Primary Resources and MLK
February 5, 2009
A starting place for docs
http://usasearch.gov/search?v%3Aproject=firstgov-web&query=%22martin+luther+King%22
a High School referent to primary resource data
http://www.archives.gov/education/lessons/
More docs
Yet the GPO had a different set altogether
http://www.gpoaccess.gov/index.html
Video: try and avoid YouTube…
Hulu, Daily Motion, archive.org
audio
http://www.archive.org/details/MLKDream
http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speechbank.htm
Texts on line in whole and part
Google book search
and Google Scholar
USASearch.gov: “martin luther King”
February 5, 2009
Book Report: Bearing the Cross
February 2, 2009
Bearing the Cross: Bio about MLK
Bearing the Cross by David J. Garrow is the 1987 Pulitzer Prize winning bio of Martin Luther King. It is a rather amazing text that gives the detailed history of Dr. King that is detailed to the point of each week of his life working toward each hour of his day as we march inexorably toward his final hours.
The themes of the text truthfully reflect the messages that drove this intelligent, burdened man. He stood resolute against a world that preferred order to justice. The book is neither artful nor clever. It is resolute: Each word necessary additions to the paragraphs and pages that all collect to a full and far too short summary of a man.
Throughout the text one can see Dr. King’s penumbra still visible around each person in his life. The voice that this book carries is weighted by the dozens of people the author interviewed about King and the richness of the response that each had about this significant man. His message, his desire, his integrity, his weakness each evident and challenging the reader.
Much of the book is derived from the thousands of documents that the FBI amassed illegally through the near-constant surveillance by J. Edgar Hoover’s over-reaching, paranoid troops. It is sad and disturbing that the most detailed diarists in his life were the mocking and suited men with earphones recording his conversations to use against him.
Through every chapter one sees a man pulled by a strong cord toward his destiny. A man who was not heroic but who was cast by his God as a hero. A man who had failings and commonnesses apparent to all who knew him, yet still he was molded to become what he had to be. This is the “destiny” part of his life that is hard to deny when reading the text. Interestingly he was not put up on a pedestal by those who knew him best neither before nor after his death. But at the same time it was clear that he was not like you and me. He seemed to follow his call against his wishes and in reading this book one hears the unspoken words “let this cup pass from me.”
I don’t know much more than the average person about Dr. King and the civil rights movement, and was not a giant fan of King, but in reading this book I was wholly moved by his life and convinced that he was cast to be what he came to be. From his unwillingness to amass personal property (much to his family’s dismay); to his becoming one of the youngest recipients of the Nobel Peace Prize (whose honor and cash prize he deflected to his organization, The Southern Christian Leadership Conference, SCLC); to being Time’s Man of the Year; to his appetites ; to his sense of humor—he was not a carefully packaged commodity, nor a televangelist. This book shows him as an everyman, if everyman had an unswerving call to justice over order; to equity over peace; to what things could be over what things tend to be.
This text gives the reader a three dimensional vision of and three dimensional man. He was not hero but he was heroic.
Blog Jumping
January 29, 2009
Ripping off the fine people at Back Reaction
So I have a few blogs I read every now and then. Reading a lot of blogs is rather like reading other people’s mail. And while I am not opposed to that, per se, it is still necessarily a procrastination technique, and I have far too many of those as is. Not the least of which is good parenting. But more on that later.
Now I know that one is not supposed to just grab all the stuff off of another blog and claim it as the results of their own mining, anymore than one should descend on poor old John Sutter and overrun his mill and take his gold. But claim jumping is tough to resist.
Look at these crazy cool links that Sabine Hossenfelder (theoretical physicist from Canada, really) and Stefan Scherer (from Frankfurt) have on their way cool blog:
This is crazy cool as it tells me artistically that which I fear to be true in my own heart every day.
From chris Jordan dot com Yowee what a great way to show what you are saying…
This is just fun as it is the low-tech way to be high tech…
Look over their Blog and you will see stuff about the Plank phase and entropy and specialization and god. What bright folks who write ever so well.
Thnks S&S,
kevin
Links for the APSA talk
January 27, 2009
Us Gov sites
An important site yet will be known by most. Much primary data.
Through the University of North Texas, but serves as a point to request docs from members of congress
Another source for primary data.
Links to PDF stats that all should know
The US gov meta search tool
The Rest
Serious archive of media. Major tool
Large archive site with primary data
The DC paper, Roll Call sponsors this tool for researching congress votes
Sample of an active, partisan sponsored blog that includes streaming embed files.
GMU Center for History and New Media
The George Mason materials seem the best on line. This site takes some time to discover the many offerings. Note their “copyright explanation section,” that links to copyright.gov.
Google Earth
an important app/site. Imporatnt because of the mix of site and application
While this search tool is limited to many for-pay destinations. It is worth knowing the direction of academic search tools. Also note the full-text possibilities.
Great site with tools and archive and links. Sort of a “secondary-school” flavor.
Worth noting when corporate interests get involved. Example of what’s wrong with advert sites.
What is replacing the print papers. Lost of fluff as time passes.
Not mapquest.
Political Compass-diagnostic (bias)
A biased albeit interesting tool for students to note categorization.
Politico.com
A political (no doubt partisan) site that is clean and easy to use.
The academic version of WordPress.
Slate is Newsy of course, but is an example of a streaming media mix. With great blog use.
Stanford Accessibility Program
Looked and found little on assistive technology
The entry level for research but can be shared and stored etc…
Nice reference site.
Tech should include handhelds
“death of E mail” thoughts.
Social Networking, Blogs, Twitter.
Cut equick demos of al that new and ha not been seen.
Need hip flashy timeline app, and concept map use.
Worse for Wear
December 8, 2008
This morning I pulled on one of my favorite pair of jeans. As I pulled them on I noted the tear above the knee had increased to the width of the front panel. The trendiness of thread-bareness is lost on me. I just like a profoundly comfortable pair of jeans. I also chose to wear a pair of light blue boxers so that some other, less 
modest rips might go unnoticed. But as I carefully fed foot one and foot two through the netting of these soft friends I admitted to myself that they were unlikely to endure another trip through my wash. Clock ticking.
I remember hearing from the old codgers of my youth, as though it were an insult, “Why I have ties older than you.” Now I recognize it as a grim confession. That if our socks, and sweaters and ties have pre-dated some smart Alec kid, then they are earmarks. Little indicators that we were around in 1985 or 1992. “That tie was from a student when I taught at that school back then…” My closet is full of these indicators, these “Ebenezers.” Each peice of clothing has aged some faster and some slower. Jeans age like rockstars, or dogs at about seven times our speed. Ties meanwhile age slower, like you can inherit your granddad’s ties. Shoes are sort of funny, they vary according to use, same as us. I have running shoes that are pretty well spent in less than a year, while I have dress shoes that have held up several years, and I have had ski boots since college.
I carry all of these little totems around with me and their aging reminds me of mine. Each item I outlive reminds me of how time fleets. And that is what it does, exactly. Fleet comes from the Middle English word “fleten,” (as in fleet of ships) or, Old English, flēotan to float. So when you hear the cliché that “time is fleeting,” well I suppose that is so. As boats float down streams , certainly we float along with time. Here we are unaware that time is passing and we note that these jeans have been rendered almost invisible by the ravages of time. As I consider my aging parents and my lost friends they too were “rendered” by time.
So I will wear these pale blue emblems to time carefully today and will hold off on putting them in the wash another week or two. I hope that as I start to fade and forget and slowly unravel I get few more trips out of the drawer before i am casually run through another cycle and begin to show that I am truly “worse for wear.”
Forgetfulness
Billy Collins
The name of the author is the first to go
followed obediently by the title, the plot,
the heartbreaking conclusion, the entire novel
which suddenly becomes one you have never read,
never even heard of,
as if, one by one, the memories you used to harbor
decided to retire to the southern hemisphere of the brain,
to a little fishing village where there are no phones.
Long ago you kissed the names of the nine Muses goodbye
and watched the quadratic equation pack its bag,
and even now as you memorize the order of the planets,
something else is slipping away, a state flower perhaps,
the address of an uncle, the capital of Paraguay.
Whatever it is you are struggling to remember,
it is not poised on the tip of your tongue,
not even lurking in some obscure corner of your spleen.
It has floated away down a dark mythological river
whose name begins with an L as far as you can recall,
well on your own way to oblivion where you will join those
who have even forgotten how to swim and how to ride a bicycle.
No wonder you rise in the middle of the night
to look up the date of a famous battle in a book on war.
No wonder the moon in the window seems to have drifted
out of a love poem that you used to know by heart.
Indirect Education: Thoughts on “You Suck at Photoshop.”
August 25, 2008
I have been thinking about ways to tell a story about one thing in the foreground with the true message happening in the background. This technique is not exactly new, but it fascinates me when a story can behave as though it is about a boy’s adventures growing up in the pre-Civil War south, when actually it is a profound critique on cultural norms of an entire society. It is amazing when a story like, David Means’ “The Secret goldfish” describes the relative condition of the a goldfish’s tank, and from this wonderful unknown perspective he describes the level of peace and unrest of a family’s domestic health. The story is about the fish, but is not about the fish at all. I want to make a video of a simple foreground story while actually introducing characters and a second narrative in the background.
There are hundreds of examples of this kind of thing but I recently heard a piece on NPR by my hero, Scott Simon, as he discussed a tutorial series called “You Suck at Photoshop.” This sounds like any of the hundreds of these self-assigned tutorials where folks or varying skill levels take it upon themselves to narrate screen captures and show the world how to click and drag. This one assumes a few things up front. Things that educators tend to assume in a less explicit fashion all of the time. The narrator knows things that the listener wants to know. That the expertise offered is of enough value to put up with the inherent condescension of the instructor, who does not view the pupil as a peer with different skill sets , but as a bone head who is likely to make all of the cliché errors that the expert has seen countless times. The theme of this tutorial is not that there “are no stupid questions.” But rather that stupid questions are all there are or one may ever hope for.
The podcast is a parody and while it does do some instruction, it hooks the viewer with the back-story: that the narrator, Donnie, is a troubled soul with a broken marriage whose every instructional comment is saturated with self-involved soliloquy and telling, unhealthy obsessions. The target audience for this parody of dismal pedagogy and a no-life YouTube producer is the coveted 13-29 demographic I assume, and it is pleasantly sophomoric as he gives every listener far more than the student of Photoshop would want to know. In this case I am amused not because the number two story is the main point, but rather because there is instruction at all. How interesting is it when a skilled instructor hides real meaning in a personal narrative? How can stories be told on multiple levels? How can, how should we make education interesting? I am not suggesting that this is the model, but it may be closer than most would want to admit.
We have had instructors who had the uncanny ability to make the bland interesting. Listening to lectures by physicist, Richard Feynman; author, Bill Bryson; or psychologist Jeremy Wolfe (through MIT opencourse)Their stories and illustrations enhance the material so much that while they tell a story you don’t just (as preacher Maurice Boyd says) hear the illustration and miss the point. As an instructor myself the goal is to blur the lines between living and learning. We can enjoy learning. We should enjoy living. Setting aside learning activities as unenjoyable chores is like telling kids up front that painting fences at always a bore. Who knows it may be fun
Educational technology 03
August 4, 2008
In my previous post I got distracted by one of my favorite topics, pop-neuroscience. Noting how robust brains are I pointed out that these organs do some impressive stuff. I can’t yet walk away from this topic. I love the well-known quote by Arthur Clarke, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” This is so, but we dictate the difference between what is magic and what is not magic by that which we expect. Einstein showed how gravity is not magic. But in the same fashion that Columbus proved world is not flat. You just gotta take their word for it. Same is true for brain function. It works and we really don’t understand it. We don’t call this magic in a scientific age. But, it’s magic.
I mentioned that brains are doing all this rather startling work in a fashion that is dictated by necessity. Brains don’t seem to function on an aesthetic level naturally. Oh well, that comment is not even possible to defend nor make understandable. But the idea is that we dump information into these containers in a biologically efficient fashion but not in a logical fashion. By “logical,” I mean in a way that complements data collection and retrieval, as modeled by our own finite taxonomies. Indexing systems allow one to put their hands on the book that they want because the actual arrangement of a library is rearranged dozens of ways in card catalogues so that small versions of books, these cards, can symbolize a place where the book resides in time and space. You can arrange your library by publisher, by author, by genre, by date, by title and so on. It reminds me of John Cusack’s character in High Fidelity who rearranges his entire LP collection in chronological order of where he was in his life when he first heard the record.
What a crazy system. But that is the kind of system that one might have if data streamed in all the time and the receiver was barely conscious of cataloging their data. “This is your brain on reality.” You might not have been raised by wolves, but the point I was making earlier is the natural method for dumping knowledge into the brain is the same if you were or were not. Our data acquisition is rarely organized in a fashion that complements retention or retrieval.
OK here is Kvalvik theory: our brains are wired to note 1.) novelty, 2.) its antonym repetition and 3.) internal importance. We know if we ever saw an elephant in our yard, because we know that novelty is memorable. If you hear the song, Sugar, Sugar by the Archies all day you will know that song. The concept I use of “importance” is cheating, as it is vague. But this ability to assign importance has to resonate with our “attention mechanism” but here’s how I think it works on evolutionary-psychology level. If you are a teen, on average, you are hardwired to note the other gender and procreate. It is this big motivator and so on… Not getting eaten by animals, hit by cars, burned by fires all seems pretty important. Sex and safety, important.
Weird thing is that if one loves Mozart he/she alters the attention mechanism and points it at all things Mozartian as important. Likewise, baseball, ballet, chess and dog shows. I’m not talking about intelligence so much here as I am the way most folks tend to retain and organize their brains. But these guys who love baseball have a framework built to retain runs batted in and pitchers doing pitchy stuff and so on. It is pretty impressive.
OK next the residue of memory…
Educational Technology 02 (not yet near the point)
August 3, 2008
In the previous entry on this topic I took a bit of time to outline that
- We all learn
- We all think
And you are now thankful that you have taken time to read these observations. My point is that thinking and learning must not be seen as activities associated with any type of educational plan. Those activities are not foreign or separate at any level from our breathing, heart beating and so forth. This is no small point. We have this term, “education,” set aside to delineate a structured process that allows this learning stuff to occur. While one might argue that no one feels this way, the entire pre-K industry is founded on this odd notion: Learning is better when conducted by professionals. …or the don’t-try-this–at-home mentality.
For my point it is vital that we see brains as these aggressive gadgets that are not idly humming a little tune as they wait for instructions, but rather they are these fabulous processors, which are being fed whopping amounts of data around 2/3rds of the day. Further they possess appetite or hunger as one of their key features. We may call this curiosity, but these machines are ravenous. Consciousness is defined by learning.
When my daughter asked me what sleep was I told her that sleep is when we are not recording information. Recording information allows our little internal clock to turn. Time passes to our understanding only because we are aware that it passes. If you are day dreaming, that implies that you are disconnected for the time-passing majig right? You were not “in the moment.” We see the pretty pictures and sensations passing by and our linear beings take note. This “note taking” is learning. In normal circumstances one seldom dreams their life away, they rather experience it from every dog bite to every discovery of a new toy. We learn, learn, learn. Learning is breathing.
The cynic may note how the dimmest and least informed in his/her community is distinguished from the brightest and best by the structured education that he/she received. Yes, I get that. Kids who were raised by wolves seem less likely to manage a Chik-Fil-A than those with a high school education. This I too have noted. But kids raised by wolves have still been recording massive amounts of data and are way smart in what Howard Gardner describes as the “wolf intelligence.” (OK, Howard never said that, but you take my point.) We learn all the time. Kids raised by wolves and kids raised in homes devoted to viewing NASCAR and Oprah have learned different things. And it’s not just the kids, we all have a finite amount of time and a finite amount of attention to spend. If we lived to each be 300-years-old ask yourself if we would be 4x smarter at the end of the day? But i cannot go there right now…
Learning can be structured. Sometimes this is a good thing. Wolf children have a hard time fitting in. Kids raised by cave folk probably fit in pretty well, with other cave folk anyway. They learned how to gnaw on bones, how to avoid getting batted around by mom and dad, and how to drag or be dragged off into other caves for long meaningful relationships. The idea is that the things taught then and the things taught now are different in content but not necessarily in scale. The subtleties of advanced hunting 401 may rival the details in anatomy 401, or The History of Europe 401. We have a sense that our great education is so much more complex than just learning to keep the garbage pile a ten minute walk from the camp, but learning how to figure amortization schedules is arbitrary and artificial compared to keeping the garbage ten minutes from camp. And being separate from refuse may the more important lesson.
Next go round I will get to what the artificial structure and mechanisms for learning might look like, and then on to what may assist us in the learning stuff…
Thinking about Educational Technology 01
August 1, 2008
This has been my field for most of my career thus far, and I have felt a commitment if not a competence about the comings and goings of different gadgets and how they are used to promote and oft times inhibit learning. Educational technology, to my mind, is the use of tools to complement instruction. So, technically, chalk and blackboards are the starting place for this subject, and they should be.
Learning is this thing that happens. The sensory pathways we’ve got that run from ears, eyes and the nerve endings drawn uniformly over our bodies all converge on our brains in a hurricane of activity that cascades en masse for hour after ceaseless hour of data acquisition. Handy for us that we have this complex sorting apparatus at the ready to take this blizzard of blinky white noise and interpret it as discernable information, which we aggregate initially as reasons to cry or coo. This is thinking.
We sit around from birth to death with these little data sorters cooking. Not put too fine a point on it this is learning. We have all of these internal mechanisms that divvy information into visual images. These are sorted into rather arbitrary distinctions of vertical and horizontal forms, and into chromatic and luminescent information. Audible data is piped right into the brain as the frequency it is heard and is written in and we distinguish it by pitch, rhythm and timber. But we also have this capacity to infer language.
We learn and then we think. It comes in and rattles around in there. Plato and Descartes’ old saw about thinking establishing existence’s proof, is certainly true turned around, as “I am, therefore I think.” Would that be “sum ergo cogito?” The fact is that there is vastly too much coming in to reasonably remember, much less consider. If you doubt this read a paragraph out of a book and ask yourself what you just read. Then ask yourself if the page was clean or stained? Then ask yourself what was the noise you heard in the background while you were reading it? Then what the smell was in the room while you were looking at the page” and so on ad infinitum. This is an important point. So I will restate: We can take in more than can be stored, digested or used.
They have these simple tests where they will say a series of nonsense words in sequence, and after varying pause lengths ask you to repeat them back. Folks can repeat back like five to nine words, or numbers or colors if they are wholly random to the hearer. Centering on about seven items. This is where the myth that we can only think about seven things at a time comes from. Really this is how much a person can take into short term memory. We also have long-term memory of course, as you can remember that particularly wonderful elementary school teacher, or that devastatingly embarrassing outfit mom made you wear to that party in middle school…
My point is that we can, at will store some information with varying success. We are experts in this as you know what you do not know. I will explain. I say the word “know” to mean that I know it happened. I remember it being so. If I asked you if you had ever seen an elephant in your front yard, you would say “no” with resolve. Now that is a fascinating. We know for certain what we do not know, and have never known. You have never recorded in your brain’s existence an elephant in the front yard. It is sufficiently novel that you are certain that is a thing that you do not know.
We also know things that we do not know. I will explain. I regularly ask groups if they know what Play-Doh tastes like. One must be of a certain age, but the positive response is about 80%. That is equally amazing that we store data secretly away from our internal inventory appliance—the part that notes what we know and that which we do not know—and that some things are universally and verifiably stored away never to be retrieved. (The answer is “salty.”)
The point here is that our brains are tricky and they don’t take in all information, and they are organized by some evolutionary hand that makes sense if one only needs to eat, sleep, and procreate. The information that they tend to acquire is often unmoved by our urgent desire to remember all of the bones in the human body for a anatomy test, but instead our brains use that needed real-estate to remember every word to the Gilligan’s Island theme song.
I will follow up tomorrow with what any of this has to do with educational technology.
