The Line

Here’s a brilliant take on what might not– multitasking. Certainly not necessarily endemic to digi-reality: but nevertheless yet another reason to think about the ramifications of using Web 2.0 with our students.

Here’s a fun interview with the author on the Colbert Report.

Thanks again to Artichoke.

So what do you do when virulent pinkeye keeps you out of school for a day, but you otherwise feel fine?

I took a long walk in the early evening– couple of hours tromping in the mud at a local nature preserve.

I’ve made a conscious decision to blog periodically about more personal adventures. A mentor educator once told me that if you don’t nurture your loves outside of school, your teaching becomes about…well…teaching. A bit like the serpent biting its own tail. Joe puts up “Your Sunday Muse” Youtube music clips (I think I will pickpocket this idea shortly).

As for today, I made a couple of discoveries. One: the seduction of ice.

The marshland borders of the pond where I walked, usually mud two feet deep, were frozen and walkable. Winter is fast becoming a favorite season for me to hike in. Ice allows for exploration that isn’t possible otherwise; and the naked trees give up treasures.

Two: the park people have done a nice bit of trail work over the fall, including a recent infusion of wood chips. I found that it tickled me to be walking on the remnants of what was likely other people’s Christmas trees. Go, recycling symbols of rampant first world commercialism! Cough.

Three: it is very dangerous to read Thoreau while in the midst of the Twitter experiment. He talks of how difficult it is to subdue “a few cubic feet of flesh.” I, reading on a bench at the north end of the pond, reflected then on how I have not yet managed to subdue (in a positive sense) the few cubic feet of my classroom. Twitter may be useful or not, but one way or the other its pedagogical incorporation may be simply extraneous to where my focus needs to be at the moment. We will see.

So what feeds you in your off-duty hours?

Thanks to Artichoke for bringing this concise and thought-provoking article to my attention. Sherry Turkle, professor of social sciences at MIT, says what I was attempting to say in my last meandering protracted well-intentioned post on Twitter: only ten times better. Do read it.

Check out this NYTimes article on hardware developed specifically for the third world. I’m not sure how I feel about this. In much of the stuff I’m reading or have read, including the magnificent Spell of the Sensuous by David Abram, there is a significant concern over– again– the way of being that computer-based technology may lead us to (see my last post). Abram specifically talks about the necessity of honoring oral, indigenous cultures who are integrally connected to their physical world in every aspect. Now, of course, not all third world cultures fit this description. But a lot of them do. I don’t know if giving computers to such cultures is philanthropy… or just plain old narcissism….or, at its worst, racism. From the article: Negroponte’s XO laptop reveals a great deal about his worldview and how he and his colleagues perceive the benighted people they seek to enlighten.

Yikes.

Bill Ferriter, complimenting me most graciously, framed his most recent post around some comments on Twitter I left on his blog (and he also commented here). Rebuttal follows.

First of all, let’s clear up our terms. When we say “connection” between people, I think it’s probably not accurate to represent that as solely “deep” connection. Surely I can agree with you that Twitter ain’t for discussing Schopenhauer. So let’s call what we’re talking about “authentic connection”: that is, something beyond merely utilitarian, but not necessarily soulmates meeting. I think I might argue, however, that even narrowing our terms in this way, Twitter and other Web 2.0 tools are still more limited than they are being portrayed.

Sure, Twitter can work wonders. But I wonder if it works only if you have a strong social sensibility (not to mention language abilities) already present.

For example, I find it fascinating that despite agreeing that Twitter is not for deep connection, the metaphor you have chosen to discuss Twitter is FAMILY– one of the deepest connections there is. Why is that? I would wager that it’s because you already feel connected to people there. You spoke in deservedly glowing terms of Clay’s blog, for example, which you had started to read long before getting on Twitter. You also started peopling your Twitterverse with TLN folks you already knew– as I did I, through Linda at my school.

So (speaking of metaphors) Twitter as a”gateway” may be a misleading metaphor. It implies that Twitter leads us to authentic connection. I wonder if Twitter may be better seen as a tollbooth. It only lets you onto the road if you already have the fare. In this case, the fare would be having the capacity for authentic connection in the first place.

This might go a ways towards explaining why my colleague Joe feels that Twitter is redundant in his life. He’s got the fare already– that is, a deep, admirable capacity for authentic connection– so he has the ability to pick and choose which Web tollbooths are useful for him. In contrast, you’ve gone through the Twitter tollbooth– but again, like Joe, you’ve got the fare, and so you can make the tollbooth work for you. You are a talented communicator, a thoughtful and educated person, and obviously loving (and loved) adult. Your foundations are firmly in place.

So, to bring it back to ground zero, my question seems to be evolving as this: is Web 2.0 equally useful for our students, who are mainly still in the thick of developing their foundations? Do they have the fare?

Here’s another way to put it. For us lucky adult educators, who came of age and learned to connect with others far before the Net existed, Twitter (and other Web 2.0 techs) are indeed just tools. But I wonder if for students, who increasingly do not have this cross-century perspective, these tools have the danger of becoming totalitarians.

On Twitter the other day you mentioned Wes Fryer’s post on false privacy. Although I’m branching out from just the Twitterverse here, I think this is a pivotal example of what might go wrong with an insufficiently critical Web 2.0 approach. Where would such a fundamental misinterpretation of the nature of the Internet come from in our students? I would argue that it springs from the nature of the Internet itself. Without a concerted effort to the contrary, we are intuitively convinced that on the Net we are acting in private– alone. This has been fairly well documented among researchers, and I myself have succumbed dramatically to this falsehood at times.

But perhaps the idea is so pervasive because it isn’t actually a falsehood at all. Aren’t we actually alone on the Net, no matter how many followers we have on Twitter?

You’ll see that I’m going at this differently than Michael Bugeja at the Economist debate. He’s concerned that Web 2.0 is fundamentally selfish in nature. I’m not interested in Bugeja’s moral condemnation here. But I do have concern about a way of being via Web 2.0 that is vastly different than anything else we’ve experienced before. I can sum up this new way of being by asking this: does a webcam count for a kiss, as your niece beautifully shows us? (My son is three too, by the way.)

So can we really teach kids to authentically connect through a medium which causes us to conceive of ourselves fundamentally as alone? Isn’t this an inescapable contradiction in terms?

And what will happen, therefore, if we– and they– continue to further integrate our human communication with that of Web 2.0?

You’ll note that I’m not suggesting that our students will give up all face to face interaction and transmogrify into cyborgs, a straw man argument if I ever heard one. And I’m no Luddite, as this very blog attests.

What I am suggesting is that even a little of the Net, tossed into the bubbling pot of our still-cooking kids, seems to be like cayenne– or mercury. Without substantial reflection, perspective, maturity and context, it can go a very, very long way– and in a way that I am coming to believe IS NOT ANALOGOUS to our experience of the Net as cross-century adults. (Bill, I have actually heard students say “LOL”– instead of laughing.)

But Bill, you’ve clearly had more experience with the intersection of Web 2.0 tools and the young developing minds in a classroom. Do you– or anyone reading this– see some, or all, or none, of what I see?

On NPR this morning: Guy Raz reports on how one adjective can define our future military commitment to Iraq. Not Congress. Not we, the people. An adjective.

“The U.S. Congress has passed three laws that prohibit any U.S. funding for permanent U.S. military installations in Iraq. But according to Kurt Campbell — a top Pentagon official during the 1990s and now the head of the Center for a New American Security — there are also ways around that. “While no one will say anything about permanent bases, [there are] lots of ways to create the potential for bases to be in Iraq for decades to come,” he says. White House and Pentagon lawyers may opt to use adjectives like “enduring” or “continuing” instead of the word “permanent” when they announce the final agreement. And to Campbell, the agreement is an attempt, “in the last days of the Bush administration, to hand a new administration a done deal.”

Listen to the whole thing here.

Check out this story on sleep from NPR. Had to post this– I’ve been struggling with this all year. Is it not a part of underground teacher culture to assume you (or someone else) is doing their job if they’re on five hours’ sleep or less? How true is this? Maybe we’re all just– well– dumb.

My favorite line on how to get more sleep: set up quality time “with a bed partner.” My amazing husband notwithstanding, this partner for me is usually the saliva-soaked teddy bear my toddler son has left on the pillow.

I got on Twitter this weekend. Wild stuff. Check out this nice synopsis in Newsweek for how it works. Bill Ferriter over at The Tempered Radical was also playing around at the same time I was, and went googly-eyed (justifiably) for how such a simple Web 2.0 tool holds such possibilities, particularly for educators and their students.

I have to tell you, though: although I am fascinated, I am not yet sold. Twitter, like any technology, is not value-neutral: it requires buy-in to certain ways of thinking about the world, and I am still figuring out just what those are for Twitter specifically.

Can you create a meaningful relationship with another in typed bytes of 160 characters? Does Twitter only yield value with a constant presence on-line? How much further does Twitter divorce us from our fundamental physical sense of self, never mind our local communities and environment? Is it always good to “go global”? And of course there’s the Language Arts teacher in me, who wonders very much (amongst other things) at the linguistic implications of a technology that does not allow revision– only deleting. (Hm!)

The Economist is running a high-quality debate on some of these issues (the pro speaker is, interestingly, on Twitter) …but for my own information, I’ve decided to give Twitter a month. I’ll make some very detailed quantitative and qualitative observations, and post my conclusions at the end of February.

Stay tuned.

This topic came out sideways at Dy/Dan recently and the linguist in me got interested. For fun– what do you call your students and why? Reflect on it. Why have you made that verbal decision, and what does it mean (if anything)? Is it personally meaningful, slang, regional dialect, something your mentor called his/her students, what your mom called you?

When the last living thing
Has died on account of us,
How poetical it would be
If Earth could say,
In a voice floating up
Perhaps
From the floor
Of the Grand Canyon,
“It is done.
People did not like it here.”

And this, I realize,  is a very simple way to say what it’s really about in teaching, for me. I hope to help my kids like it here.