I just watched the Apple Education event keynote and I’m very excited about what I saw. If you haven’t seen today’s keynote yet, run, do not walk to your local device (I got a better connection via my iPad projecting the keynote to my TV) and sit a spell. Nope, Schiller will never have Steve’s dynamic style, but the content is definitely something that we need to be keenly aware of. In a word they are taking book publishing and specifically textbook publishing, and taking it to the next level. The textbook will not be a static collection of words and images frozen at printing but have the portability of a book, the videos and interactivity of a networked computer and the freshness of blog pages, while retaining formatting, typography and layout that tends to be lacking in web-based textbooks.

I was going to try my hand at getting Udutu to work for my stand-alone copyright unit but I’m now going to investigate the possibility of using iBook Author to make the unit. Now we know where all the iWeb brain-power went over the last couple years. And I’m curious to see Full Sail will continue to experiment with iTunes U, in that iTunes U seems determined to become it’s own LMS and not just a lecture delivery vehicle.

I’ve been getting emails from QuarkXpress begging me to check out their new iPad/ePub friendly $299 app (if you have a previous version of QuarkXpress). They’ve got to be peeing their pant. I wonder how Schoology feels about Apple putting more effort/muscle behind iTunes U with added assignment and communication features. Yikes.

Enjoy. jbb

Journal Classic: Following the Logic of Feelings

Heart, why are you pounding like a hammer?
Heart, why are you beating like a drum?
Heart, why do you make such a commotion
when I’m waiting for my baby to come?
Oh heart, don’t do it if it’s not the real thing
Heart, I get so easily deceived
Heart, there is no other I can turn to
if not you, heart, then who can I believe?”
“Heart” by Nick Lowe

I vividly remember when it first happened. It was in the seventh grade when I walked up to Mary Hinck and said, “Hi,” and she said rather unfeelingly, “Oh, it’s you.” It’s like I didn’t even really know that it was there until it came crashing to the ground in front of God and everyone. Jesus, I thought, if this is what love feels like, I don’t want any part of it.

I didn’t mean that, of course, and have spent the intervening 17 years demonstrating it to no one in particular. But something very definitely changed after that first brush with emotional death.

photobooth iowans by 3Neus/flickr

Back at home, though I never once for a moment doubted my parent’s love for me or my siblings; emotions, especially anger, seemed to be like Steven Spielbergian pyrotechnics. Like the much-feared nuclear holocaust, there would be a blinding flash of emotional light: my father would explode over some such reality of living with five children. My mother would then deploy her tactical arsenal. Another flash, then children running in every direction, vainly hoping to avoid becoming part of the scorched landscape. Then just as quickly as it had begun, it would be over. Father would be about his business and mother would continue hers. It all seemed to my childish mind to be quite unnecessary.

So it only seems right that at one point in my life I hung around with a religious group that held to the philosophy that “feelings” could not be trusted. “Feelings, they come and go, but objective truth, now there’s the ticket.” Of course the objective truth that was being referred to here was the Bible, the Scoffield Reference Bible in the King James Version to be more specific. And Love, well that had something to do with some Greek word and God and Jesus dying and . . . (all of which of course made no sense whatsoever to my teenage mind, but who was I to scoff at the insights of my elders?).

I don’t know why I always seem to use this column to take pot‑shots at Evangelical Christianity (no doubt an unconscious attempt to pay them back for the emotional trauma and near fatal brain damage I experienced while getting my Bachelor of Arts degree in Biblical Studies). In fact, before this starts sounding too much like “Sex and the Single Brain Cell,” I have to question the wisdom of attempting an article that would argue following the logic of emotions. I mean, either you understand it or you don’t.

I guess it’s just one of those things that pisses me off. While I was playing my little religious game, going to seminary and all, reading Kierkegaard’s Either/Or, thinking about Pluralism and other “important issues,” my own wife was suffering from emotional deprivation. Perhaps this isn’t unusual for couples where one of the partners is working full‑time while carrying 12 units of graduate school course work. It’s called, “I love you, but I don’t have any time for you”—a rather mixed message.

Quite inevitably she announced to me one day at lunch, rather unceremoniously, “You know, if you were just my boyfriend or if we were just living together, I’d leave you.” I wasn’t sure I wanted to look up from the book that I was reading. I knew it wouldn’t be a pretty picture. This was not at all what I was expecting.

So off to counseling we went. A well-meaning Christian friend told me about the horrendous percentage of couples who go to counseling and end up divorced. I think she was trying to caution me against the practice. Of course she failed to mention that no one goes to counseling because things are going great. Someone in the relationship has just about had it (a la, “if you were just my boyfriend . . .”) and it’s either this or the door. No doubt the percentage would be even greater had they not at least tried counseling. Still, it didn’t sound very promising.

Once a week we’d arrive at the counselor’s office. She’d outline the gripes of the week and I’d patiently listen, mentally preparing my counter‑arguments. Then the counselor would turn to me and say, “So Joe, how do you feel about what she has said?”

“Well . . . .” Feel? Did he say “feel”? Most of the time I’d say something about the supposed logic behind my actions and nothing about my feelings. This went on for months. Then one day it dawned on me. It happened while she was complaining about her needing to use the new  Nissan sedan, which had an air‑conditioner, ’cause she had to wear nice clothes to work while me and my Levi’s could put up with the un‑air‑conditioned Toyota pickup. When it came time for my little meaningless counter‑argument I let it out. “You know,” I said rather matter of factly, “if she was convinced of my love for her or that she was number one in my life, than none of this other shit would even matter.” Opps. Did I say that? They both stared at me like one does when a toddler unexpectedly makes an adult‑like observation.

“So Joe, how do you feel about her then?” It took another five months before I could clearly say how I felt. In view of the fact that I write a column called “Sex and the Single Brain Cell,” it should be obvious that we were to become another statistic.

“Oh heart, there must be no mistake
Beware, special care, from the start
Oh heart, though I’m glad for the first bit of love to have
Be certain now, else you’re gonna break
Oh heart, motor of emotion you’ve never been like this before
Heart, at first I thought you were joking,
but I know deep down in you that you’re sure.”
“Heart” by Nick Lowe

I realize that the above narrative is a rather odd way to set up an argument in favor of following the logic of feelings. Those who consider the concept to be little more than a dangerous dose of pop psychology will no doubt feel justified. But, like I wrote before, unless you understand the concept you’ll have little appreciation for my argument (which is really no argument at all).

The reason for my sensitivity about this subject is no doubt the result of my own struggle with the concept of “feeling,” starting with the amazingly disarming question: “what the fuck do I want out of life?” Laid out like a raw nerve, the question began to unravel the reasons why, two years ago, I would have recoiled at the idea of following feeling’s leading.

Simply put, an anemic sense of self worth prevented me from thinking that I was an adequate judge for determining the meaning or direction of my own life. “What the fuck do I want out of life?” It’s just a simple question. But there was a silent yet pervasive lack of self‑trust, which perhaps extended personally and culturally to a time when authority figures were depended upon for making the decisions of life. And feelings were the luxuries of irresponsible youth and melancholic old age.

“She said, ‘you know, if you were just my boyfriend or if we were just living together, I’d leave you.’ I wasn’t sure I wanted to look up from the book that I was reading.”

Just below the surface was an ancient belief that if I were left to my own devices, judging things on the basis of what I “want,” I’d no doubt do damage to myself and evil to my brothers and sisters. This was somewhat based on a twisted application of King David’s repentant song and Solomon’s words of advice:

“But I am a worm and not a man, scorned by men and despised by the people. All who see me, mock me; they hurl insults, shaking their heads.” (Psalm 22:6,7) “Trust in the LORD with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding; in all your ways acknowledge him, and he will make your paths straight.” (Proverbs 3:5,6)

Not long after the news of my marital separation broke, my well-meaning father strongly suggested that if I turned this dilemma over to Jesus than all of the fuzziness would clear up and I’d make the right decision. Perhaps. But equally possible was the proposition that I got into this situation because over the course of the last 14 years I’d “turned over” such situations to the Lord, in my own feeble way, and failed to read the writing on my own heart. Ha. How was God going to talk to me anyway except through my own heart?

A child no doubt lacks the common sense and self‑discipline to negotiate the troubled waters of life without parental instruction and example but I have, for a long time, ceased being a child. And when I turned to the judgment bench of feelings I didn’t find a power hungry madman bent on my own destruction or the lording over of the lives of my loved ones. Quite surprisingly I found a mirror image of myself, perhaps a little more insightful, perhaps a little more excitable, somewhat like a profile of ones self that until this very moment one has failed to even notice.

I took feeling’s leading and made some difficult decisions. Perhaps out an inability to read feeling’s messages or like myself, out of a lack of trust, many fake their way from sun‑up to the evening news thinking that this vague sense of dissatisfaction is all part of life. Life’s a bitch and then you die. Right?

Someone once told me that there was more to it than that. Risking the possible dissolution of our marriage, she courageously challenged me to confess what I already knew about my feelings. Among other things, this difficult experience has shown me that feelings, whether acknowledged or ignored, have a way of making themselves known.

Sources:
Following the Logic of Feelings (“The Editor’s Wild Hair” column)  by Joe Bustillos. Air, Dirt & Ink (ADI), Vol 1, Issue 4, January‑February 1988)

image: photobooth iowans by 3Neus. http://www.flickr.com/photos/motherscratcher/2267589346/ retrieved on 2/3/2010

cover image: La Estrella esperaba, pero nadie llego by Mercedes.. Life as I picture. http://www.flickr.com/photos/mercedesdayanara/366501299/ retrieved on 2/3/2010

How much more efficient would it have been if I had some device, roughly 8×11, where I could have marked up the documents (in their native electronic form), that could run all day on a single charge and had access to the Internet even when there’s no nearby wifi. Hmm. No, I guess I could make the notes on the text with my finger, but a stylus works too. I doubt it’ll have a stylus, but I have to wonder if Apple’s upcoming announcement next Wednesday will include the announcement of a device that fulfills this content creation need. The announcement better not be just a rev of the iLife suite. Ack.

Sources:
image by Joe Bustillos

An open letter to my emdt co-workers, co-conspirators & creativity enablers,

On one level or another I’ve been teaching communication and writing since I took my first teaching assignment 15-years ago. One thing that I learned right away was that it seemed to be a big function of the education system to take the eagerness of our little learners to share their every creation and over time crush it down to nothing, such that every fourth grader knows that no one wants hear what they have to say and even less what they think. The smart ones, in this system, are the ones who learn to speak and write in the language of their teachers, and that it’s critically important to not make any mistakes in spelling or grammar. It shouldn’t be much of a surprise that the ones who might suffer the most from this fear of writing are the ones who are part of the system that enforces this approach to writing, our masters students. But what they may not know, which I learned from my second-language 6th graders, is that they’ll never get any better at writing without working at it on an ongoing basis and that requires that I release them from the system that says that they can only write about things that the teacher cares about and only in the style set by the teacher. You have to work against a lifetime of “correction” and just get them to write before you can help them to write “better.”

As we begin to make blogging a bigger part of our process, please consider the learning process and that putting thoughts down in writing for others to read takes something more than can be expressed in a check-list (though a check-list can be very helpful in the beginning). What prompted this concern is the following exchange between two of my current students about having to do a blog in my course:

edm613 student blog entry:
“I must admit, I disliked blogging in the last class in which it was a requirement. I am really not sure why- I like to write- but it just never gelled for me. I did, however, revisit the idea of blogging after losing my job at the end of the last school year. I thought I would chronicle the ups and downs of my lack of job, talk about the new and exciting things I would encounter and boast about my new accomplishments. I would fill the pages with salsa lessons, daily musings and funny anecdotes. I think I actually managed to write a paragraph once or twice and it consisted of me complaining and moaning about emotional drudgery. I have a difficult enough time sounding interesting in one line on Twitter- I couldn’t possibly blog about my life- or lack there of.

“So here we go again.

“I decided not to re-purpose my last blog but start a new one. It will be chock full of fresh and new ideas, brilliant insight and astute observations. Words will flow from my mind, through my fingers and dance onto the page. I will be clever and captivating. What does this have to do with anything in class? Nothing, but every blog has to start somewhere. Welcome.”

Second students comment:
“I agree with you about blogging in our last class. The requirements were very limiting and seemed to hold me back. The blog became a chore and I dreaded each and every post for fear that I wouldn’t get a good grade or I would make some simple mistake and have to redo everything. I am very excited to get to share with everyone and express my thoughts more freely again. I like that you have brought a great sense of positivity into your new blog. I like your new point of view…you think you can assist me in bringing back my light?”

Standards of excellence and creativity will never be found where one doesn’t have the freedom to make a thousand mistakes first. I should know. jbb

Sources:
image: keyboard – clipart.com/jupiter graphics
thanks to jolene t. & joann s. for your thoughts and comments on blogging and giving it “one more try.”

image by Ballistik Coffee Boy (cc)(by:) 2008

I was listening to an excellent interview of one of the creators of Scrivener, a word processing app, by Your Mac Life’s Shawn King and became very enthusiastic about using a word processing app that’s specifically designed for longer text like a thesis, dissertation or novel. I’ve been looking for the word processing promised land since I first started working with micro computers in the early 80s. Most, if not all, early word processing apps were designed for office memos and have pretty much struck to that model, at least that was my experience beginning with Word Star to Word Perfect to MS Word. When I switched to the mac full-time I was delighted to find that there were some creative outline/notetaking apps that really addressed my need to design and compose longer threads of creativity. I eventually settled on Notebook from Circus Ponies. I used it to design my media course for Full Sail and couldn’t imagine managing the continuous flow of course changes and updates without it. I laugh when I think that I used to use sticky-notes for information that didn’t fit into full blown documents. Yikes. Notebook is so much better than using just a file and folder cluttered desktop system and I’ve made at least one convert of the EMDT staff. Anyway, after listening to Keith Blount from Scrivener I became curious if anyone else has gone on a similar journey, looking for the perfect WP app. Shawn King’s interview follows immediate. After listening to the interview please take the poll listed below and share your thoughts on alternative WP apps.

Shawn King, Your Mac Life, Interviews Keith Blount from Scrivener, July 22, 2009

Sources:
Image: Apple III Keyboard Refinements by Ballistik Coffee Boy, http://www.flickr.com/photos/spaceageboy/3131550267/ retrieved 8/01/2009 – (cc)(by:) 2008

mp3: Shawn King, Your Mac Life, Interviews Keith Blount from Scrivener, July 22, 2009, http://www.yourmaclifeshow.com/archives/2009/07/22/apple-earnings-pan-mass-challenge-and-scrivener retrieved 8/01/2009

APP Highlight:
Scrivener by Literature & Latte

Notebook by Circus Ponies

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

image capture by playerx

Following is a video of Clay Shirkey at TED that my student included in her blog post:

Sources:

EDM613 wk4: Clay Shirkey and Twitter by Alice Keeler, http://www.selfservebaker.com/mathblog/?p=156 Retrieved 7/3/2009

Video: Clay Shirkey at TED, http://www.ted.com/talks/view/id/575

image: Twitter Fail Whale is back by playerx, http://www.flickr.com/photos/playerx/3090739418/ Retrieved on 7/9/2009

How to Write for the Web

by Ashley Belanger for Full Sail Online

Learn how your writing benefits from brevity.

The phrase “the shorter, the better” can be applied to many things. Generally speaking, action movies, acceptance speeches and grace before a really delicious dinner all benefit from brevity, but one of the absolute crucial applications of this phrase has been toward Web writing. Wordiness on the Web is more than just frowned upon; it’s a cardinal sin.

But why? Well, because whatever it is that you’re about to expound upon has already been explained by someone else, and chances are, they did it better and they used cooler images to illustrate their point. That was meant to be a joke, but seriously, one of the keys to Web writing is in understanding the value of a well-placed link (like this one.) that supports your statements for those who don’t already know the subject.

It’s dangerous to concern yourself too much with length without also acknowledging that the reason most writers (and readers) want you to be brief is so that you get to the point fast. Don’t dilute your message with too much language or back-story.

One of the easiest ways to highlight your point is by artfully formatting your writing to best display the message’s main objective. You can do this with a pull quote, but that’s not the only way. In this article, all of the key points have been bolded. You can also use bullets, numbers or sidebars to allow the most casual readers to immediately scroll down to the important stuff. The important thing is that you use formatting effectively to guide the reader.

Adjectives and adverbs can be really powerful, but when it comes to Web writing, it’s actually the nouns and verbs that should be your best friends. Remember to use active voice and avoid long strings of verbs, so you should say:

“I jumped over those hurdles.”

instead of:

“I had been jumping over those hurdles.”

and the very worst:

“Those are the hurdles I had just been jumping over.”

And not to beat a dead horse, but in addition to tailoring the length of your overall message, you should keep in mind that shorter paragraphs also ease the experience for the reader. Try not to have more than five lines per paragraph.

Make sure the breaks in your text make sense for an outside reader. That’s the person you should be most concerned with in any writing. At some point, every writer must come to terms with how much their chosen topic has already been covered, and for this reason, EMDTMS Course Director Joe Bustillos encourages students to find what’s important to them about their writing topic.

“Every student should keep a blog,” Bustillos said. “But don’t just write the stuff you think I want to hear. Write what you know, especially stuff from the heart. That’s better.”

Web writing gives you a chance to really establish a voice for your writing, especially if it’s for a personal or professional blog. You will probably find that the more you write, the more natural it will be to follow these guidelines, so keep plugging along.

Quick Tips:
* Always proofread before you publish to the Web.
* Use spell check!
* Deleted posts are the quickest way to ruin your Web integrity.
* If you’re worried about the content in a particular post, wait 24 hours before you publish.

“Re-reading before posting really saves on saying something stupid and/or appearing stupid for leaving out words and/or just not posting things that made more sense in your head but just look like a madman ranting in print (kind’a like this sentence!)” Bustillos reminded students.

-Ashley Belanger

© Copyright 2009 – Full Sail University

Last year I’d switched from three separate blogs to a single “magazine” themed blog with multiple categories/embedded blogs (love the Revolution Media-Pro theme by Brian Gardner). But, much like the problems mentioned by Sarah Lane, I found that because I wasn’t writing for all of the categories consistently that there were sections that grew more stale and what I was working on only pointed out the sections that were more neglected (I’m talking about you “sex & the single brain cell”!). So I went back to Gardner’s new theme operation, Studio Press, to upgrade the visual look. At the same time, I started looking at re-organizing certain sections so that what appears on the front page is more flexible to highlight what I’m working on without forcing me to write articles just to keep some sections from looking old. I also need to continue working on making it so that there’s a little different feel for the different sub-blog/category pages. Onward and upward.

Music: C’mon C’mon from the “C’mon C’mon“ CD by Sheryl Crow

Source:
history of my blogging by Hugh MacLeod of gapingvoid.com retrieved on 6/6/2009

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

Then the last week of February, as if I needed a textbook case on Fair Use, I stumbled across an NPR interview of the artist, Shepherd Fairey, who was behind President Obama’s “Hope” poster that rose to iconic status during the election. Seems that the Associated Press was threatening to sue Fairey for the use of the photograph that he used to create his poster. Just before NPR ran the story Fairey decided to beat AP to the punch and sue AP claiming that his use of the photo was covered under Fair Use. To make things even more complicated, the photographer, Mannie Garcia, is suing AP claiming that he was a freelancer and not an AP employee when he shot the disputed photo and therefore he is entitled to compensation from this litigation. Let’s say it together: Fair Use is not a right but a defensible position. Again, Fair Use is not a right but a defensible position.

I asked photographer and TWiT contributer, Scott Bourne, his take on the case (via Twitter) and he said, “I think the artist stole the photo and his fair use claim will end up costing him treble damages. All depends on whether AP owns pic.”

When NPR’s Terry Gross asked the photographer of the Obama image, Mannie Garcia, his take on Fairey using his photograph he said, “[It's] crucial for people to understand, simply because it’s on the Internet doesn’t mean that it’s free for the taking, and that just because you can take it, means that it belongs to you.”

A cursory survey of opinions online from the likes of Milton Glaser on BoingBoing, Mark Vallen on Art-for-Change, The Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston, and Chal Pivik on the Los Angeles METBlogs, seems to show that the more the pundit knows about the actual steps or changes to the photo that Fairey made to create the poster the more likely the writer will come down on the side of Fairey’s Fair Use claim. Finally, NPR did an excellent job covering all of the angles of the story, finishing up with a discussion with law professor Greg Lastowka on the case and Fair Use. Click the player below for the complete NPR recording.

NPR: Fresh Air: Shepard Fairey: Inspiration Or Infringement?

Los Angeles Times Video: Hope: Shepard Fairey and Barack Obama

Postscript: Had my research on this story ended with the NPR piece I would have been left with a different image of Shepherd Fairey than the one I gained via a series of videos that were created long before Obama campaign, when Fairey’s main claim to fame was his “Andre the Giant: Obey!” world-wide sticker/poster/street art project. Fifteen-plus arrests later for “street art” activities and it’s little wonder that he’d be a media darling while at the same time being in trouble for taking someone’s else’s photograph and not thinking twice about using it to make the Obama: Hope image. When he says, “Icon” for the G4 series of the same name, implying his own status in the art/street culture world, I’m put off by the arrogance and willingness to play both sides of the media. When all of this plays out the title of his next video might be, “Shepherd Fairey: Oops.”

Sources:
Obama photo: Mannie Garcia (AP)/Obama image: Shepherd Fairey, retrieved from http://www.boingboing.net/2009/02/09/milton-glaser-weighs.html on 04/09/2009

Shepard Fairey: Inspiration Or Infringement? NPR Fresh Air interview, retrieved from http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=101182453 on 02/27/2009

Hope: Shepard Fairey and Barack Obama – Los Angeles Time interview/video retrieved from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q_EOzZ9iaJQ&NR=1 on 04/07/2009

ICONS: Shepard Fairey, YouTube video retrieved from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZNv-9IOBZZo on 04/07/2009

So after one of our class sessions, one of my more media savvy students made the following comment in his blog:

Copyright is such a touchy subject, it’s getting crazier and crazier, even for students, to try to use resources. It seems like it’s going to get to a point where you have to have a law degree just to understand when and where you can use an image or reference someone else’s works. One solution is to always create your own work and I’m going to try to do that more often, so that I really don’t have to rely on others. But it [the session] really showed us that there are quite a difference of nuances that we really need to be aware of and really pay attention to, especially in our work now (Quinto M.)

I’ve had a number of students who are band, drama or media teachers who have to pay rather large fees out of increasingly non-existent budgets so that they can do their job and teach the next generation of musicians and artists their craft. The more I thought about it and Quinto’s comment about not relying on others the more I got pissed off that this whole copyright thing is backwards. I added the following comment to Quinto’s blog:

This is one of those subjects that one can go on and on and on about. The more that I think about it the more that I’m convinced that there needs to be a special “educational” license to use media because the first step that any artist makes, going back all the way probably to the cave paintings in Lascaux, is to carefully copy the techniques and works of the masters. Every artist owes their livelihood, if they are fortunate enough to make a livelihood to some teacher who taught them their craft. How dare the artists demand payment from the teachers! There would be no artist collecting a fee if it weren’t for the teacher who taught him in the first place!

Sources:
clipart: Task Force Clip Art (c) 1995
image: Quinto Martin 2009
http://web.me.com/tatt2q/Q_Blog/Blog_Week2/Entries/2009/3/11_Copyright_Schooling.html

jj jurado & i jam circa 1980 - love the perm!

Like most things, I started writing songs because I didn’t know any better. Teenage angst is like that. Fortunately for me it was a hell of a lot less destructive than all the other things that I could have been doing with my frustrations and energy. I also started writing because that’s what my best-friend, Jimmy, was doing. He wrote the happy tunes and I wrote the not-so-happy stuff. Anyway, being self-taught meant that pretty much all the things I wrote came from stumbling upon things that sounded good to me. But I felt like I was working from a pretty limited pallet and eventually what I wanted to write about just wouldn’t fit into a three minute three chord song. So I stopped writing songs. Lately I’ve been carefully listening to artists like Neva and Peter Himmelman and it dawned me that I might have made a mistake stopping. I thought everyone else was better than I’d ever become. I never realized the power of playing within ones strengths, to play within oneself.

peter himmelman

What I mean is that I felt I’d gotten as far as I could with my limited skills. In the years since I’ve thought about the little tricks (like a band?) I could have used to make up for what I thought I lacked. It goes without saying that most folks can do things with a band that are hard to pull off with just a guitar, a mic and blind faith. But then I listen to folks like my buddy Neva who have that right combination of soul wanting to get out in their music and the talent to pull it off with a couple of wooden spoons and a fry pan. I know that no amount of tricks can make up for the lack of talent, if it’s missing. See, you won’t find a bigger group of folks completely insecure about their talents than musicians (well, except for supermodels, which is part of the reason they hilariously end up together). It was so easy to fall into the trap, as a guitarist, to feel like I was shit because I couldn’t play like Jimmy Page, Jimmie Hendrix, or for my group, Phil Keaggy.Because I could never imagine getting my fingers to fly across the fretboard fast enough I failed to recognize the miracle that I could get some good tunes out of said fingers in the first place. I’d forgotten that I started playing and writing in the first place not because I wanted to be a rockstar or play the fastest leads. The simple truth was that I started because I couldn’t find any music that expressed what I was feeling or experiencing so, not knowing any better, my buddy and I started writing about it.

Fortunately, most of the 60 plus songs I penned when I was a kid have been completely lost over the past 30 years. But they served their purpose at the time. Like I said, my friend Jimmie wrote the happy tunes and I wrote the other tunes. But more than just a difference in disposition, my friend tended toward the simple chords while I experimented with different kinds of tuning and the like. I spent countless afternoons and evenings with my buddy really just learning how to play. And when I started playing for others, I was still spending a lot of time learning from those who were better than I was. Getting together all the time really spurned the creativity, I could hardly wait to share my new stuff with my jam buddies. It makes sense that all of this would change after college when I had far less disposable time to work with. I guess I never realized how wonderful it was to have such great jamming partners when I was in high school and then in college. That was such a long time ago, a lifetime ago, it seems.

Vineyard Long Beach Worship Team (guitar band) circa 2006

And all of this might have completely passed away into rarely remembered memories had I not found myself re-examining everything in my life and again looking for the voice inside of me wanting to communicate what I was going through. This most recent time around I found a whole host of artists expressing what I was exploring in my life so I didn’t even bother taking up the writing and spent countless hours learning all of the music I’d missed over the intervening 15-years I’d been “away.” Alas, the power in my life that compelled me to take up my guitar again was also more than a little contradictory as far as playing music at church, so I made myself available to help out with the proviso that there was a giant hole in my “personal life.” I was pretty straight forward in the four different worship groups I worked with and to their credit they accepted me in my fully-flawed state. Funniest thing was that the most challenging element in all of this that I had to deal with was that the second worship band I worked withdemanded that I play electric lead guitar and NOT sing. I learned a lot during my brief tenure at that post. But then that worship leader stepped down and I didn’t quite work out with the new guy who was piano-centric and had no time to mentor a not-quite-ready-for-primetime lead-guitarist. One thing I did learn playing electric and lead was that less-is-more and that it was never about seeing how fast one can play, but just having something to play during those breaks. I never quite got there, but it was a good lesson learned.

So now I’m in a very different place from my high school/college days, or the last five years of dragging my guitar around. It feels a bit weird listening to my own music from over the years. Back when I was writing music so much of it was full of that adolescent preachy-ness that can be pretty embarrassing given how things have turned out so far. I guess what I want to remember is the passion. It’s still a part of me, but it doesn’t seem to fit in all of the little categories that I preached as a budding musician. And this last time around it was very much about the passion and giving voice to the longing i felt in my heart. But that didn’t quite turn out either. Listening to Peter Himmelman play on Leo Laporte’s podcast reminded me that I’m not done yet. His playing reminded me of where I left off back when I was writing. It reminded me that I started this thing because there was something in my soul that needed to get out in my music. So, should it be so surprising that I still find myself, in my middle years, pulling out my guitar, playing some of the old stuff and still frustrated that I’m still not finding the tunes that tell my story? Damn.

Before iTunes entered and then destroyed the market, there was a budding little industry of RSS readers that would also pull down your favorite podcasts. Someone actually suggested an app that goes back to those crazy days called Juice (formerly called “Lemon” and before that something with the word “iPod” in it until the cease and desist letter arrived). Cute, but it’s not 2005. The next contender was the web app, iGoogle. iGoogle was the EMDTMS team favorite until it was redesign and the tabs moved to the side of the interface. Blah. I didn’t care about the tabs, but I did care that I couldn’t rename the labels to my students’ RSS feeds because they had the whimsical tendency to name their blog things like “Catchin’ the tech wave” and other completely useless names, making it completely impossible to be able to track their blog entries. Nyet. Next on the hit list was Netvibes. Very flexible, I loved that I could put my students in separate tabs per their sections and spent the better part of the afternoon getting one section set up. When I started setting up a second section it dawned on me that this was way too hard and my beloved tabs were going to make it more complicated to track the whole group. Ugh. Then I noticed in the sidebar on the left side of my screen that Flock had a Feeds panel all set up and ready to go. In fact, when I was opening my students blogs and then clicking the icon to get their RSS feed, Flock had been giving me a button to push to add the feed to list in the left pane the whole time. Ack. I got all three sections entered and in handy little folders in a third the time it took to do one section before. Damn. Flock, for the win!

The folks do a great job explaining stuff like RSS…

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.

Originally uploaded by fensterbme

It was Valentine’s weekend for some. For me it was just another weekend spent grading student blogs. But after reading an article in the UK’s Telegraph online newspaper titled, “Valentine’s Day: Technology is killing romance,” one of my students wrote a blog entry weighing the article’s premise that, because of technology, people don’t write love poems or letters to each other anymore. She said that a survey of over two-thousand people revealed that 62% had never sent a love letter (via the postal service). At the same time most everyone said that they had sent a text-message love note. My student shrugged that even though a text message isn’t anywhere as good as a real love letter, a text message is better than nothing. I’ve heard this one before: if it’s not on paper, written by hand, it’s just not as real. I don’t mean to be cruel or even crude, but I think that’s just bullshit.

Well, I was a little gentler when I began my response:

I’m curious, what is it in an electronic Valentine’s message that make is not “expressing yourself with your own thoughts”? I’ve been known to use every communication means at my disposal to let my beloved know that I was thinking of her. From 140 character text messages, to “Hello” IMs, to overly long voice-messages, to rambling emails, I found the “electronic” experience to have a certain level of “presence” that I didn’t experience before. Granted I might have over-used said technologies.. a bit… resulting in … let’s just say that my options are very flexible these days. But that’s not because of technology, that’s because some folks just don’t know how to put one word after another in a coherent (and passionate) manner. What’s that old saying about a good painter never blaming his tools…

long-haired writer

On a completely different note I was just told by a potential “match” that my e-Harmony profile photo was “a little scary.” WTF? It makes one second guess. The photo is dark and pencil-sketchy. Does that translate into dangerous and scary? I haven’t taken an official teacher-photo in several years so I’ve been using Photo-booth pix. Good thing I didn’t use any of the fun-house effects. I really shouldn’t let these things bother me, but I do wonder at how often I’ve been bumped off because of some misperception beginning with my profile photo. Then again, someone unable to appreciate something a little artsy probably isn’t going to work well with my continual self-assessment and re-interpretations of my self. Damn. Of course, having posted this photo of myself for the millionth time, I probably come off as totally self-obsessed and self-absorbed. I switched my profile photo to a “I voted” shot, which will probably piss off someone because it’s “political.” sigh.

Source: Adams, J. (2009, February 9). Valentine’s Day: Technology ‘is killing romance’. Telegraph. Retrieved http://www.telegraph.co.uk/scienceandtechnology/technology/technologynews/4568243/Valentines-Day-Technology-is-killing-romance.html

photo by B Buffington

I loved Benjamin Zander’s analogy of the conductor and orchestra. Too often educators forget that we are not there to fill there little brains with information all day long. This is where the NCLB act has brought us, though. His analogy was a reminder to me that I am not a teacher but a facilitator to great things. I have to create a safe platform for students to take risks and increase their interests and abilities… The way I see it, there is not enough freedom and fun in public schools now-a-days. For goodness sake, they even took away recess! (B. B.)

I was understandably horrified: What?! No recess?! Even us office drones are told to get out of our chairs every 15 to 30 minutes by most productivity experts. How the hell are little bodies supposed to learn cooped up like factory chickens in their little learning pens. Argh.

I try not to allow Zander’s conceptualism bother me–it goads me like a poker when he says “language is replete with a variety of ‘things’ that have no existence in time and space but seem as real to us as anything we own–’justice’ for instance….” … If everyone has their own personal framework of possibility, I fear we’ll lose the intimacy of sharing a common framework. Take the Hubble photograph above. The beauty of the Pleiades Cluster is not a construct of my mind–its beauty is there to be discovered by any who would attend to it. The community of astronomers who photograph it share a common beauty between them–something bigger than any one’s construct. Isn’t this what makes possibility appealing? What possibilities are worth seeking and having in my life? R. Swindoll

My response: Wonderful observations and pondering questions. I find it interesting that you comment about trying to not let Zanders conceptualizations bother you and then you spend the rest of the post wrestling with them. You are touching on the universal question between perception and empirical reality. Without going too much into what seems like a “dancing on the head of a pin” question, I believe that it’s foolish to think that there is no external reality. Thus the miracle is that we do seem to share in a common framework of understanding despite the fact that our consciousness is trapped in the “black box” of our individual skulls dependent on imperfect sensory organs to perceive and communicate with this seemingly infinite external universe.

And perhaps the universe was indeed laughing at me, that I would attempt to answer the student’s pondering because, after I had drafted what I thought was a perfectly crafted comment I inadvertently clicked a button on the screen and sent all of those wonderful words straight to hexadecimal oblivion. No small about of screaming or laughing at the absurdity would bring those perfectly positioned words back. Thus the above rendition is the best that I could bring back from a brain that wasn’t very happy with it’s fingers. Imperfect sensory organs indeed.

Music: Goodbye by Kevin Shields from the Lost In Translation – Original Motion Picture Soundtrack

The Zanders understand the transformative effect of the mind reframed. And they don’t linger on the hard parts of living a transformed life (because after transformation, the hard parts are worth it). Still, I would like to hear more stories that have no clearly defined ending–that end unresolved. Possibility takes faith in the face of empirical reality, and faith is a hard to have when our life stories are in their second act. Frankly, it isn’t the power of positive thinking alone that can “construct a new world.” Ben Zander’s opening premise is only proverbially true. (R.Swindoll)

One thing I love about working with my students in their blogs is that I can respond to their thoughts with comments of my own. I commented to the above observation: Your right that their stories had a cute red-bow satisfying endings to them, but then it wouldn’t be a very good book if they introduced scenario after scenario with no ending (sounds like some novels I’ve read). Actually I have read some books that never quite delivered on their promise, so I’m glad that the Zanders bring endings with their observations.

My student continued: “Ben and Roz Zander’s stories assume Providence is on their side. The Art of Providence… that seems a more fitting title of the book, given what I’ve read so far.” R. Swindoll

To which I responded: Very interesting word game… I don’t think that the Zanders believe that Providence is on their “side” because I don’t think they believe in “sides.” I think they’re more coming from the idea that the world is so much bigger than most of us are able to navigate (predict), that most of us miss the good or the possible because we put ourselves in a protective posture whining that we want “ours” before it runs out. It’s more than a proverbial observation but not new age “name it and claim it” magic.

I work in one of the most wonderful places and have some of the most amazing students. jbb

music: Great indoors by John Mayer from the Room for Squares CD