Connecticut Geography

Rick Green in this column scratches his head at the recent Julie Amero case, where new media meets law

The state of Connecticut spent two years investigating before it won a speedy conviction of Julie Amero – the infamous Norwich porn teacher – this January.

But it was never as tidy as the Norwich Public Schools, the Norwich police, the state of Connecticut and the Norwich Bulletin newspaper made it seem.

In truth, Amero, a clumsy computer novice, was the victim of malicious software that took over the PC in the classroom where she was substituting on Oct. 19, 2004. Since Amero’s arrest, the state has refused to even consider this possibility.

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This case has been a mystery to many people, especially the degree to which officials, including ASA Smith, have expressed ignorance of pretty basic technology and IT issues. The state’s inflexibility has also been strange, as illustrated by Green in this section of the piece:

“The evidence is overwhelming … she purposefully went to these websites. … We know that the images on there were offensive,” Smith said, ramming his point home. “She clearly should not have allowed this to happen. The evidence is clear. She is guilty of all the charges.”

Except when you consider the facts.

Thankfully, a team of computer security experts from throughout the country, drawn to the case by outraged Internet bloggers and a handful of journalists, has presented Smith and his bosses with the truth.

Amero didn’t click on the porn. Software that might have blocked the porn was months out of date. Critical evidence was mishandled. School and police computer “experts” who testified were woefully ignorant about computer security and porn spyware to the point that their testimony was blatantly false.

The state’s case began unraveling soon after the hapless jury voted to convict. A firestorm of pressure – from university professors and software executives to programmers – forced repeated postponements of Amero’s sentencing.

Smith “closes the case,” then reality slowly sinks in. That the case even went to trial reveals what?

This gets me to the point. I often talk to students about what we mean by relationship building under the rubric of critical thinking. In a critical context, linking seemingly unrelated information together is important to innovation and problem solving. A classic example of this is the Cosmic Background Radiation and the Big Bang.

It may be that the Amero case relates to more than just pop ups, aging IT, and the the welfare of children. Kevin Minor, in a Courant opinion piece titled Why I’m Leaving Connecticut Just as Fast as I Can, outlines his reasons for seeking a living in Texas. He writes:

At 25, I am part of the fastest-growing age segment that is leaving Connecticut. I did not want to leave, but a prohibitively high cost of living coupled with widespread complacency and ineptitude at the state Capitol have sealed my fate. I liked Connecticut’s shorelines, its state parks and its midsize, human-scale cities. How many more people like me have to leave before the rest of the state gets the message?

How are the fumbling of the Amero case and Miner’s perception of a stagnant Connecticut related? The Amero case appears to reveal an inability to meet new technological demands, a reluctance to approach people with decency, and a failure in Connecticut’s leadership to keep up with the realities of change. My technological premise is not to plunk technology into a space for its own sake but to use it as a tool with which to engage people in new and different ways. If computers are going to placed into classrooms, then these items should be used and maintained appropriately. “Appropriateness” is a key criteria for judging technological use and digital application. Teachers should be trained to manipulate the equipment and to tease out its potential and they should be provided equipment that meets their evolving needs and knowhow. This costs loads of money, but if done properly, it can surely be more beneficial than a court case that may do more to push good people out of teaching than to invite them in. Smart people don’t like being bullied. And smart citizens shouldn’t bow to dumb government.

The Amero case could have been handled with a meeting between parents, Amero herself, the principle, and an IT person who knew what they were talking about. This would have been the decent approach. Instead, the State’s legal engine got going and in its typical Kafkaesque rotundity, made a fool of itself. Why would Miner want to remain in a state that appears to enjoy ignorance and ineptitude. The state loves education but doesn’t put its resources behind learning. It loves to claim high SAT scores but will not design and maintain spaces that encourage people to remain and revise the revision, wifi or no wifi. Park development, scenic urban boulevards, local markets, public garden space, new media industry, controlled traffic flow, art space, energy innovation, local design, deschooled learning.

By the state, I mean its leadership and its decision-making citizens, who appear lost to the power of good design and to the power of urban potential and networks. In this world, change is inevitable. OS will be upgraded and idiots will attempt to destroy systems, thus one of the critical abilities for which Connecticut’s leaders should go back to school is an attitude that simply says: “I will keep up so that when it comes time to legislate, moderate, litigate, and amplify, will know what I’m talking and thinking about.”

I think we need to instill good critical and analytical habits into our students (speaking from the POV of a college teacher). We also need leaders who have them as well (one of the lessons of Beowulf, who was praised for his fairness, intelligence, as well as fighting skill). Speaking from the POV of a citizen, I think we all need schooling in relationship building.

I wonder how long it would take to create the clean energy sector if Connecticut up and said: “We will be converting all our schools to solar power within 5 years.”

But what politician would dare make such a call. We can’t even get Simsbury citizens to get out and vote on their own budget.

Hours

The Course Weblog will be going through some redesign in preparation for the literature course I will be teaching in the summer and for the Fall semester. Some pages have been prepped, but they’re not really what I want them to be. Lots of cool reading there, though. How does one design a weblog to handle information for multiple courses without the writer falling into a grave?

The New Media Weblog may see light traffic till September. Now some steam.

Another semester is done. It was an interesting one. Shakespeare was fabulous, reminding me that the dramatist has lots of relevance left in his old bones. Good writing, thankfully, never gets old, and students coming at Shakespeare with a fresh eye or for the first time will experience compelling newness and interesting questions. The students rose to the ability-based occasion, a method of evaluating student performance that avoids the traditional give and take of grade distributions, worthless curves, vague averages, and guesswork over what grades may or may not mean. They performed well and showed that they could learn. The writing course, on the other hand, was odd. Students in that course arrived in shifts and missed lots of critical involvement, which leaves gaps in work. I will not force adults to incline to a subject, nor force people to learn what they may not feel inclined to struggle with at this point in their lives. It’s the students’ job to study and learn and to apply what they learn about argumentation and rhetoric in carefully prepared work. If they don’t want my offering, they can certainly try another opportunity elsewhere.

New Media was also a gem, with good participation, interesting content, and the students who came to the course were good sports. It’s a team-taught course, with John Timmons, and this approach keeps the class fresh and honest. The fiction writing course was fun, lively, and produced some interesting writing, although some students in this course never seem to understand how much work it takes to set a good scene, revise for clarity, and to grind out language that will keep an audience interested, whatever that may mean.

I note that in lots of work that I read this semester, much of it lacked self-awareness (I’m writing now and not talking), a strong critical sense (I need evidence for this point and need to come and strengthen this other argument before I develop paragraph 5), an awareness of the codes, habits, structures, and complexities of writing, speaking, listening, and analyzing in an academic or professional context (should I use this word? combine these sentences), and compulsion to improve for a purpose (I really need to get a handle on complex relationships and understand the difference between an inference and a fact). In some cases, instilling curiosity is enough to compel the above; in others, habits of disaffection or disawareness are pretty ingrained. Some of the people I work with simply haven’t thought through why they are doing what they’re doing. Purposefulness cannot be taught but it can be nurtured. Those students who wanted something of the content, added to the experience, and contributed to the subject, did well or satisfactorily (which means they can be trusted with the forklift).

I’ve met no incapable people. But there were plenty of lost opportunities. Plenty of opportunities taken. In this way, the semester has been typical. I was stunned by how many did not work yet they still expected something meaningful from under performance. In this sense, the semester was strange because more and more people are simply not taking the time.

Searching for Character

I’m currently programming a new search engine called Ask Colonel Hickory (no relation to Andrew Jackson). Not really, but it would be fun. Ask Colonel Hickory is not a boolean, tag, or relational search but deals instead with a sense of irony.

“Colonel Hickory, will we ever win the war on terror?”

“Georgie,” the Colonel would respond, “the war on terror will only end if you stop being freakin terrified. By the way, there’s a spider on your neck.”

Where will Wally catch up to the Colonel on his romp cross country?

Ask Colonel Hickory.

Comedy, Tragedy, and the Tendency To . . .

An interesting exchange at Dan Green’s The Reading Experience regarding Julian Gough’s essay Divine comedy in Prospect.

In my studies and reading, the question of why a general tendency would develop around a given type of approach is an interesting question to pursue and I look forward to a more involved exploration of the subject by Gough, given that I find the writing in the Prospect article too general. Hasn’t Milan Kundera already explored this territory in his own way?

Gough writes:

Many of the finest novels—and certainly the novels I love most—are in the Greek comic tradition, rather than the tragic: Rabelais, Cervantes, Swift, Voltaire, and on through to Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 and the late Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse 5.

Yet western culture since the middle ages has overvalued the tragic and undervalued the comic. We think of tragedy as major, and comedy as minor. Brilliant comedies never win the best film Oscar. The Booker prize leans toward the tragic. In 1984, Martin Amis reinvented Rabelais in his comic masterpiece Money. The best English novel of the 1980s, it didn’t even make the shortlist. Anita Brookner won that year, for Hotel du Lac, written, as the Observer put it, “with a beautiful grave formality.”

The fault is in the culture. But it is also internalised in the writers, who self-limit and self-censor. If the subject is big, difficult and serious, the writer tends to believe the treatment must be in the tragic mode. When Amis addressed the Holocaust in his minor novel Time’s Arrow (1991), he switched off the jokes, and the energy, and was rewarded with his only Booker shortlisting.

But why this pressure, from within and without? There are two good reasons. The first is the west’s unexamined cultural cringe before the Greeks. For most of the last 500 years, Homer and Sophocles have been held to be the supreme exponents of their arts. (Even Homer’s constant repetition of stock phrases like “rosy-fingered dawn” and “wine-dark sea” are praised, rather than recognised as tiresome clichés.)

The second reason is that our classical inheritance is lop-sided. We have a rich range of tragedies—Sophocles, Aeschylus and Euripides (18 by Euripides alone). Of the comic writers, only Aristophanes survived. In an age of kings, time is a filter that works against comedy. Plays that say, “Boy, it’s a tough job, leading a nation” tend to survive; plays that say, “Our leaders are dumb arseholes, just like us” tend not to.

It may be true that western culture has had lopsided inheritance (this implies a missing balance) and indeed our awareness of the Greek ouvre is very small, but I’m wondering at the value of the argument itself or whether we can validate a writer’s tendency to limit from their choice of mode (to what degree is mode, voice, and style governed by choice?) or whether writing in the tragic mode is an act of self-censorship or can be construed as such. Not to mention that people have explored a range of comedy and tragedy across culture.

I share Gough’s love of the comic tradition. These are the works I enjoy reading (and writing). Stanley Elkin’s “A Poetics for Bullies” is a favorite story. And I must admit to not having read an American novel in a while (I’m currently slogging my way through Alaa Al Aswany’s The Yacoubian Building). And I’m about to devote as much time as I can to Musil’s The Man Without Qualities, which is one of my favorite unfinished journeys.

I do wonder, in this day and age in America, why we aren’t seeing a flood of comedic works.

In my opinion, and this shouldn’t count for much given my limited experience with a totality, the fiction I read in literary magazines is bland and, yes, I would argue, tired of itself. At the moment I can’t remember who wrote “Heliotrope,” a story published in Confrontation. Small, unassuming, powerful, I thought, one of those rare works that keeps me coming back.

Memory and the Web

Dan at if:book writes:

I won’t pretend to be the first to see in the Internet parallels to the all-remembering mind of Funes; a book could be written, if it hasn’t already been, on how Borges invented the Internet. It’s interesting, however, to see that the problems of Funes are increasingly everyone’s problems. As humans, we forget by default; maybe it’s the greatest sign of the Internet’s inhumanity that it remembers. With time things become more obscure on the Internet; you might need to plumb the Wayback Machine at archive.org rather than Google to find a website from 1997. History becomes obscure, but it only very rarely disappears entirely on the Internet.

One important element of social memory here is the idea of historical presence: the meaning we give to events, objects, and actions. I don’t know what is on the web until I encounter it or add to its bulk. We add to the network, but the network exists to degrees of use, otherwise it stores, without filter, unlike memory.

Clementine

Clementine.

“We’re learning to explore Europa by first exploring a Mexican cenote,” said John Rummel, a senior scientist for astrobiology at NASA.

Community College and Learning

From the NYT (requires login):

The two-year colleges most committed to funneling students into four-year colleges tend to have some or all of the following: learning communities (in which students attend classes with the same small cohort of classmates), honors programs (noted for curriculum that crosses disciplines, teachers who hold advanced degrees and smaller classes taken with similarly talented peers) and articulation agreements with four-year institutions in the state (typically synchronizing basic courses with a university’s requirements and guaranteeing admittance to transfer students who have kept their grades up).

These colleges focus on liberal arts and the sciences, responding to increasing demand for math and science teachers, health professionals and high-tech experts. The best community colleges also have what experts call “a culture of evidence,” meaning they extensively assess students’ academic performance and adjust teaching practices accordingly, says Kay M. McClenney, director of the annual Community College Survey of Student Engagement, based at the University of Texas, Austin.

I wonder about the “learning community” part, but this section of the article makes sense at engaging obvious criteria: solid assessment practice, transfer responsibilities, and providing opportunity to changing demographics. At heart, flexibility and systems that innovate.

Then there’s this from our friends to the north east:

“It’s well known that there are many other colleges where students are much more satisfied with their academic experience,” said Paul Buttenwieser, a psychiatrist and author who is a member of the Harvard Board of Overseers, and who favors the report. “Amherst is always pointed to. Harvard should be as great at teaching as Amherst.”

As Professor Skocpol put it, “People at Harvard are concerned when they hear that some of our undergraduates can go through four years here and not know a faculty member well enough to get a letter of recommendation.”

The effort here comes as the federal government and state accrediting agencies, as well as students and parents, press universities nationwide to provide more accountability for how well their faculties are teaching. “If we don’t do it ourselves,” President Bok said of the government pressure, “they’re going to make us do it their way.”