’s degree program in Biblical Studies at Biola University in 1981 I vaguely remember a few students and professors talking about something called a Midrash, that doesn’t seem to follow the definition I found in Wikipedia. What I remember was this had something to do with the kind of storytelling Jesus used in his parables where the message or emotional impact of the story held precedence over the “historical” elements of the story. Not that the storyteller would “lie” about the facts of the story, but that everyone understood that the point of the story was all that really mattered. Were there four fish and two loaves of bread or seven loaves and no fish? Who cares, the point is that the whole crowd got fed. This is hardly a scientific approach, but then it shouldn’t be, given that the scientific method won’t hold sway for more than a thousand years from the closing of Scripture and formalization of the canon of Scripture around the Council of Nicea in 325 C.E. So, should it be surprising at all that the writers of the Old and New Testament used storytelling methods that were completely consistent with storytelling around the Mediterranean Sea during that era?

While conducting research for this essay I happened upon a 2006 History Channel documentary by Jewish Canadian filmmaker Simcha Jacobovici and the producer/director James Cameron, called “Exodus Decoded.” Over the course of the 90-minute documentary, heavy in computer-generated visualizations, Jacobovici strings together the biblical story of the Exodus of the Jews from Egypt and connects the ten plagues described in the narrative with the destruction of Minoan island of Thera (now called Satorini) around 1,500 B.C.E. An undated inscription of the word “El” in an Egyptian mine, grave stones marking wealthy tombs and an ornament found in Mycenae are employed as scientific evidence that the expulsion of the Hyksos from Egypt was really about the Exodus narrative depicted in the Old Testament. The presentation is powerful and the production values are epic right down to animating the Mycenae stele to depict Egyptian chariots chasing the Hebrews and then getting over-turned during the Red Sea crossing. Too bad scholars connected with the Minoan exhibition say that the stones depict a lion hunt and that the first stone is not included or “edited” in the CG animation to show Jacobovici’s hypothesis. After reading an extensive review of the documentary by Pepperdine professor of Religion, Chris Heard on his website, Haggaion, one has to wonder at what point did Jacobovici decide to depart from the scientific method in favor of producing a slick documentary. For those who are serious about the message of the Exodus on a spiritual and academic level, how much more damage is done by a well-crafted documentary that doesn’t follow it’s own claim to be evidence based? This is not to say that science can’t be used to establish an historical basis for Old and New Testament narratives. But like Dr. Newberg’s flashing lights or energy-spikes in the neural readings, proving that there was a Moses or David or giant named Goliath doesn’t validate (or invalidate) the messages of these narratives.

So what did Veyne’s intellectual Greeks do about their own myths? Well, they did what today’s intellectual religious conservatives do: they did all kinds of mental gymnastics depending on the venue and problem they were addressing. The physician Galen, when speaking as a scholar, discounted things that could not be proven writing, “if the theorem is unrealizable, in the manner of the following statement, The centaur’s bile relieves apoplexy, it is useless because it escapes our apperception.” But when trying to win over new followers and disciples he’s willing to speak the language of the believers writing that the origin of Greek medicine was taught by Apollo to his son Asclepius. (p. 55) They understood the power of Myth in terms of social and political conventions that needed to be maintained for society to function (p. 80). They might hold to the allegorical/point-of-the-story (“Midrash”?) aspect of the stories. They might even entertain a nostalgic attitude for a Golden Age that doesn’t intersect their own non-mythical existence. But for the most part belief in the magical/mythical parts of the stories was also like today’s attitude that it’s okay for little children to believe in Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny, but anyone with any intelligence knows that these stories just aren’t true. Stories about a warrior making the sun stand still, or conquering people with a magic box, people living to be nine-hundred-years-old would have probably gotten the same “only for kids” label.

Come to think of it, perhaps the genesis of this conflict between belief and intellectualism took hold with those who insisted that the old stories, the old miracles were not something only for that time before now but are part of the Now. An expectation changed from faith and religion being a social construction or convention to being a personal relationship with the divine (which was still a social construction/convention). And because we humans are so good at pattern recognition and invention we can easily see the invisible hand of the power of everything at work in small and great ways in our lives. Of course it does help that by definition this invisible hand works in ways that are entirely beyond our capacity to fathom, there’s no real need to explain or understand anything that might appear to be inconsistent with our dearly held convictions.

On the other extreme, I’m amazed when I encounter the arrogance of some intellectuals who believe that they have a superior understanding of reality while at the same time every academic field, from medicine to astronomy to cosmology to genetics to history are all going through unprecedented revolutions where last year’s textbook and theories are having to be continually thrown out due to new discoveries. My thoughts are that in between what is understood and what is not understood there might be room for an intelligence that, just like Epicurus opined, operates just beyond our limited field of vision and visits us in our dreams. Just don’t expect me to believe in talking snakes or cheap miracle workers who seem to always be in need of donations.

References
* clipart from http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/clipart/default.aspx
* Heard, Chris (2007). Exodus Decoded. Higgaion. Retrieved 04/20/2009 from http://www.heardworld.com/higgaion/?cat=86
* Maher, Bill (2008). Religulous. Thousand Words. Retireved 04/20/2009 from http://www.religulousmovie.net/
* Veyne, Paul (1988). Did the Greeks Believe in Their Myths: An Essay on the Constitutive Imagination. Paula Wissing, translator. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
* Exodus Decoded. Wikipedia. Retireved 04/20/2009 from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exodus_Decoded
* Religulous. Wikipedia. Retireved 04/20/2009 from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religulous

sad screenshot

Remember how impressed I was last time when I was using online research tools? Yeah, in the meantime I’ve run headlong into a less than amazing experience. I went so far as to pay for the upgrade of my copy of Bookends, only to get weird error messages when it can’t read PDFs and doesn’t seem to work with my school’s online databases. Damn. I’ll probably continue to use Zotero and RefWorks to gather data and we’ll see how I might get the data into my documents. Ack.

One of three monitors filled with data by jbb

I’ve been going at it all day, one tutorial after another, pausing to answer student queries online and then moving on to the next item in the EBSCO/ERIC search. I’ve been experimenting with Zotero and RefWorks and my mind has been continually amazed that I can so easily import library citations (with full articles) so easily. I go back to the days of cryptic notecards, piles and piles of books, several hundred dollars in photo-copied journals and articles and an f-ing typewriter. Screw this business of clueless high school students and undergrads copying and pasting right out of Wikipedia. From the comfort of my apartment with Steve Miller playing loudly on iTunes and enjoyng whatever beverage I might choose, I have access to the collected works, wisdom and musings of our entire species. Yeah, I know that was the original idea when DARPA began to put what would become the Internet together. I guess I’m a bit overwhelmed that the damn thing actually works almost as promised. How often does that happen with technology. Right. Never. I’m just wondering how these online tools might work with the writing/organizing tool that I’ve used most over the past years, Circus Ponies’ Notebook.

When I began studying for my doctorate in 2004 I was done with the reigning reference software of the time, Endnote, because that piece of dookie never quite worked as advertised. I found an interesting mac-centric reference manager called Bookends that was bundled with word processor geared toward scholarship called Mellel. I never really got the chance to put either program to the hardcore test in part because I started using Notebook for all of my note taking and draft work and then I took a leave from the doctorate, so not so much need for either app. I guess I’m going to get a chance to really test the hell out of all of these apps over the next few days and weeks.

Alas, as much as I love my beloved Notebook (all of the planning and design of my course at Full Sail was put together in Notebook, then tested in Dreamweaver before going live), I find that I’m doing more and more gathering via web-tools like Evernote, where the content stays on the web, accessible from any device and not trapped on a single machine. I’ve actually pretty much switched to editing my blog using the web-based WordPress editor built into the blogging platform and use my resident-app, Ecto, for a couple features missing on the web-app and as a form of local backup of my entries. I can even imagine moving my dissertation composition to something like Google Docs and that’s heresy from someone who’s chased after the latest and greatest word precessing features going all the way back to WordStar and NewStar on my old Kaypro computer. Wow. Scary thing, vendors like Evernote, are calling their product our “external brain.” Onward and upward.

The Onion News folks did a perfect job echoing the hype and often irrational fandom of all things Apple. Then Hayman spent the next hour making me want to be an iPhone/iTouch programmer. Yikes. I really got sucked up into thinking about how easy it is to program the little things and what I could possibly come up with that would be fun to do, and possibly lucrative for me. Even as I was walking out to the car, talking to Holly about the cool things that could be done, I remembered, “Oh yeah, I just restarted my doctorate program, I’m going to find it hard to find time to sleep…” Damn. I wonder how I could work this into a dissertation research question. Hmmm.

Having earned a masters degree and working toward a doctorate both online, I have more than a little insight into the matter. I’ve heard many say that they could never do online learning because they feel like they lack the self-discipline to get things done without the face-to-face pressure. As someone who is not know for having a well-balanced proactive-get stuff done early work habit, I can say that I have done better with online learning because I’m never not in contact with my classmates and professors. Unlike my ungrad work where the educational experience was largely staring at the back for someone’s head for three-hours every Thursday then forgetting about the class or doing my assignments until the day before the next session, online I found myself working with a small group of friends on a daily basis helping each other get through the process. One would assume that there isn’t any educational experience as lonely as doing it online, but when it’s done right, nothing could be further from the truth. Granted this sense of community isn’t something that happens entirely by accident. What happens is that smart program designers, course developers and students take advantage of the technology and the removal of restraints to have to meet at a certain time in a certain place, and make their educational experience into a “hello” via IM or TM in the morning and an ongoing chat conversation all the way through the day. Because the learning and dialogue is not limited to a certain place or time, it can be made to go on for the entire time one is in the program.

If any school should understand this way of thinking about learning it should be Full Sail. In the face-to-face program classes are held around the clock, covering in four-weeks what other institutions ramble through in 14, limiting students to one or two classes at a time and expecting them to become fully engaged in learning from the very first day. There are no part-time students. It’s intense in the extreme but incredibly effective for the students and efficient as far as facility utilization. You go to Full Sail because you want to quickly learn about filmmaking, music production, entertainment business or media in education from the best and you want to turn that learning into a career in the shortest time possible. It’s the same in the online program. Except that we don’t require that you move to Winter Park, Florida. You can get that same experience from the comfort of your own home, just don’t expect it to be some part-time half-baked at-your-own-pace correspondence course. Ack. jbb

2008 Version – Ed Tech Observations & My Goals Related to This Program:

Technology is expensive. Some would say too expensive. At a time when school districts are scrambling for funds to pay for books, cutting back on student services, and fighting to avoid any cutbacks that would touch on union contracts, one might be hard pressed to justify spending money on shiny new boxes. To me, the fact that we’re faced with this apparent either/or question indicates that this problem is much more than just an unfortunate fiscal shortfall. There are issues here that speak to the very purpose of our educational system.

At the very least the urgency of this ongoing “butter versus guns” question speaks to the cultural/social disconnects that one can find in the decision making process where these decisions are being made. For example, to the business world investing in a computer is just that, an investment to enable a worker to better communicate, to better facilitate getting the job done, and at the very least a business expense to write-off at the end of the year. It’s just part of doing business. In the elementary classroom, however, over twenty-years after Wozniak’s revolution, computers are still a dusty novelty sitting in a corner like a revered but untouched trophy meant to communicate our commitment to “technology and our children.” The computer is still something you do after you’ve finished your regular classroom assignments. And in this environment of “NCLB” there’s scan little time to do the curriculum, much less after-assignments “fun” activities.

Technorati Tags: pepperdine, teaching, work, writing

2008 Version, Continued:

So, on one end of the scale the average classroom teacher is already overwhelmed by the countless demands that need to be attended to every day. Making the shiny new box (or perhaps, not so shiny box) a real part of her working day easily become just another unwelcome chore. I believe that it is a part of “school culture” that wants to maintain a kind of stasis in the classroom that is incompatible with “change” mentality that is part of working with technology. The power against change in the classroom seems to be such that recent college graduates who have been using email to communicate with professors and posting assignments to newsgroups for years, do not bother to wonder why their district has no email service or one that their principal uses or why they have to walk across campus every day to check for paper notes in their little box. The culture is much more 1908 than 2008.

To the student sitting in the seat, however, the world is a very different place. It’s not unusual for eleven-year olds to pester their parents for a cell phone so that they can SMS with their friends (though they tell mom and dad it’s strictly for emergencies). They grew up with Furbies, computer mice, drag and drop, cut and paste, the Internet and MP3s. To them the culture within the classroom is out-of-date and irrelevant. The fact that few of my colleagues would imagine that an iPod might make a great content delivery device and would rather just ban any hand-held device from the classroom speaks to this cultural gap. Students may not have the means to articulate it, but the question is there: “how can what you’re trying to teach me have any validity when you act as if everything I know in my world doesn’t even exist?”

Add to this the concerns and agendas of a whole host of important and influential groups. At the top of the list are parents who very much want the best for their children and may or may not understand technology themselves and assume that schools know what to do about all this technology stuff. Then there are the hardware and software vendors trying to make a living who send catalog after catalog, and never seem to grasp the Byzantine educational accounting practices that squeeze a district’s “buying season” to the working days between late October and March 1st (with time off for Winter break). And on top of this whole confluence are the real decision-makers: concerned citizens who sit on school boards, in administrative office and governmental positions whose most recent full-time classroom experience generally pre-dates the introduction of the electric typewriter and are often just as up-to-date on technology itself.

The world outside of our classrooms is changing in profound ways whether the educational world is willing to partake or not. While we squabble about whose responsibility it is to take care of the busted printers and whether the Mac or the PC is a better classroom computer, the world outside is considering (largely because of technology) whether we really even need fixed-school sites or physical classrooms. Yes, technology is too expensive. But ignoring it may, in the long run, prove to be even more expensive.

As a school-site technology coordinator and/or technology go-to-guy for the past 13-years with three different schools in two different districts I’ve had first hand experience with the frustrations and difficulties of moving a technology plan from idea to implementation. It seems to be a continual struggle between having adequate time, adequate resources and the right people to work with. Most complaints one hears about are the ones related to time. The ones that seem to get the most Press are the ones with dollar signs. But I’ve found that the first two complaints are much more manageable if the last one, having the right people, is taken care of. It’s the team, the educators, administrator, and community participants who make the biggest difference. While technology changes and will continue to change everything in education, the most important component will not be any of the devices used but the people who use them and how well we learn to work together. My objective with this degree program is to continue to grow my capacities as a communicator, as an organizational leader, as a group facilitator, and as a team member. jbb

2004 version: The differences between this and the 2008 version are slight, a bit of editing to pull back on some statements, but overall I was surprised at how many things held up after four years. In technology four years is several generations…

Technology is expensive. Some would say too expensive. At a time when elementary school districts are scrambling for funds to pay for books, cutting back on student services, and fighting to avoid any cutbacks that would touch on union contracts, one might be hard pressed to justify spending money on shiny new boxes. To me, the fact that we’re faced with this apparent either/or question indicates that this problem is much more than just an unfortunate fiscal shortfall. There are issues here that speak to the very purpose of our educational system.

At the very least the urgency of this new “butter or guns” question speaks to the cultural/social disconnects that one can find in the decision making process where these decisions are being made. For example, to the business world investing in a computer is just that, an investment to enable a worker to better communicate, to better facilitate getting the job done, and at the very least a business expense to write-off at the end of the year. It’s just part of doing business. In the elementary classroom, however, over twenty-years after Wozniac’s revolution, computers are still a dusty novelty sitting in a corner like a revered but untouched trophy meant to communicate our commitment to “technology and our children.” The computer is still something you do after you’ve finished your regular classroom assignments. In that environment investing in more technology doesn’t make any sense. “We’re not using the stuff we have,” is the often-frustrated response. There’s a disconnect. They don’t get the role that technology can play in getting the job of education accomplished.

So, on one end of the scale the average classroom teacher is already overwhelmed by the countless demands that need to be attended to every day. Making the shiny new box (or perhaps, not so shiny box) a real part of her working day is just another unwelcome chore. They may vaguely know that they’re missing out on something because they don’t have access to the Internet in the classroom and, if their district has e-mail, they have to bug the also-harried school secretary to get it. But to them, there really isn’t a core connection between what they do as educators and all of this technology stuff.

To the student sitting in the seat, however, the world is a very different place. It isn’t unusual for eleven-year olds to pester their parents for a cell phone so that they can SMS with their friends (though they tell mom and dad it’s strictly for emergencies). To them a PDA has nothing to do with kissing (for the most part… ick). They grew up with Furbies, two-button mice, drag and drop, cut and paste, and MP3s. To them the culture within the classroom is largely out-of-date and irrelevant. They may not have the means to articulate it, but the question is there: “what is the point of all of this?”

Add to this the concerns and agendas of a whole host of important and influential groups. At the top of the list are parents who very much want the best for their children and may not understand why one classroom has three new PCs while their kid can only ogle from a distance his classroom’s “Altar to a Deteriorating Apple ][e," that the kid is convinced was uncovered in some Inca ruin. Then there are hardware and software vendors trying to make a living who send catalog after catalog, and never seem to grasp the Byzantine educational accounting practices that squeeze a district's "buying season" to the working days between late October and March 1st (with time off for Winter break). On top of this whole confluence are the real decision-makers: concerned citizens who sit on school boards, in administrative office and governmental positions whose most recent full-time classroom experience generally pre-dates the Inca Apple ][e and are often just as up-to-date on technology itself.

There are short-term measures that can address the concerns I've raised, better training and increased communication between all parties to begin with. But given the typical education mindset, I have to conclude that technology is just too expensive. It is too expensive to implement with amateur/part time technophiles who are infatuated with "shiny new boxes," but haven't quite thought out specifically how we're supposed to use these things. It is too expensive to trust to mid-level bean counters who only see the number of boxes they can purchase per dollar, but forget that TCO has to include successful implementation by the end-user, the teacher, and not that it just works. And technology is just too expensive to trust to administrators and planners who have never spent a day in a classroom in the past ten-years, if ever.

The world outside of our classrooms is changing in profound ways whether the educational world is willing to partake or not. While we squabble about whose responsibility it is to take care of the busted printers and whether the Mac or the PC is a better classroom computer, the world outside is considering (largely because of technology) whether we really even need fixed-school sites or physical classrooms. Yes, technology is too expensive. But ignoring it may, in the long run, prove to be even more expensive.

As a school-site technology coordinator for the past eight years with two different schools in two different districts I've had first hand experience with the frustrations and difficulties of moving a technology plan from idea to implementation. It seems to be a continual struggle between having adequate time, adequate resources and the right people to work with. Most complaints one hears about are the ones related to time. The ones that seem to get the most Press are the ones with dollar signs. But I've found that the first two complaints are much more manageable if the last one, having the right people, is taken care of. It's the team, the educators, administrator, and community participants who make the biggest difference. While technology changes and will continue to change everything in education, the most important component will not be any of the devices used but the people who use them and how well we learn to work together. My objective with this degree program is to continue to grow my capacities as a communicator, as an organizational leader, as a group facilitator, and as a team member.

Music: Takin’ It to the Streets from the album “Greatest Hits” by The Doobie Brothers

Music: King Of The World from the album “Citizen Steely Dan: 1972-1980 (Disc 2) [Box Set]” by Steely Dan

Technorati Tags: blogs, pepperdine, work, writing

Having tormented my close friends with my relationship travails going back to the time just before finishing my master’s program at Pepperdine, in 2002, I knew well enough to leave all of that out of the memo. So, restricting myself to what was going on in my professional life, I was still left to wonder how much detail to include. As with the unnecessary personal stuff, including too much detail might look like a case of excuse making or whining. So, I went for covering the chain of events, trying to keep to the relevant facts and letting the facts tell the story. jbb

1. Why Did I Take My Leave:

Thank you for taking the time to consider my re-application to the Ed-Tech doctorate program. I took my leave from the program in the beginning of the Spring 2006 term during my second year with Cadre X. In the beginning of that school year I had taken a job teaching technology at DeMille Middle School here in Long Beach. Besides teaching four computer classes I had agreed to help out with some staffing problems by teaching a pre-Algebra class. As is traditional in many institutions, being the least senior staff member, I was given a group of 35 eighth graders who were demonsteribly not interested in learning pre-Algebra. By December I found that I was taking more sick days than I had in the previous ten years of teaching and that the eighth graders were “winning.” Needless to say I was finding it difficult to devote the necessary time and energy to my studies with Cadre X because of this Black Hole of a class. So, I decided, rather than fail at both my teaching and my work with CadreX, I would take a leave from Pepperdine.

As an addendum to this narrative, when I took some time off in March of that Spring, the principal was called in to assist a frustrated substitute and after spending a couple of days with that class he decided that the students had been missasigned. He sent fifteen students to merge with another pre-Algebra class and redesignated the remaining twenty as a basic math class and remained the rest of the school year to co-teach the class with me. It was no victory but I felt better about the hours I had spent trying to work with that class.

2. Why I am ready to return.

I believe that I am ready return to the program because I faced the difficulty of my work environment and not only survived but in the following two years expanded my teaching-duties to include classes in journalism, yearbook and basic word processing. I am ready to return because I need to finish what I left at Pepperdine two-years ago. I am ready to return because I am about to take my career to the next level teaching media in education for/with Holly Ludgate at Full Sail University. I will be in the perfect position to match my studies with my work.

3. EdTech progress over the past two years.

As previously mentioned I’ve spent the past two years expanding my curriculum to include teaching journalism and yearbook. When I took over yearbook I moved the program to a completely digital process using only digital cameras, and managing the work-flow with iPhoto, Photoshop, PageMaker, InDesign and my in-class Macintosh network. I added journalism this past year and chose to forgo the expense and limitations of paper and instead put up a website using Joomla as my CMS to put my students’ work online. I’ve also taken the opportunity over the past two Januarys to attend Apple’s MacExpo in San Francisco networking with fellow educators, tech journalists and tech-enthusiasts.

4. Explain the “C” in LX’s 771B class

I believe that my “C” performance in my 771B class was a result of the stress of my prior work environment and not being able to give my work at Pepperdine the time and level of concentration that I normally would have given. I have no doubt that my low performance in that class not only doesn’t reflect what I am capable of doing but what I am ready to perform.

Related Twitters:

• 9 more weeks, need 2 do my pepperdine app online, turn in a request 2 readmit letter. oh yeah, & teach my normal load. Projector still dead #

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Music/Podcast: Mac OS Ken: 04.10.2008 from the album “Mac OS Ken” by Ken Ray

Technorati Tags: pepperdine

The podcast by Morgan Webb that mentioned gOS:
Further details on the gPC were reported in Tech Crunch. All I can say, as much as I like my commercial, I like watching Morgan deliver the news a hell of a lot more. Duh. JBB

One good thing that came out of this conversation was that it reminded me of something I wrote on a web-page just as I was coming into this experience of Love that would so completely change my life. And even though the relationship seems to have run its course and I’m currently not with the person who was at the center of this very long whirlwind, the things that I was beginning to learn and wrote about still hold true. My struggle for the past few month has been to remember and hold on to all of the good things that I’ve learned despite how things have turned out. Some days are harder than others…


I almost think that I’ve come full-circle now. Almost fifteen years ago I wrote an article about following the “Logic of Feelings.” At the time the argument was that it was important to not dispel “feeling’s message” just because it lacked something in the way of being “objective truth,” and that it’s okay to determine the course of ones own life with the assistance of said feelings. It was hardly a mission statement but it was a good place to start.

Using Steven Covey’s “Beginning from the Ending “ model, I’ve created my own extended obituary:

When I’m gone I’d like my friends and family to remember my love for seeing the humor in everything (rule 6, or was that 69). While this humor had its roots in an insecure boy’s avoidance/defensive mechanism, it found it’s full voice in an older man’s understanding that the difficulties and tragedies that would rob us of our smiles merely hide the much greater reality, full of wonderment and limitless possibilities. And sometimes the only answers for life’s irritating queries is just to laugh at it all.

When I’m gone I hope that my friends and family see that a good measure of this humor came from my love of language. I can only imagine that my elementary school teachers would never believe that this stubborn nine-year-old, who hated reading and refused to look at anything more “literary” than LIFE Magazine and National Geographic during library time, would have been proud, in his later years, to call himself a life-long learner. In the space of about seven-years the reluctant third-grader became a knowledge-thirsty high school sophomore willing to plow through Elizabethan English and the King James Bible to satisfy his thirsty soul. In fact this language-laden quest would lead that sophomore through a “literary” Bachelor’s Degree in Biblical Studies and then a second Bachelor’s in Journalism.

Then there’s the music. When I’m gone I hope that my friends and family remember the important role that playing and writing music had for me. Actually learning to play guitar as a teenager and stumbling into songwriting (because nothing out there seemed to reflect the way I felt) forced me to learn how to articulate feelings and communicate within a very specific and narrow bandwidth (my budding musicianship). Performing said music, first with my first writing partner and then later solo, taught me a lot about communicating by listening first for the audiences’ response. I also learned to not let the number of faces intimidate me, but rather to find a few faces to focus on and let them unconsciously speak for their neighbors.

Then there are those faces in the crowd . . . What are the words and music and humor without those special people, friends and family, who connect with ones small voice crying in the wilderness. All of it, the accomplishments, the accolades, the insights, and the learning are completely worthless and meaningless without the knowing smile, the supportive hand squeeze, and the simultaneous glance. When I am gone I hope that you embrace the memory of our times together and how my life would have been so vacant and empty with you in it.

Most important to me are the small faces in the crowd. Maybe it comes from being part of a moderately large family, maybe it comes from never having grown up myself, maybe it comes from understanding that all of creation exists behind those little eyes, in their hearts and hands, that there is nothing more important than doing my part in their life’s journey. When I am gone, they and their children and their children’s children will be a testament as to whether I did the job that I loved so much.

Then there is the benefit of having lived at this time in history, in this place, with these opportunities and, of course, with all of these great toys. “For whom much is given, much us expected.” While I’ve used that quote to motivate myself to gear myself toward the service of others, I also use it to recognize the wealth of technology and access to it that has/had been dumped in my lap. When I am gone I hope that my friends, family and colleagues remember that I was always captured by the wonderment of our species’ creativity at having made these things. In my enjoyment, however, I hope they remember that I never let the toys or their shininess become more important than the little hands that would use them or the hands that created them (including my own).

Thus when I am gone I hope that my friends and family remember the smile in my eyes and my willingness to turn something on its head so that we could all have good laugh over it. I hope that they remember that my life was about building into the future by helping my students and associates integrate the complexities of our technological existences with our human endeavors for companionship, meaning and community. I hope that they revel in my love of writing and for communicating and how fascinating I found each of them and our whole species. I hope that they remember how I loved my role as observer, as teacher, as brother, and as lover. I hope the vista of these memories amazes them in its simple beauty and stays with them because of its deep complexities.
JBB

“Everyone who has been given much, much will be demanded; and from the one who has been entrusted with much, much more will be asked.” Luke 12:48 (NIV)

Taking care of my gifts:
Health
I’m no use to anyone else including myself if I don’t take care to maintain my physical health with proper diet, proper exercise and proper rest. Of course the cool part is that the better I do at this the greater energy I have for the other stuff.

Heart/Head
I’m no use to anyone else including myself if I don’t invest in my own emotional and mental health through frequent reflection and meditation on my core values and beliefs and interaction with my significant other, my family, my primary friends and associates.

Well-tuned instruments
I cannot share or help others if I haven’t first spent the time and energy needed to maintain and develop my talents. I need to spend time every day writing and reflecting. I need to spend time every day listening and being a participant in the lives of those closest to me. I need to spent time every day playing my guitar to continue to develop and maintain the voice that I first discovered almost thirty-years ago. I need to spend time every week investigating and reading to maintain my technology troubleshooting/problem solving skills. I need to spend time every couple of months creating web or video projects. I need to spend time every couple of months meeting and working with people with similar communication drives or interests. I need to spend time (quarterly?) publishing or presenting my projects and materials to my associates and supporters.

Giving Back:
Home/Not Home
I know that some of my contemporaries make great efforts to keep their personal and professional as separate as possible and take great pride in that. But, because I tend to work across so many different skill sets on so many different projects, I prefer to let my personal life and profession life overlap as much as is possible or reasonable. This is not to say that I’d let my students suffer because of difficulties at home (the mom/dad-to-kid-to-dog-to-cat chain reaction), but wherever possible the lessons or insights of my or their home experiences needs to be a part of our learning community. My “role” as an educator is actually a skill (or collection of skills) and lives along side my other skills (often confused as roles) to afford me the means to live in the different areas of my life. But I am the same person and I know that I benefit and my students or associates benefit the more I pull together all of my resources to support them in their learning and endeavors.

Living in the Moment
Whether I’m answering a printer question on the phone or a seven-year-old wants to tell me what movie he saw with his older brother over the weekend, I need to be there for that person in that moment. Because I believe that all of creation exists behind those little eyes, in their hearts and hands, and one cannot tell how the gift of ones attention can effect the lives of these little ones, there is, therefore, nothing more important than doing my part in their life’s journey. Now, because there are frequently forty little ones vying for my attention I cannot be in the moment for that one person to the exclusion of all the others. So there are certain balance limitations at work here.

This also means that I need to be there for those little and big ones whom I’m related to, just as with those who call me “Mr. Bustillos.” And those whom I’m related to would be well-served to understand that there should be no conflict in my being there for them or for my students because one does not diminish the other. In this case, the more I give, the more I have to give.

Balancing the “Then,” the “Now,” and the “Later”
Like the sub-floors and pillars driven deep into the earth below great building, I know that what we wish to build into the future is frequently determined and shaped based on what we have built in the past. This goes for organizations as well as individuals. New administrators would do well to fully understand where their staff and organization has been before making changes, rather than to imagine to sweep away the past through executive order and then wonder why no one is following through with his/her edicts. At the same time, because of our capacity to create and change, we cannot afford to allow ourselves to be limited to the dictates of the past, especially if we did not have a full, active role in creating those dictates.

Now it’s certainly true that there is nothing that one can do about the past and that the future is, in fact, unknown. But we cannot allow ourselves to suffer from the tyranny of the “Now.” Because most of our lives are full, well passed overflowing, we need to be aware not to let the endless stream of “just one more thing” completely fill and commandeer the sum total of our lives. This means that today’s actions and demands (the “Now”) needs to be properly balanced with time for reflection (the “Then”) and time for planning (the “Later”). What this means in terms of a mission statement is that I need to provide for myself and those whom I’m leading adequate time to plan and then adequate time to reflect after project completions. JBB

And what every administrator and teacher knows is that this stupidity will persist until the “A-list” schools fail to meet their goals. Then someone “brilliant” will figure out that there is something flawed with the plan. A darker interpretation is that this “planned failure” is meant to dislodge the typically “left-leaning” teacher power-block and hand public education over to enterpreneurial private sector old-school education run like “business.” Until that, of course, fails. In the meantime we wasted billions of dollars and treated a whole population of highly trained professionals like idiots because we can get blood from a turnip. Our society is or has already fallen apart and it seems to be riding on the backs of educators to make it look all pretty, at least until the end. God knows parents are overwhelmed and the politicans have now idea what the hell they are talking about. All I can say is thank God I don’t teach math, english or science. This is all one giant joke. JBB

My friend, Sissy, refuses to do committee work with public school teachers because of our renowned tendency to complain about everything and do nothing to change things. It seems that it doesn’t take us very long to “learn” that we really can’t change things and the best we can do is the work we do helping our students. Alas, enough negative experiences with that and many a teacher then reduces their expectations to just showing up on time, having a reasonable command on the curriculum and not fucking up over the course of the day.

It’s sad to think that the system has such a consistent knack for chewing up young energetic teachers and spitting out old bitter negative shells who are just hanging on to live to the day when they don’t have to do this fucking shit any more. Being a bit older when I came into teaching, and through my experiences with Pepperdine, I just can’t accept this idea that we can’t change things or that success by attrition is still success. I believe that there is no excuse for living ones life “in silent” frustration and disappointment. I’m too old for this shit. JBB

While up with my Pepperdine Friends I decided to move my video archive onto the YouTube website. At the moment I’ve only uploaded two videos but eventually I’ll upload the whole archive and put a link to the whole catalogue on the nav bar on the right of this blog… But for the moment feel free to enjoy a project that I created a year ago last February (02/2005) for a future scenarios class. Click here to go to my current video catalog. JBB