Mo's Missives

UFOs Questions

You will never know how much I want to believe that the world is so much bigger than the ego of man. And, I know, people will say they have evidence, delivered by his human messengers, that infinite God would limit Self so completely as touch the immediately infinitesimal mind of man. I can’t believe that we are so crazy to think of Spirit—God—Universe with such a limited sense of our self-centeredness. Are we crazy? Take a hint: right now many thinkers are accepting the cosmological idea that the universe has eleven (11) dimensions, and if that is not enough, we have a black hole in the center of our galaxy!  When we look at the visible stars, we are pretty sure that there are as many galaxies, each holding up to a hundred trillion stars. Hello … These are pointing to something bigger than us. 

Enough of my rant and angst. Yesterday, a student asked me to watch this UFO video (I had mentioned in class that I used to collect articles when I was in my teens). When I got home and watched the emailed  video, I did so with mild curiosity.

I didn’t hope for much. There are many seekers of something new who feel the constraints of society that they fall in line—and we think we are such free thinkers— and these seekers comb through different threads of information for any indication of something beyond.  This UFO trail was an old thread for me. There were a couple of frames in the video that had me wondering if they were CGI. I don’t know. I would have to get more evidence from established analysts with proven track records. All the Blue Books, von Danikens, Cryptic sightings, and Enquirers had diminished SETI and aligned all inquiries into the topic as fringe.   It would increase my comfort level before investing more emotion and attachment to the idea of it being true. I am not ready to claim the idea of the video as proof without more proof.  

The search for evidence is what moves me more than anything (admittedly now in avenues that don’t require a lot of physical exertion). Damm  … Does that mean age acts as a braking effect to prevent the whole cultural system from breaking down? It only allows a small number of individuals to possess knowledge of how things work and have the energy to pursue them? I could be dangerous if I were younger effect? That being younger is when the answer was more important than life? That I would raise my hand and stick out my thumb to the next UFO  if it would help answer the question that the world was bigger.  It is amazing that the older you get, the more you hold on to life even as the body starts to grow tired. I guess that is why I am so enthralled with technological advances now.

 

Now, despite the tiredness in my body, I can explore all kinds and times of worlds created by human minds with infinite permutations. As the four dimensional creatures we truly are, not the three we see, we change as we move through time. We change our ideas, our values, our spirits despite societal boundaries. This is the only triumph I have found in escaping the sameness imposed on us by us. It thrills me. I can gain back some of the youthful excitement. Oooh, it feels good… . but it is hard to keep it going without new infusions of energy.

When I opened that emailed video, I did not have much hope, but I loved that there was a possibility and a new seeker. What does give me more hope is that there are still young questioning minds out there that have a possibility of escaping to a new thing. Something that may be based on something more than tooth and claw as they have so many new knowledge resources and links being created in a media shared by so many others, it’s scary and exciting. It gives me energy. My thumb is out again.

Teachers and the Internet

Sitting in front of my TV, I am watching CNN, realizing that they fully comprehend how people want the news these days. CNN has blogs that viewers can read and respond to with their own ideas. CNN is on Face Book and twitter. Viewers can vote by text to let CNN know what story they would like to see next. CNN has podcasts, video conferencing, interactive TV menus, live feeds, I-reporters, mobile connections, a customizable web site, surveys, and an Second Life office.  As a main stream network, CNN displays the standards for media today. In seeing the great lengths that main stream media has gone to in engaging the social internet, what impact do these standards have on us as teachers, students, and consumers? What does it say about teachers’ delivery systems?

Students grew up in the presence of current media standards. Incredibly, it has only been thirty-five years ago since Direct TV was available (Do you hear that? Only thirty-five years ago? When did I get to be so old?).  With most students born in the early nineties, it highlights how fast things are changing (Remember when time moved so slow?). It was during the early nineties that the internet starting getting its public face. Indeed, the social internet has grown up with our students.  It is safe to say that many current students have never been without the internet. Is it any wonder that more traditional methods of teaching do not engage students? As teachers, we have got to change to meet the new expectations of students. We must learn the new social media.

As example, the hard copy repositories of knowledge deemed worthwhile that we call libraries are ignored by students except to use as gateways to the internet (student computers). Surrounded by books all nicely categorized, the students look for information on the computer, not on the shelves next to them.  The internet is their natural playground, informational library, and social center. The internet is their first go-to.  It is where they go to find the answers. Truthfully, not all students automatically go to the internet, but I would venture to guess that if they don’t, it is because the students were from a technologically deprived background. (Yes, Virginia, There is a digital divide, but that becomes a whole other harangue).

With an infinite bank of knowledge available to students, the only thing that we can really do is guide them in their journey of discovery. To do this, we have to help establish the standards of good information retrieval for students and for ourselves.  This is new territory here (Where are the guideposts?). This uncertainty is because the internet is a new thing without much categorization.  Just think, the internet is only twenty years here, barely enough time to get a good glimpse of how it might turn out, and for us to look at it  to decide how it should be put together.   This means we have to school ourselves, and we cannot rely on traditional methods.  We have to go to it. We have to experience the internet environment and figure out how to safely move around in it.

So many times we focus on the potential hazards (worms, viruses, identity theft, predators, and fraud) that can be found in any discovery path, trying to sell students the idea that the lessons with which we are comfortable are the only ones to use in learning; we are safe in our comfortable rooms and view the internet as a passing phase.  We must know that not to engage students in their environment is based, perhaps, on fear. (Just as your old-school parents said, “Would it hurt you to try?”) Why should we fear with our knowledge of problem solution learned through schools of education and hard knocks?  There are methods to avoid malicious programs and to try and weed out content farms and inappropriate material in internet searches. However, that means that teachers must add a new lesson plan to their current set of core lessons, and teachers must learn enough to just stay just ahead of their students (It is unfortunate that  the internet is an evolving thing. We will always be learning, always practicing our craft).

Of course, we can insist that students need that basic grounding in tradition and cannon. As it stands right now, if they are more interested in engaging with their social media connections, we say it’s too distracting. It takes away from the lessons that we are charged to give them.  We need to adapt. After all, we have changed our delivery system before from blackboards to computer screens. Why not add students’ environment to the lesson? True, it will mean venturing into an area where we do not feel all that comfortable or knowledgeable. Raising questions such as how can we teach them when our expertise might come into question, when a student might be better versed than us in the subject matter? It feels too insecure. However, while the delivery system must change, how that material is handled in learning argument and analysis has not.

It is simple. The internet is a new thing based on something old. It still suffers from all the chronic conditions of humanity, including compassion and greed. Just as with most explorations that succeed, business has joined full force with the internet, seeking the best locations to spread their commercial webs. In business, it is a matter of location, location,  and location. Like hunters, businessmen are staking out the game trails where people travel, casting commercial nets to catch the most money. Rather than seeing business as predators, we should thank god for their enterprise in clearing pathways and helping to define what communities want. What they discover helps define what people want of the internet.  It helps to delineate the good neighborhoods from the bad neighborhoods. It makes it easier for like to find like and create communities complete with supporters and dissenters. They are taming the wilderness; and with their penchant of keeping customers, they will smooth the rough patches so that commerce will flow smoothly.

With the building of communities, the more established residents will want their offspring taught to survive within their community to help it grow, to sustain the social energy that makes it vital. This is the world that students are moving into, and if we wish to remain as teachers, this is the world that we must learn. Sure, we can say that this is going to take time, that we have room to adjust and get around to it. We can say those things as surely as we can take that attitude with America’s debt problem or the world’s climate change problem… . We have time. Really? Things are changing, and I bet it won’t even take one more generation before teaching has completely changed—web based, cloud based. Oh wait! It’s already happening… . Hybrids, Content Management Systems enhanced learning, Second Life.  Darn, out of time. What are we waiting for?

Teaching Audience

Who is the audience?

As composition teachers, we  teach our students audience. How to identify your audience. What are their assumptions that you can use to convince them? How do you focus your writing to that audience?  Teaching audience is teaching me to pay attention in ways that I haven’t.

When I got to work this morning, I entered the keyed parking lot to find a space that was close to the building. As I swung around the circle in my car, I thought on how the best parking places were already taken. OMG! Is this playing to the audience, showing the job’s importance is such that the day cannot be started too early? Does that fact that I was early enough to get a space show me in a positive light—with good ethos? (Of course, I’m ignoring the fact that we just might be lazy.)

Keeping to the idea of audience, when we get in front of a classroom, to which audience do we play? Our higher ups? Showing that we are on time, we are in front of our students, we are lecturing, and we are grading? Do we play to other teachers? Showing our rigidity to the canon of teaching, our strictness in grading grammar, our students’ output in volumes of writing, and our dedication to spending hours in developing lesson plans and grading? As teachers, what audience should we focus on?

The students, of course, but we spend so much time at the front of the room giving our credentials to the students to emphasize the value that they are paying for. How much time do we actually spend teaching? Anything can be pitched to a specified audience. How many of us take the time to develop materials that will appeal more to the students than the administration or other teachers? I am not saying that this is wrong. We must keep the job, and we must gain the respect of our community, but I want to teach because I want to learn. Teaching is my excuse for learning new things.

In thinking about my audience, a flash of things, devices come to mind:

  • The one thing that all students are looking for is themselves. Just having come into adulthood, they are trying to figure out where they fit into society without the restraints of having it chosen for them. They want to know that the position in society where they are headed is their choice, not that of others. Many of them, not having much in the way of life experiences, do not know how to express what they want or don’t want; therefore, I thought about using images from the web to allow them to create an image of who they are as they see themselves. Programs such as Glogster or Word could be used. Once they create a self portrait, have them create a portrait of how their parents see them, and a portrait of how their friends see them. I would then ask them to explain the differences between the images and what remains true in them. What remains true should be a true reflection of their natural leanings.
  • I could then have them write an application letter to their dream job. Is the letter geared to getting the job, or is it a statement of what they want from the job?  What is their ideal job and why. The next exercise would present three examples of application letters (gained from other class sections). Students must chose who they would or would not hire for an executive position in their own company and who they would not. For what positions would they hire the other applicants?
  • I would have students create a blog. In reading other blogs, they would write about what attracts them to that blog and what does not. Reflecting on why those things attract them, they would have to apply it to their own blog. Next question for them would be whom do they wish to attract and why? After reading blogs of those people they wish to attract, they would again apply it to their own blog. Through doing this, I can show how the media uses the same devices to target specific audiences.
  • Another way to go, would be to have them use an aggregator to bring articles of interest to them so that they can blog on them. Additionally, they can be shown how to market their blog to gain responses/feedback.
  • What can I do for citations? A contest of some type? Make a game where they cannot move forward unless they identify certain characteristics needed for the citation and show it? Individual competitions or group? Jeopardy? Timed group competitions? What would be the prize?  What other detested items could I apply this to? Grammar? Sentence Structure? (Create a compound sentence with a dependent clause, then, reduce it down to one?)

These are just a few thoughts that I didn’t want to lose before I started my next task.

 

 

Isabel Behncke: Evolution’s gift of play, from bonobo apes to humans (by TEDtalksDirector)

After saying that humans were animals in the last post, I hardly could resist posting this video immediately after. It also shows what elements are already in the web landscape: play and sex. Behncke assures us that this leads to diversity and tolerance. Wait a minute. I think I got it wrong. It was a matriarchal society that leads to those qualities. Ladies, you better man your websites.

Mother Ships, the App World and a Sense of What's to Come - ReadWriteCloud

Building the Nervous System

In February, I presented an informational wiki: Web2Teaching Resources at the Online Lifeline Conference. At the start, I drew an analogy of slime mold engulfing of food particles to the web coalescing around social connection hubs that provide its energy. It is the human energy that we invest in the web that powers and changes the web.

I find it funny that when we talk about alternative energy sources that we never mention the energy source that is building its own nervous system as it slowly and then rapidly makes connections between individual nerves cells. This energy source is human consciousness. Just as we have explored, colonized, and created our communities in the physical world (where like finds like or agrees to co-habitate peacefully or not), we are building communities in cyberspace. Of course despite it being a new thing, a imagined world, it will still have to follow human laws, which means it will no longer be a pure thing. It must be commercialized as that is the engine that transfers the energy to nerve hub to nerve hub. 

Apparently, enough of the smaller connections have been made because “Mother Ships” shows how the central nervous system is forming. Ooh! It’s almost like watching an infant being born—which creates the important question. What will it grow into? I hear people afraid that this means artificial intelligence. That it will grow beyond us and make us obsolete. That it will be inhuman and not care for us, push us aside. Of course, we worry about this as we do that very thing to whatever gets in our way. We are animals after all. How else can anything act but like we do. Therefore, it seems that the fear is not that it will be different than us, but that it will be too like us.

It will be us. Each one of us that connects to the internet, in any way, is a nerve cell, an individual host of information uniquely combined. Oh, I hear the rumblings! No, we will not dissolve into a unimind. We can’t even if we wanted. There will still be differences that push against each other. We will all have a stake in establishing our own individuality. Just as we are individuals in the real world that are protected or subsumed into greater and greater communities, we will create the same in the cyber world even down to our ghettos and palaces. A new thing will become an old thing after all. 

Lessons Learned

Someone whose husband passed away within the last year asked me how long I was married to mine before he died. “Twenty-one years,” I pride fully stated. It puzzled me that I had a sense of pride of having a relationship that long. Was I prideful because he had cerebral palsy and I stayed with him? That I could see the person despite the handicap? Certainly on some level, I feel this; however, I learned so much from him and the relationship that the learning kept me around. I gained several lifetimes of lessons from the marriage, and I know that I have to examine these lessons from time to time to reinforce the learning by passing them on to others.

Some might say that I am not happy with my current relationship (sneaking up on five years) because I am looking backwards. I am not looking backwards. I am looking forward to growing and learning more as I incorporate the past with the present. As a whole person, why would you not express all your selves? As Shrek so profoundly said, “I’ve got layers like an onion.” We all have layers, and it takes all of the individual layers to make the whole.

Web Dreams

I have a small dream. My dream is to be a web power user; actually, I may be more ambitious than that: a web hub. Imagine being at an information center of a new world.  The personal discoveries I could make.  All the interests I have dipped into a flowing stream that can grow and change.

Spending much of my youth looking at the stars, knowing the possibility of countless new worlds spanning across a universe so much bigger than anything I could imagine, I wanted to see what the possibilities were, only to find myself earthbound.  Unable to explore the outer worlds, I discovered the inner worlds of imagination and stories. Hence, the reason I went into English. I discovered how the written word can mold human worlds, and I wanted to give students a leg up  in understanding the world around them.

I know. How noble and altruistic of me. It is not that at all. Maybe a small bit… . No, not really. What it really is that students teach me new things! I love to learn new things. It is my way of discovering new worlds, to seeing what no one has seen before because every individual, every group, every different human combination invents a different world.  People create so many new permutations of a standard story that it fascinates me. I learn different ways of seeing the world. Something new is here, and  this newest variable really draws me. 

The cloud—web—internet or any other possible term denoting this latest social mechanism is growing, evolving into what none of us can anticipate. The aliens that I wanted to see and discover are us! Can you understand my excitement at watching how we are changing? It is like looking at a transparent womb as a child develops, speculating on whether it will be a normal child or something more—new. It is clear that I am optimistic about the birth because I suspect all the possibilities awaiting the child’s discovery and, vicariously, mine .  Oh … I am revealed as selfish. I am. However, this is my world, and I am allowed… . I’m still excited.

There are some many things that catch my interest on the web that I feel like I have to save them, share them, own them in some way, hence, this blog. It forms a declaration of what I find of interest, what amuses me, and what just plain amazes me. I saw this video posting of Jake Shimabukuro and was blown away. The last memory I have of ukele playing was of Burl Ives and Tiny Tim—God rest their souls. However, watching Jake play the ukulele as if it were a spanish guitar is amazing. Just listen to his rock ukulele: blowmeaway!

David Brooks: The Social Animal

I have been guilty of placing the rational in a superior position to the emotional. What he says makes sense. Apparently, I am one of the “arrested” developers in social skills. It is not, however, too late to change.