More on Devices

Many semesters ago, even prior to the issues brought up in this post, I had one of my first encounters with the laptop and smart device as a tool for critical thinking and information literacy. In Composition II, we’d been talking in class about Connecticut’s brain drain subject and the thought occurred to me that we should be able to find relationships between levels of education in a population and measures of quality of life, such as median household income, the point being to show that if educated people left the state, quality of life would be affected negatively. Here’s the simple question: is there a relation between income and higher education? (It’s harder to measure whether higher education makes people nicer.) This issue is related to relatively new ecological inquiries into smart cities and future predictions about the role of cities in the United States. You can read more about this issue in this article by Richard Florida in The Atlantic.

In this discussion, I wanted to move away from guesswork and to an examination of statistics and I didn’t want to run to the teacher’s computer while the students sat passively waiting for my thinking to go somewhere. Rather, we put the laptops and the phones to work. Students set about looking for some method of examining the above question. After a few moments, a student found median household income at about 28K and reported percentages of higher degrees in Hartford, CT at about 12%, the source being the US Census. This was a good start but not enough to generate a solid hypothesis. The next question would require a search of other urban centers, such as Chicago and Boston, and then to examine those ratios. So the student set off seeking this information out. Several students suggested that, while the same measures showed higher returns than Hartford, these cities (and even towns surrounding Hartford) might not make for good comparison as Hartford is a fairly small urban environment and has a particular metro area. Question: to which cities, therefore, should we compare Hartford? The students set to work, even though this is a difficult question. More questions came: does the drift in population in an urban center tell us something about that area’s economic and cultural vibrancy? One way to search this is to examine whether over a hundred year period populations trends down or up? We went off on a search for this: guess what the answer points to?

The point of all this is that the students in the room, with their laptops and their phones, were seeking out the info, weighing the sources, and asking questions. I find this sort of wrestling with real problems a good method of generating engagement. It’s a routine now for me to ask students to have their devices ready and their laptops on, even if the occasional student decides that a game of this or that is better than the topic at hand. And if a student gets a call, they will quickly tell the thing to shut up.

It’s a good question: should information tools be incorporated into classroom discussion or should they be kept hidden? What are appropriate uses of communication tools, such as data-service phones and other hand-helds? One size doesn’t fit all contexts. But for me, devices have become an excellent addition to classroom learning ecologies.

Emberlight: A Review

At Tunxis Community College we’re always looking for ways to provide students opportunity for challenge. In a course titled New Media Perspectives, the introductory course in Tunxis’s New Media Communication program, we employ Tinderbox, software developed by Eastgate Systems. This powerful software provides students flexible methods of visually illustrating relationships, physically linking ideas, and developing system and game prototypes. However, our only method of sharing and submitting Tinderbox files was via local network dropbox.

Emberlight, a system developed by J. Nathan Matias and Frederick Cheung,
immediately solved our distribution and document sharing limitation. Emberlight is software that makes Tinderbox files available for reading and distribution on the internet. It took students little more than seconds to upload their Tinderbox files into Emberlight and make URLs available for readers and assessors. Students may now cut and paste URLs to their work for assessment, distribution in digital portfolios, and for analysis by their peers. In addition to this solution for distribution and sharing, Emberlight also provides for version control of Tinderbox files, making revising and redistribution a simple matter of re-upload into the online system.

Emberlight was highly responsive, open to development input, and understanding of the needs of faculty and students. They worked with us on software features critical to the teaching and learning process, and we had input into the development process every step of the way. Their understanding of assessment frameworks, semester work schedules, and student learning issues was insightful, creative, and refreshing. Emberlight will become a standard feature of our curriculum.

A Question about Interpretation and Influence

Something bugging me. It’s been bugging me since 100 Days 2008. But it’s come back since I’ve been reading Hargood and Millard on Narrative and Theme.

It’s bugging me in a good way.

But here’s the story.

Let’s say you watch John Timmons’s video perusals. Of course, a first viewing will produce an interpretation or reaction, whatever it may be.

Then read my response to it in the form of Grandfather’s Favorite Spot.

Then go back and view John Timmons’s video again. The idea is that the interpretation of the video will be permanently altered because of the fiction and the viewer can never have their original interpretation back. The video is permanently changed, even if the viewer discounts the second work. (An opposing issue would seem to be “forgetting.”)

The same phenomenon is at work in the following example:

Let’s say a viewer encounters Carianne Mack Garside’s watercolor called progress.

Then the viewer encounter a re-contexting of it in poetic form. This poem, for example. This will happen if one purchases the 2008 book which places the context for these works in juxtaposition.

If the viewer goes back to the painting after having read the poem, the interpretive context is “permanently” altered. I observed and thought about this during the gallery show of the 2008 work. Blake opens his Experience poems with a pointer to the notion, thus the theme of innocence and experience is baked into the concept.

Hear the voice of the Bard,
Who present, past, and future, sees;

I’m not making an argument for the degree to which the original interpretation is changed. But that original experience is lost forever. It may not be profound and in some cases it won’t matter all that much to world affairs, as when a person on the lot finds a better car than the one they first saw and might have purchased. But I am seeking a name for the phenomenon.

The Last Airbender or What was He Thinking?

As we’re fans of Michael Dante DiMartino’s animated Avatar, my son and I attended Shyamalan’s version today titled The Last Airbender. My first response is, “What was he thinking?” and “It’s not that hard.”

The animated work is an excellent unification story, a journey narrative of impressive complexity, color, and emotional pull. Aang, the last air bender is lost and the nations of the world have descended into war. Aang returns after one hundred years and with the help of some very interesting friends, puts the world back into shape. That’s the story, told in three parts. However, the story is also broken into several subplots, those of Katara, her brother, Sokka, Toph, Suki, Aang’s parallel character, Zuko, and his uncle, Iroh. They’re all interesting and DiMartino takes the time to develop them. However, the essential story is grippingly simple and Shyamalan could’ve told the super story with some nice dips into character, but, alas, the things as it stands is very strange.

What devastates Shyamalan’s version, a barely visually impressive vignette, is that it simply jumps through a portion of Aang’s journey so that unfamiliar viewers will wonder what the heck’s going on, doing so with the feeling that two or three hours of the good material had been slashed. In the film, the characters are little more than thinly rendered shadows, act as a means of carrying unnecessary dialogue or stage direction, and are basically shapeless, drab, and arbitrary. Zuko is treated pretty well, but his part ends before it begins. I’ve been to movies where the story persistently remains in an intro phase, and then it ends, and I wonder, when the hell did this thing start? This is one of those, and so I say, What was he thinking, with such solid material to work with, too. Gee wiz. What a shame.

Summer Projects

Monday is the Solstice. 8:30 or so and dusk can still be seen. Great.

This summer I have a few projects. Some are trivial. Prep for Fall teaching, bone up some programming. Other things not so much. In May I decided to learn how to play the guitar. And 100 Days is pulsing like the desert sun. I’m, therefore, writing at mediaplay, where the summer work is stored.

Today, boosted by this film by John Timmons and loads of images by other’s in the collaborative, I learned about an old man who lives in Osaka and whose father may or may not have died in the bomb blast at Nagasaki. He’s still with me. I see him holding his photograph. And I see the mother on the porch and hear the thinking of the fictional narrator, whose thought process is really my own.

This Osaka is perpetual. It is always present, like the El Paso I still remember from my last visit or the corridor of Park Street in Hartford. I wonder where the old man is now. I wonder what he’s eating. I wonder if his mother is alive.

The last couple of days have seen graduation to a new level of guitar playing. The funny part is that I go from beginner to a little more than beginner as I have thousands of hours left to go toward mastery of something I don’t really know much about. Luckily I have friends who do. I’ve learned a piece that weeks back I couldn’t even have attempted without a lot of pain and frustration. What’s amazing about all this is that I’ve re-connected with the thrill of just learning something new, something that I’ve always wanted to do but hadn’t had the time to consider seriously.

The brain is physically changing. And that’s thrilling. I often joke that I want to connect a program to my head that will teach me to do things. It’s a joke of course. The fun part would be missed. It’s totally thrilling to learn something new.

On Going Back to School

I’m teaching myself how to play the guitar. I have the Idiot’s Guide and a Fender acoustic, whose neck is too small for my left hand but is nonetheless playable. Too small, because at the size of my fingers, it’s tough to play something like A without the index rubbing up against the third string.

This whole enterprise is 1) a humbling experience. I used to play trumpet in high school. I was pretty good, moving to first chair in the marching band and jazz band at the ripe age of 14. We traveled to Mexico city in 1979 or 80, we won lots of awards in jazz. After high school I played in a band that did a few weddings and parties, playing Chicago-like music. But tennis, computers, and a novel drew me then and I lost interest in gigs, music, and lugging around equipment. So, I must start from scratch. The first order of business was to strengthen both hands, toughen the tips of my left hand fingers to withstand razor sharp acoustic strings, and start training my brain to recognize left and right hand relationships. It’s like I’ve hit the first grade again, struggling to make sound.

After three weeks, I can pluck Clair de Lune, play a nursery rhyme (barely–I think it’s Pop Goes the Weasel), and strum a few cords. Barring’s getting easier and I have lots of interesting warmups. I know how to read notes and patterns but I haven’t yet passed my first set of self-imposed quizzes. I won’t move to brighter things until I have those basics done, though I do read ahead into the book.

2) I have that learning anxiety that everyone feels when facing the unknown: will I be able to master basics and thus move on to things more advanced, like varied accompaniment? The first impasse has been proper plucking technique, which is a brain knotter. When the player goes from first to third string with annulas and index respectfully, the player experiences one of those cognitive surprises, as in “how does one do that without going mad?” But when the movement grew easier, typically on the second day, then easier on the third day, I felt that elation people feel when what seemed impossible one day is now possible. When does a person know they learned something?

In the fiction writing (which is different from verbal storytelling), this feeling of elation may take years to experience as the ability to compress an image (or understand the arc) is one of those sneaky things. It’s important to know what sort of a learner one is. I’m an obsessive, so when I want to learn something, that particular skill will become the sole object. This is true of software, programming, gardening, wine, cooking, and Beowulf the work, which drives my wife crazy, as during the learning of something, such as “the shop saw” or some particular character in a new novel, I have a hard time “listening” to what she had to say five minutes ago. The problem is, there’s always something to learn next. The guitar should keep me going for years, as the “objective” is to learn flamenco and some tunes my wife may be able to sing a long to when we’re sitting about the fire pit (which I need to learn how to build, too).

3) As a dedicated generalist, it’s hard to always keep focused on one thing at a time, as the world is loaded with “too much to learn and too many distractions” which may tends to greed, glossing, over-confidence, and the adulteration of expertise. So, I’m forcing myself to repeat repeat repeat in an effort to fight dilution and the urge to learn a cool progression before I really know what I’m doing.

The person at the head (of course, this metaphor is misleading) of a classroom should always be reminded what challenges feel and sound like and how failing over and over again tests ambition. I feel like I’m back in the first or second grade, plinking my way through a few trivial sounds. But I also feel that sounding out the C chord to a degree better than the day before is really explosive and that moving smoothly from C to G7 is actually possible. Wow, the little things.

We can also do this with a new electrical grid and new energy forms. That’s said, then.

Religion and Science War: That’s Not a War Either

Mano Singham’s The New War Between Science and Religion published in CHE is an odd duck. Here’s a portion of the set-up

The former group, known as accommodationists, seeks to carve out areas of knowledge that are off-limits to science, arguing that certain fundamental features of the world—such as the Heisenberg uncertainty principle and the origin of the universe—allow for God to act in ways that cannot be detected using the methods of science. Some accommodationists, including Francis Collins, head of the National Institutes of Health, suggest that there are deeply mysterious, spiritual domains of human experience, such as morality, mind, and consciousness, for which only religion can provide deep insights.

This either misrepresents the accommodationist view or generalizes to a degree that the point is lost. Can “a group” seek to do something in the sense that Singham suggest. Maybe. But the position seems to me to be somewhat difficult to understand. Accommodationism as an ism is, bluntly speaking, a matter of attitude perhaps.

The question I ask is: so what?

Singham has a point to make:

Why have organizations like the National Academy of Sciences sided with the accommodationists even though there is no imperative to take a position? After all, it would be perfectly acceptable to simply advocate for good science and stay out of this particular fray.

One has to suspect that tactical considerations are at play here. The majority of Americans subscribe to some form of faith tradition. Some scientists may fear that if science is viewed as antithetical to religion, then even moderate believers may turn away from science and join the fundamentalists.

I doubt the last conclusion. Do people think that science is antithetical to religion? And what does that mean? Let’s say that I have a question that calls for experiment: how big is the solar system or is the solar system expanding? When does science become antithetical to religion in a real sense in this case?

Spring New Media Perspectives and Other Thoughts on Teaching

It’s always interesting after a course has run to think back through and consider content, method, and production. New Media Perspectives has seen several versions and we’re really just hitting our stride in the course. We cover several issues:

1. An overview of new media principles and examples we think are generalized and reflect digital culture and history, such as the intrinsic dimensionality of digital objects (code, interface, culture)
2. An introduction to some basic observation, planning, and production techniques
3. Practice with a few tools that provide opportunity to work with media relationships, actions and events, abstraction, data manipulation and visualization
4. Survey of works and applications that reflect interdisciplinary ideas and states of the art

But the content, even though we don’t delve too deeply, is still difficult for students to keep up with. One observation we’ve (by we I mean me and John Timmons) been making is that students have difficulty using technology in a methodical fashion. They either want to leap to the good stuff or don’t pause long enough to think about even the most rudimentary “processes” as significant building blocks for complex analysis. (I’m teaching my self how to play guitar so I am very much sympathetic to this impulse). Another issue has to do with the relationship between concretion and abstraction. In a game, for example, students had difficulty understanding the nature of a walkthrough, even though they’ve probably encountered plenty of them. A walkthrough is, of course, a concrete and explicit representation of a physical but abstract system of rules and potential states of a system. Visualizing the walkthrough as a set of decisions for another player to follow was hard for most of our students to grasp.

Another example of abstraction has to do with spatial representation. Thinking about how an object can be constructed as “another kind of surface” is just plain difficult to do. A house for example can become an aggressive and strange monster if we’re asked to describe how we move through it in a descriptive essay when we don’t consciously think about how we move through that space, unless we’re lost, looking for the restroom, have just had our eyes poked out, or trying to find a location in Hartford. Coding that space in Inform is yet another challenge. “Mapping a space” in Tinderbox and Inform proved fairly difficult.

I don’t think any of this is new or controversial or even all that insightful, as many of my students in Composition courses really never leave with a strong sense of claim or thesis. I have some students who simply cannot understand, at least at this point in their careers, how to compose a coherent and purposeful paragraph and how to frame a position in the construct of an essay. An essay does have a structure but that structure can seem complicated to people who don’t really experience a lot of them or read many books or who who are not used to working with fundamental processes. It can get complicated. An essay, like a house, has a front door.

Another example of this “question of abstraction” is a particular work I received that used semi-colons incorrectly (but with gusto!) throughout the paper. The semi-colon would either tell me it wanted to be a comma, a colon, a dash, or some other punctuation mark meant to act as a strenuous signification of pause, signal into a quote, swift transition to a different argument or example, or perhaps even a mid-sentence paragraph shift. In the end, the semi-colon became like that strangely tall person you had in the third or fourth grade. The semi-colon is, indeed, not a difficult punctuation mark; it, for example, can be used thusly. They provide the opportunity to show clausal relationships between ideas, assuming one doesn’t enjoy the technique of coordination with words like “and.” They’re also quite unnecessary, and we can probably thank Ben Johnson for their occurrence in the language. We should probably get used to blaming him for everything language related.

A relationship exists between the purpose of punctuation in composition and color in mapping. I’ve been thinking a lot about the grammar of maps, thanks to Nathan Matias, who made me aware of this item.

A deeper problem is trying to understand how freshmen in college think Screen shot 2010-05-18 at 12.10.27 PM.pngabout punctuation and abstraction and why they think about such things as they do. If every room in a structure is painted the same color, it potentially performs the same purpose. This may or may not be true. Rooms, of course, have different attributes. The designed regions of Facebook screens are significant in considerations of spatial representation. The observer can make the code layer available to make inferences about those regions.

The student who misused the semi-colon is a valuable lesson, as is the student who forgot to use color to distinguish his map from his objects in Tinderbox. These students will help improve my approach in discussions about the logic of a variety of languages.

How budding Scholars Talk

This is an email answer from a student, responding to an article I sent that seemed to have relation to her research topic:

This article would have been perfect to go along with the Filion study.

Nice.

Assuming It’s Broken: A Little About Why I’m a Lamont Person

The Courant asks a leading question of the “governors”: “Where specifically will you find the money or savings to lead the state out of the red?”

4 out of 8 “governors” focus only on “guvment” and how they’d play with that red herring. Give some credit to Foley, Griebel, Lamont, and Malloy for admitting to insight into the darker corners of things. Griebel fails to consider that “guvment,” however, is NOT a business. If it was, we’d live in an unrecognizable world. I’m sort of ready for it.

Malloy and Lamont by nature see beyond “guvment” as a benchmark problem. I like that. But I’m a Lamont supporter because he’s into urbanization and seems to understand our city issues.