Stanley Kubrick – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia: “When the film rights to Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings were sold to United Artists, The Beatles approached Kubrick to direct them in a film based on the books, but Kubrick told John Lennon he felt the story was unfilmable.”
Bold.
The Reproduction of Privilege – NYTimes.com: “SAT scores, in turn, correlate directly to students’ family income. The following charts show this linkage.”
Beautiful piece from a beautiful soul…
Letters of Note: I am very real: “Perhaps you will learn from this that books are sacred to free men for very good reasons, and that wars have been fought against nations which hate books and burn them. If you are an American, you must allow all ideas to circulate freely in your community, not merely your own.”
What is life?
A Universe Of Self-replicating Code | Conversation | Edge: “But, we now live in a world where theydid get loose—a world increasingly run by self-replicating strings of code. Everything we love and use today is, in a lot of ways, self-reproducing exactly as Turing, von Neumann, and Barricelli prescribed. It’s a very symbiotic relationship: the same way life found a way to use the self-replicating qualities of these polynucleotide molecules to the great benefit of life as a whole, there’s no reason life won’t use the self-replicating abilities of digital code, and that’s what’s happening.”
Beautiful, powerful and full of crazy implications.
Whatever your politics, this is pretty cool…
Sign of the Times: Watch One of the Best ‘I Met Obama’ Stories Ever | Distriction: “I am proud of you,” Stephon signed. The president, almost involuntary, instinctively, immediately signed back.”
Strong article on Daisey, This American Life, Kony 2012 and the hubris of emotional resonance…
3quarksdaily: “It Would Ruin Everything”: “What will ruin everything is if we succumb to the belief that the emotional resonance of a story always trumps its accuracy, and that the only way to encourage ourselves to “care” about politics/the rest of the world/our neighbor is to accept being lied to. I think we can handle the truth, and we owe it to ourselves to try and tell it – and to try and hear it.”
Colonialism of the mind is just as damaging and significant as colonialism of the land.
There’s nothing more heart-breaking then uplifting than seeing a middle schooler admit they did something wrong then wrestle with the action in an effort to repair what they’ve done.
What is remarkable about This American Life is Ira Glass’ ability to say he’s sorry in such an authentic and compelling fashion…
Retracting “Mr. Daisey and the Apple Factory” | This American Life: “Daisey lied to me and to This American Life producer Brian Reed during the fact checking we did on the story, before it was broadcast. That doesn’t excuse the fact that we never should’ve put this on the air. In the end, this was our mistake.”
Being able to say you’re sorry is a valuable life skill.
Often, we trivialize this human triumph of the spirit in our current decadent age of politician-like need to always be right all the time. It’s ok to be wrong when making a point. It’s ok to make mistakes.
It’s not ok to try to justify those missteps by covering tracks or blanket denials. This is why science and religion succeeds. We should teach our students to be wrong more, and then help them realize the grace available available in taking paths less traveled in an effort to be right more.
Why would I spend my money (especially something as precious as retirement funds) with a company that promotes such cluelessness?
Can you really “believe” in a calendar?
Cute, but rise above the silliness…especially if you’re
looking for people to put their retirement trust in your company.
Makes sense to me…
McSweeney’s Internet Tendency: Open Letters: An Open Letter to the Guy in My Office Who Thinks He is the NCAA Tournament Office Pool Oracle.: “Julie’s bracket success is also the reason a female President is our only hope to save the US economy. We must harness the intuitive sensibilities and unassuming ferocity that have enabled women to destroy guys like you in office pools for decades. It is the American thing to do.”
My Master’s degree work dealt with post-colonialism in a small backwater “kingdom” in the 7th and 6th centuries B.C.E.
We citizens of the U.S. are still very much susceptible to colonial ideologies as we enter this brave new world of post-nationalism:
African voices respond to hyper-popular Kony 2012 viral campaign – Boing Boing: “From Sachs to Kristof to Invisible Children to TED, the fastest growth industry in the US is the White Savior Industrial Complex,” Cole writes. “The white savior supports brutal policies in the morning, founds charities in the afternoon, and receives awards in the evening.”
Awareness is fantastic but actionable and authentic follow-through’s are much more complex than feeling bad or sending troops/money based on guilt.
What does it truly mean to be a world changer?
I love the idea of examining this idea of a “philosophy of cosmology”…
What Happened Before the Big Bang? The New Philosophy of Cosmology by The Atlantic: “This question of accounting for what we call the “big bang state” — the search for a physical explanation of it — is probably the most important question within the philosophy of cosmology, and there are a couple different lines of thought about it.”
Go read the entire piece. Beautiful, relevant and haunting.
When danah boyd says something, I always listen…
Danah Boyd – Cracking Teenagers’ Online Codes – NYTimes.com: “We need to give kids the freedom to explore and experience things online that might actually help them,” she added. “What scares me is that we don’t want to look at the things that make us uncomfortable. So rather than see what teenagers are showing us online about bullying and suicide and the problems they’re dealing with and using that information to help them, we’re making ourselves blind to it.”
I chose to go into the education profession for many of the same reasons she calls herself an activist and anthropologist. In many ways, teachers are anthropologists that are tasked with constantly studying and even attempting to understand the various tribes of youth, adults and community members we encounter with the aim of curating a learning experience or process for our students and co-learners.
One of the expressions of that mindset is how teens interact on social platforms in this world of gated communities and little time/opportunity for children and teens to have real free play or socializing time that is spontaneous and not scripted or hygienically controlled. As a teacher, I view it as part of my duty to get my hands dirty and attempt to understand what is going on in communities like Twitter or Facebook or XBox Live so that the learning experiences I work to provide in our classroom is authentic and meaningful to both myself and my student co-learners.
Fascinating time to be a teacher.
Must watch if you haven’t already…
Thank you, Steve.
Jerry Maguire-esque…
Steve Jobs Open Thread – The Atlantic: “Doug, do you have 10 more ideas. Steve”
To quote the Jesus of CopyMat (who knew he was Jerry Cantrell?) in Jerry Maguire, “That’s how you become great, man.”
Today during our “free” 8th period, the 7th grade team decided to show TED videos based on various themes in different classrooms.
My theme was “Creativity” but it turned out to be more of a “How To Live Before You Die,” which is heavy for middle schoolers but spurred some great conversation.
Here are the videos we looked at:
The Steve Jobs video was a hit with the 7th graders (especially since they are all excited about the Apple announcement tomorrow) but the Ken Robinson video surprised me with the amount of interest and conversation it generated.
Stay hungry. Stay foolish.
I return to this episode of Ze Frank‘s The Show every so often to remind me of what is beautiful about making things on the web (something Ze is very good at doing and encouraging).
“Suddenly consumers are learning the language of these authorship tools. The fact that tons of people know names of fonts like Helvetica is weird! And when people start learning something new, they perceive the world around them differently. If you start learning how to play the guitar, suddenly the guitar stands out in all the music you listen to. For example, throughout most of the history of movies, the audience didn’t really understand what a craft editing was. Now, as more and more people have access to things like iMovie, they begin to understand the manipulative power of editing. Watching reality TV almost becomes like a game as you try to second-guess how the editor is trying to manipulate you.”
I’m constantly reminded of this video as I work with my students on their individual portfolio/blogs and answer the never-ending “why do we need individual blogs?” question.
Earlier this week, I finally killed my Facebook participation:
For the life of me, I’m not sure why I clung to that space for so long, but in the last few days I’ve realized how little I need that space or many of the 3rd party “social media content creation” tools that are seeking to make a business model on the backs of “user generated content.”
I worked in the (direct) marketing world for a few years and I became very aware of the allure and profits that can be generated by getting more and more content created within your silo that you can then take to advertisers (your real clients) and sell for a healthy margin over the costs of the authoring tools you provided.
Instead of consigning myself, my students and my children to that sort of a web, I’d rather have a web that relies on disinter-mediated connections and encourages the creation of content in our own spaces.
It’s always better to own than rent, both in terms of property, housing as well music, blog platforms, email services etc. A web that encourages responsible ownership by individuals (or at least more tacitly implies the trade-offs of using “free services” to do mission critical things like email your family or store your child’s baby pictures) is a web that I envision for the future.
So, go buy your land and start your own farm for your content production. Don’t work on Maggie’s Farm no more.
Clean Well-Lighted Place – Ernest Hemingway: “Some lived in it and never felt it but he knew it all was nada y pues nada y nada y pues nada. Our nada who art in nada, nada be thy name thy kingdom nada thy will be nada in nada as it is in nada. Give us this nada our daily nada and nada us our nada as we nada our nadas and nada us not into nada but deliver us from nada; pues nada. Hail nothing full of nothing, nothing is with thee.”
It’s been a longtime coming, but I finally found the straw to break the camel’s back for good and decided to kill off my Facebook account in lieu of what I have here (this is a much better space for me)…
See, not so hard.
Here’s to the cars and crazy ones who walk away from omelas.
Brilliant…