Aurora

I remember stepping outside of my sister’s house in Alaska and witnessing sheets of color in the sky. Photos of the Alaskan aurora thanks to my sister, Cathy:

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2005 and counting

Well it’s now 2005 and counting. Not much to say about the new year, except to wish those stricken by tsunami well in the recovery, survival, and rebuild. What horrors on the beaches.

Susan at Spinning is writing about narrative as she gears up for fiction writing. I’d suggest not to worry about short or long story, but rather about story and how it manifests. In fiction we’ll be dealing with shorter forms to start because we can manage a lot of them in a semester. Each story will demand what it demands. But I winder if as she writes them she sees the whole circle? Do I when I compose a story? Sure, a vague sense of what the story might look like at resolution.

What about the novel Suttree and Edson’s short Dinner Time as examples of story? One is long, the other short. Different shapes, but story nonetheless. But how they both drill into memory.

John Timmons announces the IF course for the Summer, too. Teaching at Tunxis is itself a lesson in timewarp.

literacy and all that

A slice from a Kaplan and Mouthrope backandforth in Kairos

NK: Is it a problem to define the act of reading more or less exclusively as an encounter with a book?

SM: When the folks at the NEA say “books” they seem almost always to mean novels, short story collections, and volumes of poetry. This is a ludicrously narrow definition. Why don’t they include biographies, memoirs, or non-fiction books about history, science, economics, or even popular philosophy? I’ll agree that most Americans know very little about fiction and poetry, even recent work in their own language. But most of us are yet more profoundly in the dark about the natural and social sciences. Which is the more serious problem?

Via Bernstein.

bias at school

From Jonathan Chait via The Courant/LA Times (needs account):

A pair of studies recently found that Democrats vastly outnumbered Republicans among professors at leading universities. Conservatives gleefully seized upon this to once again flagellate academia for its liberal bias.

Am I the only person who fails to understand why conservatives see this finding as vindication? After all, these studies show that some of the best-educated, most-informed people in the country overwhelmingly reject the GOP. Why is this seen as an indictment of academia, rather than as an indictment of the Republican Party?

Conservatives have a ready answer. The only reason faculties lean so far to the left is that deans, administrators and entire university cultures systematically discriminate against conservatives.

. . .

The main causes of the partisan disparity on campus have little to do with anything so nefarious as discrimination. First, Republicans don’t particularly want to be professors. To go into academia – a highly competitive field that does not offer great riches – you have to believe that living the life of the mind is more valuable than making a Wall Street salary. On most issues that offer a choice between having more money in your pocket and having something else – a cleaner environment, universal health insurance, etc. – conservatives tend to prefer the money and liberals tend to prefer the something else. It’s not so surprising that the same thinking would extend to career choices.

There’s more going on about this topic at Michael Drout’s weblog. I don’t necessarily know how to respond to the disparity question in higher education, nor do I know if Chait’s arguments make sense in practice due to the absence of qualification. They may and they may not. It may be one of those non-issues that just gets a lot of time because it’s easy. Is there any evidence that a liberal or leftist bias in higher education is particularly a bad thing?

the obsolete teacher

Maureen Durkin writes, “If a teacher opens a door, asks a student to enter, then closes it… Does that make the teacher obsolete? Is learning suddenly student driven? Hmm, but then hasn’t learning always been student driven?”

My first response would be, sure, obsolete, at least in a sense. But teachers come in all shapes. Students are teachers when they learn on their own, which in my mind, should be the goal of education: to teach people to teach themselves when necessary and where wanted.

But game space is a learning environment. I’m learning from Plotkin at the moment, thanks to John Timmons for the file. Learning what? To look and try out, to “essay” and “assay.” To use my wits, what of them are left or hungry.

But this reminds me of something. What is Maureen Durkin up to?

scenes and schemes

I’m wondering if Christopher Coonce-Ewing would consider a few scenarios based on some specific issue in history, such as the problem of telling the story of the constitutional convention (how was Broom involved?) or the story of Wilson’s Espionage Act and its implications in a textual environment. T.I.M.E. deals with the sense of place and anomoly–it gets close to the idea of consequential instances in a historical sense: a what if scenario, in other words. But what other constructions are possible?

I think that there are certain misconceptions about teaching that perpetuate negative and stagnant attitudes about education. I’m no expert at this but it seems to me that the classroom is an environment manipulated by the teacher to encourage learning: the readings are a part of the space. People learn, regardless, and what they learn depends on curiosity, fear, interest, and context. Let’s say that teachers “shouldn’t” teach at all (no Zen intended). On the contrary, the teacher creates a world where learning is made possible, whether it’s Milton or C++, and then drives into the business with all due enthusiasm, leaving the outcome in the hands of the student. Alternatively, the teacher opens a door, asks a youngster to enter, then locks the door after closing it, leaving the outcome, again, up to the learner (this is a metaphor). Example, I just read an article about flu virus in SciAM and it wasn’t the subject that got me, it was the enthusiastic voice of the writer that kept me interested. I left the article with this and this alone: Wow, the flu virus is a really interesting, scary nut.

“There’s another door in there,” the teacher calls through the barrier. “I’ll meet you on the other side.”

Neha could also consider this since she’s now a student of IF like the rest of us, or Susan Gibb, who, if her computer is still working, will be scared into learning with SHII. The question for Neha would be not to teach poetry with IF, but how would she design an IF environment that made learning to disentangle complex texts possible for a student. Can “a” reading of a poem be construed as a digital environment in and of itself?

Game designers are teachers, in my mind; so are interior designers.

It’s an interesting problem for a teacher (someone who likes to talk about cool things, typically to a captured audience) or team of teachers to consider game elements seriously and how those elements are actually already at work in learning environments now.

google and online texts

I’m not skeptical about Google and the loading of texts onto the Internet. See Guardian’s “Top libraries to go online . . .”. This isn’t exactly news. It may be a good thing. But how the search and retrieval will take shape over the next decade is going to test the idea of “digital books.”

We can always OCR paper-form texts into digital form, but what is the workable model: “image” as in Bodleian or Perseus hypertext? I’m always a little tickled by the almost unreadable static scanned pdfs of pre-1990 articles on databases.

Something to look forward to: interesting maps.

translations

Susan and I finally got the chance to watch Sofia Coppola’s Lost in Translation this weekend. I thought it was a wonderful film, brilliantly edited, acted, and crisply told. I find that I like Bill Murray because he’s the kind of guy everyone thinks they know and he’s great at grabbing the audience, but in this film he “went beyond” what I’ve known of him. Scarlett Johansson grew on me too although it took a while to ground her in the story. We wondered, however, how the film would go over in Japan, since “language” and the alienation of space and self plays such a role in the film’s conflict.

Bob and Charlotte are in bed together, two strangers not so strangers, one young, the other mid-life, met by chance. They talk. She asks about her future, wondering if things get easier. He reflects on irrevocable change: what happens when the children come and more. Their brief time in Tokyo is sleepless until this moment. He touches her foot. They sleep. The story comes together in this scene like a soundless explosion. Bob and Charlotte meet “by chance” and that’s all that matters.