The Marvel of a Hand-Held Gadget

With the iPad introduced this week, I'm urged to publish about a strong competitor in the hand-held device market.

I'm in love with my alternative. Having an amazing ability to store and index information, it is not only user-friendly for reading but also great at catching my thoughts for when I want to jot and save short short notes, questions, musings and other marginalia. It also will store nicely small add-ins like sticky notes. I've tabbed the most commonly used information for future reference. One feature I really like is random access; I can bring up any topic, literally at my fingertips.

Green devices like this are all the rage these days. It's not great in the dark, but it's reading surface actually uses available light or solar to make text and visuals pop out in full color, so it never needs to be recharged. There are no cords to get tangled or that need to be toted about with it.

My model comes in a durable shell and I've found (by accident) it can withstand dropping from heights from as great at ten feet or more without damage to its core data. In fact, I think the data is likely to last for years and years . The information stays organized and never requires defragging.

Snazzy skins are available from the manufacturer, or you can make your own to personalize and for some added protection and style. Currently there are no known viruses and only some extremely rare worms that trouble the hardware, so I'm don't waste money on expensive security subscriptions.

These gadgets come in so many versions. There's one for just about every need. And the omnivore can also find ones that are have encyclopedic data. While such versions are bundled with a variety of data, most come customized to fulfill a particular need, so you needn't carry along a bunch of important data that you don't need.

Perhaps the greatest thing compared to similar data technologies is the price. I like it so much I've got shelves of them. Yes, there's nothing like a good book.

Image:  "The Sun in My Hand 1." By Whatever. 29 Jan. 2009. Flickr.  Used by permission via Creative Commons License: BY, NC, SA.

Ready to Explore

One of my longtime laments is that most film documentaries are too long for classroom use. Fifteen minutes is a maximum usefulness of a video that I'm trying to fit into a 40 minute period, and I tend to get excited by a good 30-minute film. So when introduced to Explore with a variety of high-quality films designed "to champion the selfless acts of others, " I was pleased to find varying lengths of clips from 2 minutes to 48.

These films, found at Explore.org, are developed under the leadership of Charles Annenberg Weingarten with the support of the Annenberg Foundation. I have long been a fan of Anneberg Media's American Passages, Literary Visions, and Voices and Visions online features for Americna literature at Learner.org.

My first impression of the site's concept--films deal with particular individuals in specific nonprofit pursuits around the globe--was that this site was going to be too esoteric for classroom use, but I was mistaken. Although each short film does feature an individual, this approach presents an engaging human element to the topic. The focus is not on the individual so much as the individual's passion. His or her passion sheds light on some cultural, political, and ecological aspect of our world.

The documentaries are arranged by geographical region. As a teacher of world literatures I am especially drawn to the 2-to-8-minute short features that enrich my students' study of a culture. They can be viewed from the site or streamed through a class website or wiki and launch to a full screen view. Unfortunately, they cannot be downloaded for more remote use, and I don't see any mention of DVD options.

Several of documentaries have printed transcripts of the interviews with experts that can be downloaded and there are online viewable files of dramatic and instructive scenes from the documentaries.

I use shorts on Indian Dance with Bhagavad Gita, on Blue Mosque with poetry of Rumi, and Caligraphy Master with Chinese Philosophers. And I'm signed up to get updates when new films are added. On my wish list: Mexico, Norway, Greece, Iraq, Japan, Peru.

Loading Content . . . Reflection Optional

What Nicholas Carr is afraid that what happened to time will happen to knowledge. In his July/August Atlantic Monthly essay "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" he points to how before the clock, time had a human element. We told time by means of sun and moon, seasons and harvest, births and deaths, and in general natural and human events. He points out that Socrates, decried the writing down of ideas, said without the contemplation of discourse, wisdom would be lost. Partially true, but look at what we gain by storing the accumulated wealth of words.

Carr notes that the Internet is mostly designed to browse, not to read, and that our very ability or desire to read long texts, to become immersed in say the world of a novel is fading with each click of the mouse. More troubling, while at the same time somewhat amusing, is Carr's mention of Google's stated mission "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful." It seeks to create a search engine that "understands exactly what you mean and gives you back exactly what you want."

Futurists have predicted that nanochips encyclopedic volumes of information will someday connected to our brains. The assumption is that we'll all be better off with every bit of information. What I find worthy of concern is Google's Sergey Brin and Larry Page's belief that "certainly if you had all the world's information directly attached to your brain, or an artificial brain that was smarter than your brain, you'd be better off." Carr notes:

In Google's world, the world we enter when we go online, there's little place
for the fuzziness of contemplation. Ambiguity is not an opening for
insight but a bug to be fixed.

Information is a resource, but it's not knowledge and it's not intelligent, artificial or otherwise. So much meaning can come, from ambiguity, fuzziness, subtlety, and nuance, recollected with clarity. As a reader and teacher of literary texts, whether fiction or non, I believe the most rewarding parts come from the spaces where all the dots don't line up, where there is room for multiple interpretation and that kind of knowing that can only survive in a human consciousness.
I do find it troubling that we are encouraged to browse rather than digest information. I see it in my students approach to literary texts—they scan and skim for the headlines, and when a novel doesn't work that way, and most of them don't, my students give up, and go to Sparknotes—online no less—to get the gist of the text. Like Prospero, "this swift business I must uneasy make, lest too light winning, make the prize light." I know my students will spend much more time with computers than books, despite the equally revolutionariness of both inventions. Still, I'd like them to relish the reward of thought and enlightenment that comes from deep reading.
Carr points out that:

The kind of deep reading that a sequence of printed pages promotes is valuable
not just for the knowledge we acquire from the author's words but for the
intellectual vibrations those words set off within our minds. In the quiet
spaces opened up the sustained, undistracted reading of a book, or by any other
act of contemplation, for that matter, we make our own associations, draw our
own inferences and analogies, forster our own ideas.

Yes, reading and thinking are changing with technology. I share Carr's concern for the loss of reflection and in fact the ability of reflection in my students. The Internet itself doesn't foster thought the way books do. And books don't foster reflection the way a teacher can. With Plato's writing we got to know Socrates and settled with less rhetoric, with Gutenberg we quit illuminated manuscripts in lieu of plain type. As Google perfects its search engines, knowledge is more accessible, wisdom remains rare.

I'm no Socrates, the Internet is not a book—but as teachers we must endeavor to foster reflection's power. Reflection is perhaps the best kind of intelligence and furthest from artificial. It's what develops and changes our thinking whether we are speaking in groups, reading books, or surfing the Web.

Recharging the Batteries #1: Mali's Viral Slam

It's midsummer. A time by which I hope some of the stress of the previous school year has melted in the Western Pennsylvanian humidity of July. A time when I start to shift through all of those piles of "to file." A time when I begin go to a mall and not wince at the sight of teens. A time when I start preparing for next year with some enthusiasm.

Today, I got a boost as I watched slam poetry bard Taylor Mali on YouTube on "What Teachers Make." Almost anyone who's been a teacher more than a year has run into one of dozens of sophomoric spams about how teachers "make a difference." So true perhaps, but so cliche. Yet, Mali's take on the topic entitled, "What Teachers Make, or Objection Overruled, or If things don't work out, you can always go to law school," refreshes the defense.

If Mali's answers are much the same as other similar "make a difference" poems, his ramp up to the answer provides a good context having a lawyer ask the question, and the clever: "I decide to bite my tongue instead of his." Granted, at points Mali's language and gesture may offend some people, but it is these that give the verse (and his delivery) versimilitude and freshness, if not an echo of a few union meeting diatribes. Bottom line: it got to me.

It added to my annual recharging of batteries, and thinking it might do the same for you, I've included the links here. Again, warning: it has content that might be objectionable to some. It's slam poetry after all.
According to Mali, 'turns out that many of those spams I've seen in the past few years are likely to have been the work of plagiarists at the school copier. (Teachers would do that? Nah!) Suffice it to say the original is best and delivered most believably and powerfully by its author. Take a look at what is another viral video for pedagogs. At least if it gets spammed, it will be the genuine article.



The full text of the poem is available at YouTube page, or, better by far (i.e. worth the visit), at http://www.taylormali.com/.

A Kid(robot) Again

Earlier this month I had an afternoon snack meeting with hip-to-the-groove educational publisher Defined Mind in Soho. Fun meeting, if you like to talk about what's new in vocabulary instruction and brainstorming on a "next" project of that ilk. After business and some good eats, and not wanting to miss anything on my all too rare visit to NYC, I was introduced to Kidrobot, located half a block down Prince street.

For me, it was a futuristic time travel to a new culture at warp speed. My first realization was that I was about oldest, WASPishest guy in the place--about twenty years senior to anyone else in the little shop that was buzzing with a dozen or so customers that fit Asian or African-American profiles. The culture's in-crowd schematic is not laid out for bookish forty-somethings from Western Pennsylvania. It took me about ten minutes to shake down the blind box concept, deduce what was in -- or might be in -- the boxes, find the prices by matching labeled characters in the clear acrylic display cases, get over sticker shock of what a tiny vinyl collectible toy retails for, and reconcile myself to the fact "I had to have a one!" er, a couple of the figures.
For those who get it, I walked away thirty dollars lighter with three items to show for it: a Kubrick Star Wars Luke Skywaker, Munny (white with crown and ice cream cone)zipper pull, a ToFu figure, and, of course, a Smorkin Labbit.

Like any traveler to a strange land, I had to snap a photo of the New York shop. If not for this photo I would have missed the old stationery and office supply sign from an generation that would have been hard-pressed to imagine dropping cash on vinyl figures inspired by a Hong Kong-Japan-New York collision of industrial design, urban graffiti, anime, and hip-hop. And the graffiti on the right side, well, that's a given. For my time spent at Kidrobot, it felt great to be alive. Like being a kid again.

I left before checking out the clothing fashion side of the store. Always save something for next time.