Not a Battlefield

Education is not a battlefield. It is not a war on ignorance, or a war on anything, for that matter. When we use metaphors that suggest otherwise, we undermine the process of learning, which, at heart, is what the educational project should be about. Earlier this week, I posted a link to an op-ed piece by Michelle Rhee, in which she urges that the US take educational reform as seriously as it takes Olympic competition () By no means do I disagree that educational reform should be taken seriously. But the more I've thought about her piece over the course of the week, the less convincing I find it, and the reason that I'm experiencing cognitive dissonance over it comes down to the way she conflates "seriousness" with "competitiveness," as if learning we quite naturally a global arms race that we, as a nation, no longer appear to be winning. This leads me to two questions. 1) Have we as a society really become so immersed in the metaphors of warfare that we can't even take the subject seriously without it being framed in terms of conflict? 2) Where does the use of war as metaphor crop up in education to begin with? I'll focus on the second question here by summing up some of my observations, and at this point I should probably explain that I am resurrecting this blog as a space to sort of think aloud about the processes of learning and education. I'm doing this now because I'm in the probably fairly rare position of having: 1 child at home, 2 children in grade school, 1 child in middle school, 1 child in what used to be called junior high, 1 child in high school, and a semester where I am teaching students from first-year undergraduates to graduating seniors. So I will be afforded an almost panoramic view of the American educational system. One of the staples of western thought is that humans are innately curious and interested in learning from birth. And if I remember Aristotle correctly, it is primarily learning via imitation. I mention this for two reasons. The first is that I wonder how, if learning is an innate pleasure we reach the point where our educational process seems to be in perennial crisis; if everybody is wired to learn, shouldn't learning be a relatively uncomplicated process? Second, if imitation is one of the primary ways we learn, than our actions and attitudes in the classroom, including the metaphors we use to describe the educational process itself are likely to be picked up by the learners we work with every day. Carl Jung is quoted as saying "what we resist persists." If we view education not as fulfilling an innate need and desire for learning, but rather as a war on ignorance, we have defined the process in terms of a massive resistance. What will persist? Ignorance. When I think back to the education classes I took as a secondary education minor, what I most remember is that classroom discipline was the most frequently addressed topic. I remember thinking at the time that we often find what we are seeking, and that when I began teaching, if I looked for responsible, developing human beings I would find them, and if I looked for monsters and delinquents I would find them. During my semester of student teaching, we were required to attend a weekly seminar during which time we were supposed to bring all the troubles we had encountered during the week to offer on the altar of the educational gurus leading the seminar, so they could tell us how to regain our classroom authority. And so I would spend three hours on a Wednesday night listening to how so-and-so set someone's hair on fire in class, or how frightening it was to have to break up a fist-fight in the middle of a math lesson. I was speechless for the entire semester. How could I speak up in front of the class and reveal that the two problems I encountered were that my students were frankly, kind of boring me, and that the principal was a bit snarky when I wore a Shakespeare festival t-shirt to class to kick off our unit on Romeo and Juliet? The fact is, the belief that students are discipline problems waiting to happen, potential sociopaths resisting knowledge at every step, is drilled into us from day one. The idea is so ingrained that when I try to point out the possibility of learning as a more cooperative experience, I'm often countered with either hostility or incredulity. I mention that in the seventeen years I've been in the classroom I have never encountered a single disruptive student, and the response I typically get it, "well, look at you," as if my mass somehow gives me magical powers to ward off behavior that would otherwise show itself. My point is that when we talk about learning solely in terms of discipline problems and classroom authority, or even the slightly more innocuous sounding but related problems like diminishing attention span, etc., we are inadvertently sending the message that learning is an unpleasant chore that students must be forced to do against their wills. Compare this with the other discourse, that of learning as an innately pleasurable act. Which wolf win? The wolf that we feed.

Haunted by Technology

Here is a confession. I hit my head all the time. Now, some of you may be thinking that this explains things! But I'm actually quite serious. It's like I tend to think my height just stops at eye level, somehow, and then blammo--I crack my head on something. In fact, once during a tech rehearsal I followed a fellow actor, who I had always assumed was taller than I was, through a steel doorway. He made it through without ducking, and I ended up on the ground with an egg on my head.

I have a similar feeling when I am interacting with computer technology, particularly with a mobile device--like the rest of my body disappears and I am just my eyes and my hands. I wonder if this is a common feeling; given concerns I've heard expressed by others in various yoga and movement classes I've attended over the years, I'd wager that our body awareness, collectively, is fairly non-existent throughout most of our daily lives. By body awareness I don't mean consciousness in the sense of shame or judgmental attitudes towards our own bodies, but a connectedness to how our bodies are actually occupying physical space.

The question of how we occupy physical space seems to be the burning question of the last year. And more particularly, how does our use of social media contribute to our occupation of various spaces? What common threads might exist between phenomena like geocaching and the social justice gatherings happening across the US and in scattered locations abroad, beyond the use of GPS technology? How do these forms relate to earlier cultural memes of youthful unrest, for example, Happenings and performance art? What similar strategies are employed? What ideological differences might arise if we were to look closely at the performative practices of today's occupiers and last generation's performance artists, especially as they relate to the body as a medium of expression? To what extent are media descriptions of this expression of today's zeitgeist haunted by the ghosts of earlier movements, and does the use of mobile technology by occupiers heighten or diminish feelings of cultural deja vu?

"Parallax," A Mind-Bending Game Where You Leap Between Parallel Worlds

"Parallax," A Mind-Bending Game Where You Leap Between Parallel Worlds:

I aged out of playing modern video games way back when GoldenEye was popular and I couldn't keep the mazelike game environment straight in my head. So I'd be pretty much screwed if I attempted to play Parallax, an "interdimensional puzzle platformer" that superimposes two 3-D mazes on top of each other and forces you to phase-shift between them in order to find your way out. (That sizzling sound you hear is my brain melting.)

With a concept that's difficult to explain, designing it was even harder.

Parallax's gameplay is simple: Move your first-person avatar from point A to point B across a series of suspended paths and platforms. The twist is that your route is studded with circular portals that connect to a parallel universe with another obstacle course of paths and platforms, all occupying the same space. The only way to get from point A to point B is to exploit these portals, which connect both universes in a kind of meta-maze. Oh, and sometimes the paths, platforms, and portals are all moving, so the ways that physical space intersects with itself becomes difficult to predict. (Still sizzling? Yep.)

For a game whose concept is that difficult to explain, designing it was even harder. How do you present the player with two separate-but-superimposed gameworlds in a way that gives them a shred of hope of solving the puzzles? Creators Zi Ye and Jesse Burstyn found a simple answer: Make one world white, and the other black. Parallax's ultra-monochrome visual palette elegantly distinguishes between the mirror worlds while providing a stark, simple interface for solving the puzzles. (No need for distracting photorealistic ornamentation on walls or floors--Parallax is already demanding enough from your frontal cortex as is.) Ye and Burstyn are hoping to release Parallax by the end of the year for Mac and PC.

[Via Ars Technica]

After Trying To "Kill Math," An Ex-Apple Designer Aims To Kill Reading

After Trying To "Kill Math," An Ex-Apple Designer Aims To Kill Reading:

If you thought I was hard on Microsoft's "Future of Productivity" video, read interface designer Bret Victor's take on it (money quote: "Are we going to accept an Interface Of The Future that's less expressive than a sandwich?"). Victor, a former designer at Apple, is a guy who thinks big about UIs and builds working prototypes of his ideas--like his "Kill Math" project, which replaces abstruse differential equations with intuitive interactive visualizations. His latest creation, called Tangle, is an attempt to redesign the "interface" commonly known as the written word--and reinvent the experience of reading text online.

[A screenshot of a reactive document: When you drag the cursor on the chart at the bottom, all the figures change. The math has been programmed into the interaction, so that all of these formulas are alive. Click to view interactive version.]

"Imagine if every claim you read came with an explorable analysis."

Victor calls his concept "reactive documents," and the basic idea is that digital text should leverage the inherent interactivity of the web--turning written arguments into "apps" that the reader can manipulate and test, instead of just consume. But instead of doing this with fancy infographics or chrome, Victor uses Javascript to embed interactivity into plain-text sentences, phrases, even individual words. In his prototype "Ten Brighter Ideas", Victor turns 10 written arguments for energy conservation into "explorable explanations." For example, mousing over an assertion about "turning off the lights" launches a written premise: "Suppose 20% of US households always turned off lights in unoccupied rooms." The statistic "20%" looks like a normal hyperlink, but clicking it invokes a tiny sparkline-like slider that the reader can move back and forth, increasing or decreasing the numerical value--which then changes every other written assertion following from that premise, live and interactively.

The appeal of Victor's system is hard to explain--it makes much more sense if you just try it out--but the thinking behind it is visionary. "Imagine a world where we expect every claim to be accompanied by an explorable analysis, and every statistic to be linked to a primary source," he writes. With "reactive documents," critical reading--and by extension, critical thinking--becomes an interactive process. We don't just read a document; we can also use it, exploring the limits of and connections between ideas by physically manipulating the properties of the information behind them.

And since the whole point of fusing interaction design, programming, and writing in this way is to make communication more transparent, Victor created the open-source Javascript library called Tangle so that anybody (well, anybody with basic coding knowledge) can create or tweak their own "reactive documents." And making or reading one doesn't have anything to do with pretty fonts, fancy animations, or proprietary algorithms. In Victor's vision, the millennia-old "interface" of the written word remains unchanged. It's simply enhanced--because "digital documents aren't subject to the constraints of paper."

Will the future of writing and reading online be forged by writer/programmers and reader/users inspired by visions like Victor's? I'm not sure, but after seeing "reactive documents" in action, I'm already wishing that every op-ed writer and journalist at the New York Times would start using Tangle. Hey, they've got an R&D lab over there--maybe they should think about collaborating with Victor before he wins a MacArthur genius grant.

The New “I” In Journalism

Another look at objectivity/subjectivity and personal pronouns in blogs and other news articles:

The New “I” In Journalism:

Is integration of the personal narrative helpful or harmful in reporting?

A Video Series Teaching Web Design To Anyone Who's Afraid Of Code

A Video Series Teaching Web Design To Anyone Who's Afraid Of Code: Anyone who has ever tried to build a website for the first time knows that awful feeling when confronted with lines of HTML, CSS, and PHP, languages as foreign as any known to man. Well, never fear. Two graphic designers have begun releasing a series of video tutorials called "[url=http://www.dontfeartheinternet.com/]Don't Fear the Internet[/url]" that explains how to perform the basics of web design without having to become an actual web designer.

The videos, created by [url=http://jessicahische.is/awesome/]Jessica Hische[/url] (also the designer behind the “[url=http://www.fastcodesign.com/1663033/infographic-designers-should-you-work-for-free]Should I Work for Free[/url]” flowchart and [url=http://www.dailydropcap.com/]Daily Drop Cap[/url]) with her boyfriend [url=http://strangenative.com/]Russ Maschmeyer[/url], aren’t intended to be comprehensive guides. Instead, the process reflects a refreshing, stitched-together DIY sensibility. The two of them designed the title cards and interstitials in Illustrator (typeset in Brandon Grotesque by [url=http://www.hvdfonts.com/]Hannes von Döhren[/url]), cut and pasted the audio using GarageBand, and slapped it all together in iMovie.

[video]http://service.twistage.com/plugins/player.swf?v=03ea13bc09c5e[/video]

But the real “fear removal” work is done by analogy, and specifically, how coding is like food. In the video above, Hische calls HTML “hamburger text markup language,” and then uses the analogy of a hamburger to illustrate how HTML tags actually work--i.e., the opening and closing tags are like the beginning and ending of lunch hour. “We like metaphors in general,” Maschmeyer told Co.Design. “Code can be scary. Food is comforting. We think it balances well.” And they keep it loose, peppering the script with deliberately cheesy lines and pictures of cats--the idea is that if they learned how to do it and they seem to be having fun with it, how hard can it be?

The series contains six videos so far--each one takes about 2-3 weeks to make from start to finish--and more are on the way. But even though serious developers won’t find much in here that they don’t already know, Maschmeyer says the real audience is for people like he and Hische used to be--creative types looking for real-world analogies and common language to explain how to design online.

See all the videos [url=http://www.dontfeartheinternet.com/]here[/url]. Please note that the site does not allow embedding because the authors want the videos seen in their original context.

Geek Show! Neil Gaiman, Amanda Palmer Hit the Road

Geek Show! Neil Gaiman, Amanda Palmer Hit the Road: Newlyweds Neil Gaiman and Amanda Palmer are taking their love on the road. The author and Dresden Dolls singer will be touring the West Coast starting in October.