authority

We’re at that point when authority becomes the stuff of every moment. Since the law is all over the news these days, and Shakespeare is on the reading list, what better topic to consider and keep reconsidering.

Who makes the law? Is it Pepin, as Christopher wonders, or Mathew Arnold by other means. Congress is now taking time to put together legislation on the body. How would such authority be weilded in this sense? Any law written by Congress comes with pretty hefty weight. We know that such things can be combed together pretty quick and with not a lot of consideration. What would these actions look like? What’s the rationale?

At the White House, the president’s chief spokesman, Scott McClellan, said the proposed legislation fell within Mr. Bush’s desire to “build a culture of life.”

“In instances like this case, where there are serious questions and doubts raised, the president believes that our society and our laws and our courts ought to be on the side of presumption in favor of life,” said Mr. McClellan.

Huh?

Weblog Portfolios

Note that Sean Woolford’s weblog has been added to the list here. Sean is a student in Composition and has expressed interest in the weblog and I hope will be building his typepad space into a portfolio that doesn’t just contemplate the good and bad of college Composition but that also allows for tracing his learning career at Tunxis, much as Susan Gibb has been doing for the last few years over at Spinning and Learning to Spin, the Spinning splinter cloister.

Sean’s a smart guy. He expresses himself well in writing.

I want to see interested students use the weblog as a space that does a lot: it demonstrates what they’re leaning in school and out; it creates a space for examination and following of interests that can be expressed publicly; it allows for people like me to follow them; it organizes learning, knowledge, and problem solving into relevant areas. Will Sean’s weblog become his space where I can go to evaluate what he’s doing in class and enjoy visiting just to read? Hopefully. Will it become a critical tool for the things that come and are relevant to it? Hopefully. Will it come to justify its costs monthly? Susan can answer that one.

Here’s the charge for Sean: if you have and use the typepad space I don’t need a paper journal. Move the journal from paper to the online space, but keep the class notes as a map for posts; respond to the readings online; consider categories built around process; and if you come across things that apply to the current issues under consideration, such as cause and effect, generate some posts on those.

What are the advantages:

Portability
The work here can be seen by anyone: recruiters, evaluators, colleagues, friends.

Look and Feel
The space can be customized and organized and professionalized so that presentation is tailored for different audiences. Sensitive material can be hidden, excluded, or sent elsewhere. The space can be used to demonstrate whatever one wishes

Control
People are in control of the content and organization such that the weblog becomes authoritative and representative. And the archive proves the work.

future of science and math ed

From a recent House Committee on Science report

Chairman Inglis added that he was concerned about proposed funding reductions in NSF’s educational activities. “I wonder about the cuts in math and science education, and indications that some NSF activities may be ‘migrating’ to the Department of Education. The NSF has a passion for excellence, while the Department of Education is arguably focused on proficiency. Passion isn’t easily transferred.”

Testifying before the Subcommittee were Dr. Arden Bement, Director of NSF; Dr. Mark Wrighton, Chairman of the Audit and Oversight Committee of the National Science Board and Chancellor of Washington University in St. Louis; and Dr. Christine Boesz, Inspector General of NSF.

Following the witnesses’ oral testimony, Members of the Subcommittee questioned the panel about the proposed funding levels for FY 2006, including requested cuts to math and science education. Members also highlighted ongoing concerns regarding the proposed transfer to NSF of funding responsibility for icebreaking activities in the Antarctic Ocean. Also discussed during the hearing were management challenges facing NSF, including workforce planning and post-award management.

Dr. Bement testified that the proposed funding increase for NSF is reflective of the Administration’s confidence in the agency and the importance to the U.S. economy of NSF’s investments in research and development. “At a time when many agencies are looking at budget cuts, an increase in our budget underscores the Administration’s support of NSF’s science and engineering programs, and reflects the agency’s excellent management and program results.”

I don’t think this is going to make Inglis so happy.

heaven and time

Interesting class today in Brit Lit. When we get to Tennyson things always start to come together since in Tennyson we see another one of those poets and thinkers who has his feet and head and work slipping into the future. Easy to say now, though; in the present, who knows what the future holds.

Anyway, it was good to see Neha but she have been able to tell me that the word I couldn’t find was the “sublime” and its relevance to Tennyson and the images that populate and grow in In Memoriam such as the image of grasping, hands, and light and dark, the divisions of cycles. We talked a lot about death and absence. The subject of heaven came up which is a notion important to the poem, not in a stated way but in the way believers in heaven may think about death in a Christian context. Sorrow in Tennyson is a liar and grants tempting secrets. According to some, everyone is already in heaven given that heaven is an absolute with no coordinates in space and on no time arrow. In this Aquinian sense, in Heaven everyone has yet to be born, everyone is living, and everyone has passed. This is a confusing and comforting thought for mortals. Christian, one of our youthful members, had a tough time grasping the idea that he’s already in “Heaven.” An odd theory.

image captions in Flash

I’ve worked through a few programming sequences in Flash that have interest, at least as far as I’m concerned, beyond the syntax, roots, and variables. The first instance below presents a “paradoxical” image in five layers and three different actions.

The second instance which follows is a variation on the first and represents just a bit of tinkering.

But what’s the beef? The beef comes in the possibilities for different modes of presenting information in an interactive sense. I was messing with a little “presentation” on one of my son’s DVDs in which a child can decorate a party scene by “guessing” where an object, such as a banner, might go. Problem is there was only one place where the banner could go on the stage and if we tried to put it somewhere else, a woman’s voice would tell to try again as if we had chosen incorrectly. It wasn’t our fault that we preferred the banner on the ground outside Rabbit’s house. There wasn’t much play, choice, or fun in the “game” at all, so we sat around clicking all the wrong answers and making fun of the “nice” person’s voice.

In the Flash bits above, all kinds of possibilities could be constructed. The display of images from odd placeholders, interactive maps, multiple captions, surprising drags and masks, and even possibilities for writing in different ways, poems maybe that sleave out into white space for different effects. You learn what looks like a neat trick and then think about its variations.

on food

Mark Bernstein on food always makes me hungry. And it looks good too.

Coonce-Ewing is also working on a new design and weblogware.

And let’s see how Sean does with Composition and weblogs. Sean could you send the url again?

And steve is working on not leaving critical words out his sentences.

winter and George Eliot

Christian reminds me in class that I’ve been a little light on British Literature. But I’m really wondering whether Monday night creative writing will ever meet again? I’m sure it will. However, it seems as if a while has passed since “nature” has presented us with a hole.

As to BL, the point was raised at the end of a discussion on George Eliot whether she was too hard on the silly novelists in her excursions against the popular conventions of her time. Eliot, aka Mary Ann Evans, had a thing for generating fiction that reflected close perception and representation of reality, a close scrutiny of human action, and a sense that “experience” was important to the development of character (both in her fictions and in real life). This is why she and Mill have a lot in common about “convention” and culture and a concern with “development” itself, as did Blake.

For a look at some of these issues see Logan’s “George Eliot and the Fetish of Realism” 2002 Studies in the Literary Imagination(TL).

The question, however, of her critique of the women writers of her time and their “fluff” was put in class in the context of market ecology. That is, Eliot is attempting to impose her will on readers and writers. But what if the market calls for the fluff against which she writes, if indeed it is fluff? Isn’t she trying to stiffle choice and strangle the market? As a market related analysis, this point of view emphasizes the market itself rather than the human values that drive those markets. Markets don’t exist outside of human context. It also assumes that since the market exists, it must be a good thing. I have no opinions about any of these issues. The important question for me is why Eliot brings her powers against the conventions in the first place and the reasoning (and resonance) behind her critique. How is her critique “moral” or “demonic” in terms of Blake? And how does her critique develop ideas we’ve been following about “nature,” individuality, and social change?

new media communication

The New Media Communication program as conceived at Tunxis Community College is a program that teaches people to understand the surface and the deeper structures of digital systems. It teaches people to visualize, evaluate, and manipulate the structures and components of media forms. To these ends, we recognize that the trees and the forest are both important. We take students who are focusing on a particular skill or competency area (trees)–these could be programming, drawing, and/or studies in history–and provide a foundation in media, communications, narrative, systems, and teamwork and provide an environment where students can collaborate on new media projects. New media coursework will provide time and space for the novice programmer to work with the novice artist on a common project or set of projects from conception, planning, and testing. How can a team of students given problems X, Y, and Z design a system or digital environment to produce a desired effect? In this way we work within the system to build skills, animate concepts, and offer students a means to put what they’re learning to work in a larger context.

In my mind this is the meat of the program here at Tunxis. At Tunxis, we require a new media kind of thinking in our everyday work, collaboration, compromise, planning, integration, and a continual tussle with the demands of systems, government regulations, and good teaching and service provision. Are we good at this? We try. Call it what you will, we struggle constantly with what makes for good teaching under the pressures of grants, heavy teaching and committee loads, truncated time schemes, technology competencies, hardware requirements, and the time to teach our areas of expertise.

It’s not an easy thing to teach writing or economics and at the same time keep up with what is offered as new or rewarding to academic fields and the continual pressures, good and bad, of education technology. It’s not that easy to incorporate new systems such as electronic portfolios or weblogs for a good-sized and active college. Dealing with such systems involves rethinking pedagogy, re-managing already busy schedules, and reorganizing the work of academic and administrative departments at a deep-structural level. Altering or adding to the tasks of an office manager or teacher means big change. The question for educational technology is not color, ease of use, or usability; the question is how does the system augment practice? How does it make the job more interesting, flexible, creative, and meaningful?

Eportfolio is meant to help organize information and time. As I work with the system and get to know it, I’m finding that it does neither very well. Yet as I work through the English Department’s action plans and work flows in Storyspace, putting together a “picture” of what we’re doing and need to do, I find that Eastgate’s tool (and I’m looking forward to the Windows version of Tinderbox for the very same purpose) with its ease, simplicity, and emergent power for “visualizing” how we work is a smashing example of new media principles at work. Flexible, unabtrusive, imaginative, clean, and it gets the job done (if I could get it to call up a Word doc, then it would be perfect). It makes thinking about what needs to be done smarter and more interesting. An entire strategic plan can be put together in Storyspace and you’d be able to figure out exactly what you need to do and find what you need to find. Next stop Tinderbox, when ready.

When you open up Flash or Storyspace, you’re met with an empty stage. Both environments wait for you to do something. Both programs want you to think big and rough them up a little. Eportfolio presents a series of fields for plug in, like an old style workbook, at once dull, and employs very little planning archicture, no agents, or search capability. It’s not really a development software package that ask for much work other than to plug in and respond in fields to questions that will become redundant very soon.

The contents of a portfolio of whatever kind are important. Indeed, a portfolio, a demonstration of one’s work, should, I’d say, provide for some amount of flexibility to the person using it, which gets me to thinking. An electronic portfolio system should behave like a development or management tool.

It would be a nice project, just to add to the others we already have planned, for new media students to develop a portfolio system for other students that is interesting to use and deep and powerful enough to grow with the user. Over the course of a year artists, programmers, writers, and budding teachers could put something together and in the process apply what they’re learning elsewhere in a different context. This is the key. Storyspace, Feeddemon and Premier act as brilliant case studies in tools oriented for human use.

the reach of systems

Greg Schneider (needs registering) on systems

Laptops are standard around Atlantic Motorsports, where Chamberlin works when he’s not studying at George Mason University. Today’s automobiles are packed with about a thousand times as much computing power as was in the Apollo moon landers, according to the Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers. Computer chips run more than 86 percent of the systems in an average vehicle, according to the alliance. Modifying them can ruin a car as quickly as juice it up, but if you know how, you can reprogram controls such as timing and air/fuel ratio to milk more power out of an engine.

More thinking in terms of systems.