The Gem of Gemini

 

Gotta say this: I learned a lot about how Gemini prepped NASA for the Apollo missions watching this documentary.

Apollo, of course, is what gets the most attention. But Gemini, wow, they spent a lot of time learning how to do what made Apollo successful. I figured they'd done all that before Apollo 11 landed on the Moon -- but clearly the training mission went on for much longer than that.

If you've got several hours, watch this, and the one that precedes it. Highly recommended.

From the Best Books, or at Least from the Mouth of Bob

We all know people who have friends everywhere.

When I was Scoutmaster, for example, my assistant scoutmaster knew all sorts of people. That became cemented in my mind when on two occasions, on hikes out in the middle of nowhere, we met other hikers and he knew them. He's a natural for making friends, though. Has the kind of personality that's always interested in people.

My Dad also knew people from all over the place. But the older I get, the more I suspect that wasn't a skill that came naturally to him. It's something he had to learn to cultivate.

I do not have those skills.

Enter Bob's Burgers.

I recently re-watched the "Driving Big Dummy" episode, and this exchange near the end really hit me:

BONNIE: Oh Teddy, you like asking people about themselves, don’t you?

TEDDY: Well, yeah. People are interesting.

MR. ESTOCK:  Teddy fixed the porch for me. He wasn’t here half the day and he got me talking about my late wife’s cornbread recipe. How was it, by the way?

TEDDY: It was really something.

MR ESTOCK: I ran out of corn. 

TEDDY: That explains it. Well, we better get going. Why are you staring, Bob?

BOB: Hey, Teddy, I . . . I wanna say something. I guess maybe I thought you were lonely. But you’re really not. At all. You make friends wherever you go, and you’re so interested in people. All the time. I, um, am never interested in people. I don’t like people that much. Not you guys; you seem great. But I don’t really like that about myself and I guess I really admire that about you.

TEDDY: Oh, thanks. And hey, don’t beat yourself up, Bob. You are like that, kind of, with the six people you already know. But yeah, maybe you could branch out a bit.

BOB: I’ll try. Thank you again, Connie.

BONNIE: It’s Bonnie.

I'm the Bob in this situation. And I need to branch out a bit. And I need to remember that when I'm around other people who do know a lot of others and spend time with them, I should be learning how to do it. Or at least learn to tolerate it better.

It’s Not the People who Do Nothing who Learn New Things.

We’re all trying something.

We plan things out. Or not. We work hard at things. Or not. And in a general sense we hope through our work that we get to see the end result of things. That’s why I’m working on the third draft of my novel Doleful Creatures, and why my wife and I volunteer with the Boy Scouts of America and why I teach part-time as well as work-full time as a technical writer.

It’s pretty much a given that most of what we touch won’t go anywhere. But I like to think we’ll find a success or two.

So I’m intrigued by this Code for America keynote that Clay Shirky gave last year, in which he discusses not only the value of listening to sincerely helpful critics, but also in simply trying things out so we can discover for ourselves what works, what doesn’t, and how we may have misunderstood the problem or task we have before us. Give it a listen.

He does kind of perambulate about his point – a Shirky trademark – but he does have some interesting things to say. First of all: Our biggest gift is the ability to change our minds:

All of this matters, this sorting out of the helpful from the corrosive criticism, and knowing the level of the problem you’re trying to take on, because the most important resource you’ve got isn’t your strategy, your plan, your tactics, it’s not your tools, your technology, or your project management. The most important resource you’ve got is your own ability to change your mind. That’s what matters over the long haul.

Shirky goes on to talk about two fellow New Yorkers, Patrick McConlogue and Leo Grand, one a minor figure at a venture capital firm and the other a homeless man living in a park that happened to be on McConlogue’s way to work. McConlogue decides to offer the guy $100 or a chance to learn how to code – and he accepts the coding challenge.

I remember when this happened, and how the Internet vomited on the idea, pointing out its impracticalities and pointlessness. I may have said a thing or two about it myself. But Shirky sees it in a significantly different light, a light that should ring true to anyone who has taken on a seemingly impossible project or dared call themselves a Christian (or any other religion in which we’re advised to watch out for our fellow man as we watch out for ourselves):

If things go well for Leo, it’s not going to be because this is a general solution to some problem of homelessness, this will be a fairy godmother story. The important part of the story is that [Patrick] McConlogue went from being a guy who felt comfortable characterizing people as the justly or the unjustly homeless, a guy who felt comfortable talking about the homeless without even bothering to learn the name of the guy he was targeting. He’s turned from that guy into a guy who takes time out of a work day to try to get his friend bailed out of jail. And I’ll tell you as a New Yorker, nobody voluntarily interacts with the NYPD. That’s a big change.

So far, things seem to be working out for Leo. And the events haven't been lost on McConlogue either. Shirky adds:

What is clear is that McConlogue would not have learned when he learned about the problems with homelessness if he hadn’t started out with the wrong idea and been willing to test it in the world. It’s not the people who do nothing who learn new things.

Give Me Learning, Sir . . .

Back when I was in high school, I participated in the ubiquitous gym class.

And let me paint a picture: I was not athletic then. Nor am I now. I was, and am, a bone-idle, out of condition bloke to whom regular exercise -- let alone something as organized as basketball or volleyball -- was completely alien.

Why do I have to do this, I wondered, every time I had to strip down to the "skins" -- invariably, all the fat kids ended up on the team that had to take their shirts off; I guess the skinny ones liked to see our man boobs jiggle.

But you know what? I did it.

I sweated through the warm-up exercises. I panted and wheezed through all the running. And though I refused to play baseball, I wasn't shunned. Nor did I get a bad grade. Because I did everything else. I even learned to like things like the warm-up exercises and pickleball.

I still regard physical fitness as important. I'm not wild about team sports, but I will go biking and walking and hiking. I try to watch what I eat.

I got something out of high school gym, even though it wasn't my favorite thing in the world to do.

So Rebecca Schuman's essay in Slate today really got my goat.

She thinks students who don't like to write shouldn't be asked to write any more. Because they hate it. Because teachers hate reading their essays. And because they'll never learn how to do it effectively, so why bother teaching them.

Yikes.

She says keeping writing in strictly English courses is okay. I assume she's OK with writing in other subjects -- history comes to mind -- but for those who don't want to be English majors or historians or whatever, writing should not be required in their college careers.

Her attitude stuns me. "They don't like to do it. It's too hard to teach them how to do it. So let's not do it." How DEFEATIST is that?

I don't recall seeing it written that what we learn in school has to be easy for us to do. Or something we'll be doing for the rest of our lives. I remember going in with the attitude -- and I get this from my father, whose schooling was interrupted at the third-grade level by World War II -- that we should learn whatever we can, even if it's hard. And he learned a lot of things, reading a lot of books and writing things down in a language that was not his native tongue. He might know what he's talking about.

I get it from this, too:

And as all have not faith, seek ye diligently and teach one another words of wisdom; yea, seek ye out of the best books words of wisdom, seek learning even by study and also by faith;

Organize yourselves; prepare every needful thing, and establish a house, even a house of prayer, a house of fasting, a house of faith, a house of learning, a house of glory, a house of order, a house of God.

-- Doctrine and Convenants 109:7-8

Or, if you prefer something a little less churchy:

"Give me learning, sir, and you may keep your black bread."

-- Leo Tolstoy

Let's just not treat everyone like this:

Online Classes and the Motivated Student

From what I’ve seen in just over a year and a half of teaching online courses, it is true that the more motivated the student, the more likely they are to succeed in online classes. And though I might like to think otherwise as an online instructor, it is the student’s motivation, not the teacher’s, that makes for success.

There’s quite a bit of hand-wringing going on out there about online courses and how they leave the less-motivated students behind. There are other factors they point out that also leave other students behind, couching everything in the unrealistic idea that every educational opportunity ought to be open to everyone, no matter what inabilities or disadvantages they possess, such as in this piece from Noliwe M. Rooks in TIME magazine. Her conclusion:

If we really want to democratize education, finding creative ways to realistically open up colleges to different communities will do more to help than will a model that, despite its stated intentions, is more beneficial for students for students who are already wealthy, academically well-prepared an highly motivated. We ought to make sure that everyone has access to the same opportunities or we will further widen the opportunity gaps we mean to close.

So why not make online courses only for the motivated student?

Well, there are many reasons that would cause hand-wringing sessions of their own. First and foremost is this American idea that education ought to be available in all forms to everyone, rather than in a tailored fashion that lets students take advantage of their learned or inborn advantages and move at a brisker pace through their education. Making online classes open only to motivated students – and how do you measure motivation – smacks as undemocratic, something that’s just not allowed in educational circles.

Maybe getting these highly-motivated students out of the classroom – leaving more room for the less motivated in traditional classrooms where they can get the physical, one-on-one instruction they need – is an advantage that’s being overlooked.




Another advantage: I’ve seen highly motivated and talented writers simply go through the motions or kick against the pricks of their online course because – this is true – they already know about writing a thesis, organizing a paper, doing research and the little bitty tricks that their less-motivated and less-talented peers are still working on. They’re bored in physical classrooms and frustrated at the busywork in online courses, and I don’t blame them. These are the divergent thinkers Sir Ken Robinson talks about in this video. Why not, in fact, let these highly motivated and talented students audit courses for credit and get it without having to go through the motions at all?

Just Keep Swimming. And Learnding

Yesterday I humbled myself when, after writing the opening to what I thought was going to be a bold push to inaugurate an information literacy course at BYU-Idaho, I read an article that’s being pushed by our online education betters at BYU-Idaho insisting in part – and rather bluntly – that classes on information literacy aren’t really a great idea.

(Why not? Because, authors and scholars Robert Barr and John Tagg insist in their piece From Teaching to Learning that such courses become an end unto themselves, going only to satisfy some sage on the stage’s desire to fill in a whiny complaint (These students are information illiterates!) without really helping the students to apply what they might learn in such a course to real-life situations.)

I may be able to re-use part of what I wrote, and that’s because it wasn’t my own idea but something I quoted from Elder David A. Bednar, who agree with Barr and Tagg to the nth degree:

Academic assignments, test scores, and a cumulative GPA do not produce a final and polished product. Rather, students have only started to put in place a foundation of learning upon which they can build forever . . . The particular topics investigated and learned are not nearly as important as what has been learned about learning. As we press forward in life – spiritually, interpersonally, and professionally – no book of answers is readily available with guidelines and solutions to the great challenges of life. All we have is our capacity to learn and our love of and for learning.

So I basically have taken what I wrote and put it in the trash bin, realizing (yet again) that I am not a genius. I’m okay with that. I’ve known for a long time that I am not a genius. But sometimes I get a flash of what might be something, only to find out it’s really not all that nifty.

So this humility thing is a good teacher.

Where do I go from here?

Well, I don’t go where I went last night: Into a funk in which I lamented not knowing what I don’t know and cursing the darkness for not suddenly shooting rays of what I don’t know into my brain so I could know it.

I do go this way: I’ll read Barr and Tagg’s article again. I’ll remember what they said and take in a little comfort that as I learn to be a better teacher, the changes I’d like to see in myself and in my students will come. But slowly, because I’ve got a lot to learn. They start off their article by quoting Albert Einstein, who said “The significant problems we face cannot be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them.”

I’m reading now a biography on Einstein (again trying to fill in the vast gaps of knowledge I do not possess) in which the author, Ronald W. Clark, emphasizes that Einstein came up with his brilliant ideas by focusing on the tiny inconsistencies in theory that other scientists either ignored or allowed to exist because they appeared minor or solved certain problems extant in the theory. Einstein didn’t like the little inconsistencies, and thus tried to fix them, to great effect. That effort took a lot of time and a lot of reflection – something I need to find time to accomplish so that my blinding flashes of the obvious don’t come so frequently.

This reminds me of another Einstein quote: “I want to know God’s thoughts. The rest are details.” And finding God’s thoughts, I know, isn’t going to come to me in an afternoon pounding out a useless paper on an idea that’s already been tossed to the gutter. Doesn’t mean I’m not going to be bitter about the whole thing, but at least for the moment I’ve achieved that bit of clarity that says to keep on swimming.

And at least I read that touted article before I blundered into something and made a public ass of myself. That's a bit of knowledge and experience gained right there. Right?

Javawocky

So, a month ago when I signed up for a free online course meant to have me become a programming fiend by the end of the year, I was overly optimistic about the time I thought I’d have to devote to the lessons.

So far, of the four lessons they’ve sent, I’ve completed half of the first one. Had something to do with Java, something to do with strings. Or threads. Or something of that nature, though I could be confusing my lesson with the spool of thread that fell out of our antique sewing machine when I was trying to figure out how to get the cover off over the weekend.

What happened?

We’re moving, for one. Packing up every little bit of furniture and personal stuff in the house and gradually shipping it south towards our new house, which we should be able to get into on Feb. 17.

I still want to complete the lessons. They’re on a backlog of things to do once life settles down a bit more. As if that’ll happen.

Maybe I’m just easily distracted. Or fearing my mortality. Or just a wee bit distracted. And prone to repetition. I am working full time, teaching part time and, in between it all, trying to write novels and play with the kids and give my wife some attention.

I'm Learnding

Used under the fair use doctrine for educational purposes.

So, I have a lot to learn.

That’s no surprise. That I knew about the Ophelia Syndrome before I signed up to teach this course doesn’t necessarily mean I don’t occasionally stumble into its pitfalls. But as Lucy said to Charlie Brown in the Peanuts Christmas special, “that I recognize I have a problem means I am not too far gone.” That’s good, right?

I’ve already confessed to Tyler that I’m having a hard time adjusting to teaching this course because, from 2006 to 2009, I was taking online courses with a group of highly-motivated grad students. Now I’m on the other side of the looking-glass and see that the students I’m dealing with don’t quite have that level of motivation. Some do – don’t get me wrong there – but there are some who don’t. And it hurts to see. Not that it’s hurting me, but I hate to see them hurting themselves perhaps without recognizing it.

So what to do? Tyler’s suggestion that we study the language we use as we interact with our students is an apt one, because I’ve seen in all sorts of interactive situations – from the online courses in which I was a student, to email exchanges I have with various SMEs at work and through the sometimes contentious exchanges I have with fellow co-workers at Uncharted, a social media group I’m involved with – that it’s communication and the words we use that sometimes inflame and sometimes calm contentious situations.

This is the part where I start to sound like Uncle Rico from “Napoleon Dynamite,” as if I’m completely legit, like I’ve got all the answers. I don’t. This is just what I’m seeing as important and what I’m seeing I need to work on.

Firstly, Elder Bednar says in his presentation “Seek Learning by Faith” (I’m trying to model good citation format for my students here; gotta keep in practice), “[A]nything you or I do as an instructor that knowingly and intentionally draws attention to self – in the messages we present, in the methods we use, or in our personal demeanor – is a form of priestcraft that inhibits the teaching effectiveness of the Holy Ghost.”

Ouch. Priestcraft. You know, that’s just like, as Steve Martin says, the word ‘hemorrhoid.’ Neither is a word you want to become associated with. But as I read that portion of the article, I recognized myself in it a little. On paper like this, I’m loquacious. Logorrheic, in fact. And I’ve probably stepped on a few toes strutting about in the cockpit of language, making myself sound bigger than I am. So then I read what Elder Bednar says and I’m humbled. I’m also reminded of what one of my writing heroes said:

The intellectual life is not the only road to God, nor the safest, but we find it to be a road, and it may be the appointed road for us. Of course, it will be so only so long as we keep the impulse pure and disinterested. That is the great difficulty. As the author of the Theologia Germanicai says, we may come to love knowledge – our knowing – more than the thing known: to delight not in the exercise of our talents but in the fact that they are ours, or even in the reputation they bring us. Every success in the scholar’s life increases this danger. If it becomes irresistible, he must give up his scholarly work. The time for plucking out the right eye has arrived.

That’s what CS Lewis says in “Learning in War-Time,” a sermon he delivered in Oxford in 1939.

So between CS Lewis and Elder Bednar, I can see I’ve got some humility to learn.

So what am I doing to learn it?

Well, I’m here, virtual hat in hand, hoping to learn from the rest of you. This is my first semester teaching anything outside of Primary or Elders Quorum, so I’m green as bamboo. I’m ready to be taught.

I’m also doing a little self-exploration, thus following one of Elder Bednar’s admonitions: “Learning by faith cannot be transferred from an instructor to a student through a lecture, a demonstration, or an experiential exercise; rather, a student must exercise faith and act in order to obtain the knowledge for himself or herself.”

Here’s what I’ve found out:

Mark Canada, in “Students as Seekers in Online Courses,” offers good advice, as Tyler has already pointed out: “To help students adjust to working effectively as independent learners, professors should emphasize the pursuit of knowledge – perhaps even using words such as “seek” and “explore: -- when communicating with their online students.” I’m trying to do that – my word of the semester is “challenge.” I know each of the students I have in this section are capable of doing the work that’s being asked of them. Over the past two weeks, we’ve spent time together learning, and I’ve learned which students are the eager beavers and which ones need a bit of cajolery. Thus the challenges – dig deeper into the articles, find what you like, what you don’t agree with, and share it with the class. These challenges are calls to action – something Alan Murray, Uncharted’s president, urges us to do all the time as we try to take our creation at www.uncharted.net and turn it into a successful social media platform. We can unfurl the flags and put out the welcome mat and pay jugglers to stand at the doors, he says, but until we ask our visitors to do something – to submit a story, upload some photos, etc. – they won’t feel obliged or encouraged to do so, even if they’ve come to us of their own free will.

Note I use the word cajolery here. That’s for shorthand purposes, not meant to bear the baggage the word brings with it. One of the things I hope to emphasize with my students throughout this semester and, BYU-Idaho willing, further semesters, is that no matter their chosen major, they’ll need to be effective communicators. I plan on pointing them to a paper called “Do Scientists Understand the Public,” written by Chris Mooney for the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. Mooney’s thesis is that scientists in general either need to do a better job of communicating with the public in order to convey the import of their scientific research or to solicit the help of professional communicators to do so in a way that leads the public to positive calls for action, rather than leading them to preconceived notions or knee-jerk political opinions of science because the principles haven’t been clearly communicated.

Mooney, in his paper, commends the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission as an example of a scientific agency that has “undertaken new measures to strengthen public support of its activities.” Part of that includes a careful watch that cajolery or condescension doesn’t enter into the picture. Mooney writes: “According to Janet Kotra, head of the NRC’s High-Level Waste Public Outreach Team, these steps include improving the ability of government scientists to engage with citizens in well-designed, effective public meetings. As Kotra put it at the American Academy meeting: ‘I will never forget a former colleague who said, ‘You mean, I have to dumb down my presentation for Ma and Pa Kettle?’ And of course, the answer to that is, yes, if you see it that way. But if you see it that way, I don’t want you talking to them.’”

So as I issue my challenges and calls to action, I’m trying to do it in a manner that encourages my students to act, rather than to be acted upon. “Learning by faith and from experience are two of the central features of the Father’s plan of happiness,” Elder Bednar writes. “The Savior preserved moral agency through the Atonement and made it possible for us to act and to learn by faith. Lucifer’s rebellion against the plan sought to destroy the agency of man, and his intent was that we as learners would only be acted upon.” I hope my choices – and the Spirit – help me avoid such situations.

Doomed, Part III

Used under the Fair Use Doctrine for commentary purposes.

Doomed has quickly become a meme here at Mister Fweem’s Blog, and with good reason. Read here if you’ve fallen behind on the reasons that we here are doomed. Doomed!

So today we explore the question: You’ve posted creative writing on the web that now you’d like to erase completely from the Internet so as not to risk losing your rights of first publication. What to do, my friend, what to do?

First of all, maybe this:

Abandon hope all ye who enter here

Then again, maybe not.

Many tend to shake in their boots at the inviolate permanence of the Internet. Once it’s there, they say, it can never be concealed. And, in a general sense, that may be true, because you never know who has read and downloaded or copied your material, though for the most part you’d have to wonder why they bothered, given that you can’t interest an agent in it to save your life.

But there are ways of ridding the Internet of your stuff if you so desire.

First line of attack: the Wayback Machine.

Used under the Fair Use Doctrine for commentary purposes.

No, not that one, Sherman. I mean this one: The Wayback Machine, part of web.archive.org, where the good folks there aim to preserve not only the Internet as we know it, but every single iteration of every single web page as we know them now and as we might have known then back in the early 1990s and such.

Every bit of writing I’ve read on posting unpublished novels and novel excerpts on the web cites the Wayback Machine as one of those inviolate net caches that will collect and store your first use in perpetuity and thus rob you of any benefits you might have reaped.

But it can be breached. Thanks to the folks at the Wayback Machine itself.

First off, they’ll tell you this:

The Internet Archive is not interested in offering access to Web sites or other Internet documents whose authors do not want their materials in the collection.

Since my blog is hosted by Google, they make this pretty easy. Restricting web crawlers in the “permissions” menu, and then ensuring that the proper robots.txt information appears in the HTML of your blog using your Google Webmaster Tools can cut off crawlers and searchers, such as the Wayback Machine. (I know I’m grossly oversimplifying things; for more in-depth information, go here.) Simply put, the robots.txt on my blog bars all crawlers and searchers.

That’s well and good, you say, but what about for those – like me – trying to close the barn door after the cows have escaped?

First of all, go the analytics route. See what are the popular terms being searched for, that bring people to your site. My analytics show people have come to my site much more frequently on terms such as “loughner beck” and “nose hair” (which should tell you something about the quality of writing topics on my blog) than anything to do with my novels.

Second of all – and this is where it gets tedious – you can request that Google remove cached copies of your individual pages. That means for each page, you send a request. And if the URL is off, no touchie.

So my publishing acquaintance’s advice holds true:

1) Posting novel excerpts on the web is a no-no, unless it’s behind a security wall.
2) Be up-front if you get a deal, lest your publisher discover on their own what horrible mistake you’ve made.

Do not be doomed.

Things I've Learned

Just over the past few days, here are a few of the things I've learned:

• Don't think you can back up in an Arizona hummingbird garden while trying to take a photo of a hummingbird without backing into something sharp and spiky.
• Don't wear a loud Hawaiian shirt (yellow with white and orange hibiscus) to Mexico if you don't want every street vendor in town shouting "Hey, you in the yellow shirt! Come see what I got!"
• Ponchos that happen to be made in China for sale in Mexico were likely made in China by Mexicans, per the street vendors I met.
• The United States of America doesn't really seem to care if you leave the country, but if you plan on coming back in, make sure you've got your passport and other paperwork in order.
• When the restaurant calls it a "Macho Mucho Burrito," plan on the "Macho" and "Mucho" living up to their meanings.
• Benito Juarez is pretty much regarded as Mexico's Lincoln.
• There are many, many, many people in Yuma who have no idea how to control their dogs and, as a consequence, spend a lot of time looking for them.
• The city of Yuma, Arizona, is a haven for 1930s Art Deco architecture, at least on Main Street. Well worth visiting.

Telling, Not Showing

One of the first Ten Commandments of Writing (said with appropriate thundery and bush-burney respect and affect) is this:

Thou Shalt Show, Not Tell

meaning, of course, that if you're telling the action rather than showing the action in your story, you're screwing up.I beg to differ. Sometimes, if you do it just right, telling is a lot more writerly than showing. Behold: 

We're not shown the off-screen action until the fourth panel, and even then, we only get to see the result of the action, not the action itself. The characters in the first three panels are effectively telling the action, and it's in their telling that we get a different perspective on the action, rather than just the action itself. It's effective, brilliant, and helps add a bit of variety to the overall storyline. (If you want to see more of Rocket Man and the Emperor of the Moon, just peruse Mr. Meyer's comics here. Well worth the trip, I must say.)

This is just one fina example of how we can, as writers, add variety to our narrative and bring in odd little side stories that entertain our readers as well as keep us in the "action," albeit not the straight, linear action that is most expected. Use such tricks sparingly, though, as there are few (with the exception of Tom Stoppard in "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead" who can keep the action we expect and are familiar with off the screen nearly entirely as they tell their story.

I'm On the Internet. And I Don't Feel Stoopid.

Every once and a while, someone trots out the notion that the Internet is making us stupid.

This seems to be a favorite subject of The Atlantic magazine. Back in 2008 they posed the question, and just a few weeks ago rephrased it by asking is Google making us stupid. Here's what they have to say most recently. Writes Nicholas Carr:

Over the past few years I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. My mind isn’t going—so far as I can tell—but it’s changing. I’m not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I’m reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.

[w]hat the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.

Here we see the typical argument: The Internet stole my brain. It changed the way I think. I can't concentrate. I don't have the depth I used to. I can't read a novel without suddenly drifting off to want to read something else. Like this:

I don't know if I buy that. Frankly, I think in many ways the Internet it making me smarter. And at a more rapid pace. I think that's good. If there's a word or a concept I don't understand, I have the Internet right there, ready and willing (for the most part) to help me learn. Sure, I have to consider who is writing or displaying what I'm reading or viewing, but don't I have to do the same thing with the written, physical word as well?

Carr is correct in thinking that maybe we're not getting the depth we need -- but we can graze just as shallowly from written, physical literature as we can from the Internet, can we not? What maybe Carr is seeing change is the way he approaches knowledge, reading and such, rather than the medium making his approach to such more shallow and more scattered.

I'm more along the lines of Nick Bilton, who writes for his New York Times blog in favor of computer technology enhancing our abilities to learn, as backed up by scientific study:

Research shows that each medium offers its own positive attributes: Neuroscience has shown that playing video games stimulates areas of our brains that control working memory, hand and eye coordination and attention and can stimulate and vastly improve our cognitive skills. Reading on the other hand promotes deep thought and exercises areas of the brain responsible for reflection, reasoning and critical analysis. And auditory storytelling stimulates areas of the brain involved with creativity, contextual thinking and executive function.

It could be argued that the Web, which is the ultimate library of words, video, images, interactivity, sharing and conversation, is the quintessential place to learn.

Why bring all this up if I'm not worried about the Internet make me stupid? Well, this.

A display of ancient clay and stone tablets, some of them dating back more than 5,000 years, at the Oriental Institute at the University of Chicago show that there was some consernation among the elites of the time that the mere act of writing things down was going to make people, well, stupid. Here's an excerpt from a Sci-Tech Today article: 

The Greek philosopher Plato revealed the fears some Egyptians expressed when he wrote of the Egyptian myth that the god Thoth invented writing and then boasted to the chief god, Amun, that it was an "elixir of memory and wisdom."

In reply, Amun predicted trouble for readers and writers.

He said it would cause forgetfulness in writers because they would not use their memory. Moreover, he predicted, readers would give only the appearance of knowing things while remaining "ignorant and hard to get along with, since they are not wise but only appear wise."

So the worry about newfangled technology dumbing us down isn't exactly new, is it? That's why I don't worry. Writing things down certainly didn't make us dumber -- for the most part, it's made a lot of educational opportunities available to a lot more people. It helped spread literacy, albeit slowly in many parts. What the Internet is doing for learning and literacy is far beyond that scope and speed.

And you know what's cool about the Internet? It gave me space and inspiration and lots of opportunities for research to write a novel this year. By all means it's not done, and it's not the best novel in the world, but I'm certain that without self-publishing and research opportunity offered by the Internet, it might not have been written this year. Now if I can only decode it. . .

The Ophelia Syndrome

The Fair Ophelia

I take this as a good sign. A sign that maybe I am still learning a thing or two.

Yesterday in the mail came a copy of “I Think,” the BYU-Idaho-prepared text for the foundations English class I’ll begin teaching in September. I brought it to work with me today, anxious to read the bits of wisdom I’m supposed to impart to my students.

Forty-two pages into it, I come out chagrined and ashamed. But hopeful, because though I see signs that, during my undergraduate work at the University of Idaho, I was, for the most part, the Ophelia that Thomas G. Plummer warns in his essay – and required reading for the course – “Diagnosing and Treating the Ophelia Syndrome,” I also see signs that maybe I’m getting past the point where I want everything spoon-fed to me, where I want to know the hoops to jump through rather than finding the hoops for myself.

Not too long ago, I lamented that the journalism professors at the University of Idaho didn’t teach me what I’d need to know in the real world, and that the journalism professionals I worked with figured I was on my own in finding things out. I see now that I was an Ophelia, someone who wants to be treated in ignorance by someone who is going to give me everything I need to succeed, with the only effort on my part being the ability to absorb information.

I’ve had a growing realization that this approach is why I washed out of journalism: laziness. It’s an ugly word when applied to oneself, but in this case it appears apt.

But I am moving on. I’m no smarter, but I believe I’m learning to think. As Plummer says:

To put it differently, surrender the need for absolute truth. The English poet John Keats wrote a landmark letter to his brothers, George and Thomas Keats, on December 22, 1817. It has become known as the letter on "Negative Capability." In part it reads,

...it struck me what quality went to form a Man [or Woman] of Achievement, especially in Literature, and which Shakespeare possessed so enormously - I mean Negative Capability, that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.

I do not want to do Keats an injustice by oversimplifying a magnificent statement, but I believe he is saying essentially this: The world is a complex place, and absolute truth is elusive, indeed; the greatness in Shakespeare may be attributed to the fact that he didn't feel inclined to explain what he could not, but only to portray the human condition as he saw it.

This concept drives a stake into the heart of the notion that Polonius has the answers. Overcoming the Ophelia Syndrome, becoming an independent thinker, includes giving up romantic notions of the world as a place where everything can be explained. It includes giving up the need to be fooled into thinking that Polonius does indeed have the answers when he does not. I wish he did. I wish I did. I wish any or all of my colleagues did. We do not. We can only join with students and others in the pursuit of answers, and even then we must remain ultimately in some degree of uncertainty.

The corollary to this is that to treat the Ophelia Syndrome, one must develop a healthy distrust of authorities and experts. Experts disagree more often than they agree. Those who pose as authorities are as likely to be a Polonius trying to turn Ophelia into a baby as they are to have a real handle on what they are talking about. Is there a solution? I can think of two: First, for every important opinion you hear, get a second opinion. Second, in the words of the Lord in the 9th section of the Doctrine and Covenants, study it out in your own heart.

I wondered why, just after I signed the contract to teach this course, why I was doing it. I went over the reasons once again: A good resume-builder. A way to see if teaching is my thing as I contemplate pursuing a doctorate. A diversion from boredom.

No. I see a bit more clearly that the reason I’m doing this is to keep stimulating that intellectual curiosity, the desire for learning. I saw that a little bit earlier this year when I wrote “Through A Glass Darkly” as a series of blog posts. Now I’m starting on the second book in that series. Maybe it’ll go somewhere. Maybe it won’t. But at least I’m taking some creative risks to use my brain, to get me to thinking.

This is what the teachers in my graduate program were cultivating – they didn’t want to show us the hoops and have us jump through them; they wanted us to think. For the most part, I did that. Maybe that’s why taking these courses was exciting. They were hard work. They set me to thinking.

I think that’s what doing this “teaching thing” is going to do once again: Help me to become a better thinker, a better reasoner. The only way is up from here.

On Originality and Authenticity

A 17-year-old author, Helene Hegemann, in plagiarizing blog posts for her breakout novel Axolotl Roadkill, reveals the shortcuts some people think they can take on the road to success.

To defend her plagiarism – and there’s no other word or concept for it, despite her insistence on “intertextuality” (Read here at Time magazine lest I be accused of plagiarism myself) – she said this:

True originality doesn't exist anyway, only authenticity

She also defends her “’right to copy and transform’ other people's work, taking a stand against what she called the ‘copyright excesses’ of the past decade.'"

Who is this kid, and why is her ethical compass so broken?

Originality and authenticity exist. To say otherwise denies the limitless expanse of the human imagination and is a terrible, crippling crutch for anyone who wants to be taken seriously as a writer.

Miss Hegemann, let me tell you what’s authentic: My own writing. Your own writing. Writing that comes out of the imagination of an author, writing original prose for what may be, yes a familiar genre. Or a familiar story. Or a familiar type of story. Stealing someone else’s writing and passing it off as your own is not authenticity, nor is it intertextuality, nor is it a battle against the “copyright excesses” of the past decade, century, or millennia.

It’s plagiarism, plain and simple. It’s not authentic. It’s not original. It’s not yours. It’s theft. You’re a thief, Miss Hegemann, not a writer. Or a writer-thief. The thing is, you have to learn how to seperate the two. choose to be a writer, please.

You’d do well to listen to the writerly ambitions of another writer, one Cyrano Savinien Hercule de Bergarac, who said in Edmond Rostand’s classic play:

Be thou content with flowers,--fruit,--nay, leaves,
But pluck them from no garden but thine own!'
And then, if glory come by chance your way,
To pay no tribute unto Caesar, none,
But keep the merit all your own! In short,
Disdaining tendrils of the parasite,
To be content, if neither oak nor elm--
Not to mount high, perchance, but mount alone!

That’s true authenticity. You ain’t got it, Miss Hegemann. And your defense of your plagiarism tells me you’ve got a lot to learn about authenticity before it’s actually yours to possess.

Go to 2:32 for the start of the whole monologue.

Here it is in the original French. Exactly Rostand’s text and, I have to say it, delivered with much more passion than Jose Ferrer in the first.

Give Gil a Lick

See if any of this sounds familiar:

X had lent $36.6 million in insured deposits to a developer who had used the money to acquire ninety-nine acres of land, including thirty-one acres under water. From most indications, it looked as if the only thing you could do with the land was park submarines. An appraiser said the ninety-nine acres was worth only $12 million. But X had approved the $36 million loan assuming that the land would rise in value once the developer used it for a lake and a resort that would include 170 condominiums and a hotel. The $36 million loan earned X huge fees. But it was like lending someone $300,000 on a house worth $100,000 and gambling that the thing would more than triple in value once it was remodeled.

Or this:

Confused as how such a debacle could occur, and understandably irate, American taxpayers started demanding some scalps, and the politicians who had willingly taken all of that campaign money graciously offered Y’s. A vigilante atmosphere evolved in which demagoguery and demands for harsh punishment flourished. Y faced an unsettling prospect: He might become a victim of the very scandal he helped create.

Or this:

Z is far more than a financial crisis; it is a political crisis of the first order. It represents what happens when a nation’s political system becomes rotten with self-interest, when raising money to stay in office becomes more important than the common trust, and when the average citizen becomes insulated from reality, be it by deposit insurance, ignorance, or indifference.

The common thread, of course, is greed. But if you think these quotes are in relation to the current economic crisis – be it the decline of GM and Chrysler or the unprecedented failures among US banks and banking interests, you’d be off by about twenty years. These quotes are from James O’Shea’s book The Daisy Chain, which outlines the savings and loan crisis of the mid 1980s, a crisis that cost the American taxpayers hundreds of billions of dollars and was caused by people wanting to get a hold of that brass ring and give it a lick, just like poor Gil Gunderson.

O’Shea’s is the first book I’ve read on the S&L crisis. (The “Z” in the third paragraph; X refers to Vernon Saving and Loan, a Texas S&L at the heart of O’Shea’s book while Y refers to Don Dixon, the guy who drove that particular S&L into the ditch.) What I appreciate the most about the book is it’s balanced approach. Rather than providing scalps or scapegoats, O’Shea details how nearly everyone involved in the situation, from the S&L officers to investors to politicians to the public at large, contributed to the problem and how they ought to share the blame. It’s an excellent lesson that we all should be learning, especially in the light of our current banking crisis. We ought to be looking less for scalps and more at what we can do as citizens, politicians and organizations to get our houses in order and keep them that way.

O’Shea’s treatment of the material is amazing. While he blames Reagan-era deregulation of the S&L industry as a catalyst for the crisis, he has no sacred cows, blaming Texas and federal officials for making the crisis at Vernon worse than it could have been otherwise. He points out that this crisis, like many others we face and may face, are really crises of personality, in which strong personalities bully through the pumpkin patch and get what they want, while weaker personalities either sheepishly do what they’re told or encounter obstacle after obstacle in trying to do what’s right that they either give up, are forced out of authoritative positions or simply fade away. There’s also ample room here to indict both Republicans and Democrats, Republicans for insisting that the free market is all good and holy, and Democrats for believing that politics ought to play before rationality.

Oddly enough, reading the book makes me want to pay more attention to how things go at work. We all have the authority to question what’s going on, and to actually stop work if we believe things are proceeding in an unsafe or unethical manner. Not that I have had much occur in my little area that needs questioning, but at least reading this book is a reminder that I do have that ability.

iPod Touch Heaven

If you're like me and new to the iPod Touch, you're probably wondering, so, what do I do with this thing now that I've got it? So far, I will confess, I have used mine to watch episodes of "Last of the Summer Wine" after the kids have gone to bed, playing games like whack-a-mole and solitare, and posting a few items to this blog.

Tony Vincent, over at Learning in Hand, is going to show me a bit more of what I can do.

I'm interested, first of all, in podcasting. Right now I'm more interested in voice podcasting rather than video, simple because there's a big one-two punch involved when you combine my John McCain-ish, weenie man voice with my ugly mug. Right now, I believe, voice would be sufficient -- though I will confess I'm much more interested in simply using the Touch as a sound recorder, not necessarily a Weenie Man recorder. I may have the technology to do this. So I'll give it a shot. Results, of course, will be posted here. Or not.