Hi, Randy Thornton Blog
nikkicool09504 has requested to follow your updates on Twitter!
Since you protect your updates, you need to either approve or deny this request. You can do this by visiting this page: http://twitter.com/friend_requests. For more information or help, please visit:
http://help.twitter.com/forums/10711/entries/14019
Best, Twitter
-- Turn off these emails at: http://twitter.com/account/notifications
Here are some resources from Chris Lott's visionary concluding keynote presentation this morning at the 2009 Teaching w/ Technology Idea Exchange. This is an inspiring and thought provoking address, at a distinctly different level of thinking than the usual educational technology ideas.
The concluding ten minutes are especially important as Chris touches on of the most fundamentally important parts of teaching and learning that we rarely talk out loud about: love.
Presentation Links
:
Here are some resources from Scott Leslie's wonderful keynote presentation this morning at the 2009 Teaching w/ Technology Idea Exchange.
Some Primary Resources
Presentation Links
Here is this morning's opening keynote by Brian Lamb from the 2009 Teaching with Technology Idea Exchange (TTIX) conference.
I have been a liberal arts generalist all my life, even during my professional moments of technical expertise. The reason I am not a full-time academic is because my beliefs in the role of the liberal arts generalist and the basic interconnectedness and interdisciplinary nature of those studies were not welcomed nor supported during my graduate school years by my mentors in an elite Ivy League university, where my interest in teaching and crossing disciplines was seen as quaint at best, and a professional liability at worst. Which, it turned out, it was, for my future in that profession, though not for me as a person.
The generation of Trilling and Barzun were my exemplars, and I even had the good fortune to know one of the finest men of that tradition, Ainslee Embree. But such a tradition was of no avail to aid me as I realized my only option for acceptance in the academy was to abandon such ideas for the minutiae of over-specialization and research. Instead, I choose the alternate path of technology, at least professionally.
So, for me, Liz Coleman's words of critique are powerful thoughts I recognize as my own, long abandoned, which raise pangs of regret for what might have been, but was impossible twenty five years ago in my life and situation.
In particular, the death of the voice of the learned generalist has been silenced in the public sphere, abandoned to an academy of the specialized who speak only with each other, with no one to speak to or for the public - a void, as Coleman notes, happily and opportunistically filled by ignorant theocratic ideologues.
I hope her words may be heeded so that others in the next generation will have options I did not.
Apropos the discussion on poverty and connectivity, this Did You Know 3.0 video.
Over at the Bava, Jim Groom has a fascinating post reflecting a talk that Bruce Sterling gave at the recent SXSW:
It seemed to logical to assume that the impoverished would not be connected, whereas the rich would be decadently consuming all the bandwidth.
Well, as he [Sterling] pointed out, it didn’t quite work out that way, connectivity became cheap with cellphones, and he comically noted that “poor folk love their cellphones!” What’s happening is that this increased dependence upon connectivity, rather than being some kind of indicator of privilege, is actually a sign of our increased impoverishment. The fact is that the wealthy are those who can afford not to be connected...
I'd have to say Sterling misses the bullseye on this one. In fact, he has it sort of backwards.
The real issue isn't connectivity per se, but control of access and interruption.
Everyone is being connected, even the poor, by cell phones as they become cheap commodities; but the rich were the first to adopt them in the 80s and early 90s when there were expensive (e.g. the scene from film Wall Street (1984) with Gekko using walkie-talkie-esque cell phone on the beach).
They will not give them up or ever be unconnected.
However. the difference is who can control being unconnected as they choose to: who can control and to what extent they can be unconnected and from whom.
This is not new -- those is power have always known the importance of the power to control access to themselves. The more power one has, the more powerful one's gatekeepers must be. Kings and courts developed vast rituals to control access to power. Corporate royalty do the same. My boss can interrupt me at any time, but I cannot interrupt my boss. My boss goes on vacation, and the only one who can reach them is their boss. But they can reach us anytime. It's hierarchical.
In fact, rather than a simple dichotomy of rich/poor connectivity, more fruitful would be to apply an analysis such as Paul Fussell's Class: A Guide Through the American Status System.
Fussell calls the top of the class system "Top Out of Sight," and they are out of sight because they are able to control access to themselves most thoroughly. The lowest class (e.g. the homeless) is likewise "Bottom Out of Sight," because there is no point in connecting to them as they don't serve any purpose as part of the labor force.
I'll bet that connectivity is stratified along a continuum according to class, where
So Sterling has it right, but backwards: connectivity is not any indicator of poverty, rather impoverishment indicates a lack of power, which means being at the beck and call of the powerful.
And the powerful want their servants to be always connected to serve them.
TechCrunch gives us the goods on that "sassy Lauren, she of the cheap HP" - Ladies, it's all about the glasses. Pace Dorothy Parker, it there anything sexier than an intelligent woman in glasses? No. Thank you Lisa!
Meanwhile - Separated at birth - Shelley Fabares and the unglassed Lauren?
(Embed is pretty funky, so link above is your best bet.)
[UPDATE: On March 31 Twitter changed the URL for post method which breaks this workaround, by adding the path "/timeline" before home. So the workaround to the workaround is to use the form https://twitter.com/timeline/home?page=# instead.]
I got so tired of that new dysfunctional "More" button in the Twitter web interface, I finally made my own menu of pages in Firefox 3 using the Bookmarks Toolbar.
Each page entry points to the old URLs in the form https://twitter.com/home?page=# https://twitter.com/timeline/home?page=# where # is the page number to load.
Just as long as they don't take away that post method, I'm good to go.
I'm sure Ajax would approve the brute force approach.
Seth Godin asked recently, "When newspapers are gone, what will you miss?" I will miss these two things: perusal and closure.
Perusal
Perusal is not the same as surfing. Perusal is bounded and hence focused in a way entirely different from surfing hyperlinks.
A pleasure of a newspaper is to flip the pages back and forth, letting the eye wander from headline to headline, choosing morsels and tasting as little or much as you wish, one section at a time.
Yet this is all focused within the clear bounds of a well-known organization. The choices are varied but limited, and chosen to fit together well; there's no anxiety about what might not be there, because it's all spread out before you.
Partly the pleasure of perusal is the pleasure of working within an established and well adapted convention, a convention with varieties. We have our favorite regular items and sections, a place to start or even an established strategy, but at any given read, new items for that day may grab our attention and draw us in.Closure
Reading the newspaper brings a satisfying sense of closure, a sense of completeness as you finish the last section. This is also partly due to its bounded nature.
When done, you are done, complete, with no nagging knowledge that something has been left out, that there is still an infinitude of other possible pages.
In fact, it reminds me of nothing so much as the pleasure of closure one finds in poetry. Longer than a lyric, more discursive than a short story, less of an odyssey than a film or novel, a good enjoyable newspaper read ends on a note a satisfaction, emphasis on the "satis" - just enough.
And the one thing the hyperlinked web does not provide is satiety.
Joining the national trend, Seattle just became a one newspaper town, a fact about which there was a good deal of nostalgic bemoaning.
Newspapers I like. Cineplexes I do not. I don't think there will be any nostalgia for their sterile, cattle-call environment; obnoxious commercials; raucous, unruly patrons; and usuric food. And Hollywood teen testosterone palaver projected on analog antiquities.
There will be no Nuovo cinema Paradiso for Generican Mall Cinemaplex Twelves and TwentyFours.
Here's a picture I snapped of a recently closed one. Hope it will not be the last.
It's a mile from my house & I'd never been in it. Last week, it just closed one day. The odd black bars over the logo and an empty parking lot were the only sign. About the only thing that could spice up its decrepitude would be an invasion of zombies.
How fitting for a ghostplex.
Links
This work by Randy Thornton is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
