The Mobile Disruption

My Twitter contact, Rafael Parente, brought an article to my attention just a little while ago about a conference, which Sarah Jackson reported on.  She says,

What happens next demonstrates how the availability of communications technology has grown exponentially in recent years: 89 percent of this group owns a mobile device, and they want to know how to use it in their classrooms.

“Two years ago, when we would do a workshop with 20 people, we would have to bring 10 devices. Now,” Gagnon says, “the 10 devices sit in the front of the room, and everyone pulls out their own. It’s just amazing.”

Read the rest of the article.  I’m cherry-picking, and I know it. It’s OK.  Read the article.

So let me recap: in essence, this is a program that allows you to write place-based games — to go out into a neighborhood, and encounter elements both fictional and real.  It allows one to build a guidebook to a neighborhood, a town, a city, a country… — and as long as you go to those places, you can learn from the game (or from developing the game), what’s going on in those places.  You can experience an alternate reality, or an augmented reality.

This is very cool.

But I’d like to point out that, at the very same time, there’s this professor of history living on food stamps.

And what this article misses, is that most teachers, in most classrooms, have neither the time nor the inclination to go out and learn how to be programmers.  Or designers.  Or game builders. And they spend so much of their time building and designing classroom experiences, that they are not particularly interested in building ‘augmented reality’ experiences for their students, or in learning how to teach their students to build such things.

What I think the article doesn’t capture, in its gee-whiz!-ness, is that the disruptive thing is not mobile devices in the hands of teachers, but mobile devices in the hands of students.

Teachers know that getting out of the classroom is important for kids, sure — but let me tell you, as one of five people trying to get thirty kids around Washington, DC, to see the sights and sounds of our nation’s capital, that teachers dread those field trips.  Even though we know they’re important.  Even though we know that learning happens far more effectively on those sorts of trips.  Even though those experiences are far more empowering of students than us.

Perhaps especially because these experiences empower students.

Phones in school disrupt all the normal activities. They make answers immediately available to any question. They facilitate ‘cheating’ – whatever that means in an age when huge amounts of relevant information is available.  Yet the number of schools which are teaching ‘research skills in the age of google’ seems to be quite small: because the schools are not ready to cope with the mobile disruption.

And now here’s this ARIS software, which proposes to make all the places which are not school, interactive and data-laden and rich, and accessible as learning opportunities for kids.  Which the majority of teachers in our school systems, public and private, are going to resist.

Because deep down in the leather armchairs of our souls, to use Douglas Adams’s phrase, we know that a kid with a mobile computer can and ultimately will learn more than a group of them will in a classroom with a teacher in front of them.  Mobile computing ultimately empowers kids and their parents to break free of traditional schooling in favor of homeschooling or unschooling — which breaks the very identity of schools, permanently.

Mobile computing represents the disintermediation of students and the things they’re ‘supposed’ to know… and the mediaries in this case are US, their teachers.

Seals for archangels

Seals for archangels
Originally uploaded by anselm23

Well.

I’m taking Rufus Opus’s course in Hermetics, and one of the things you’re supposed to do (on your way to something else) is derive the seals of the archangels of the elements:

They’re not exactly the result of conjury, and they’re not exactly traditional, but here are the seals or sigils of the four Archangels of the Elements. They work for me and I think they will work for other people, as well. At least, that’s what my sources tell me. I had them whispering “yes, yes” to me as these signs made themselves apparent to me early this morning.

What do you think?

Via Flickr:
Made with Paper

Well.

They’re not entirely scryed, and they’re not entirely traditional. But they feel right, and they work, and I think they’ll work for other people besides me. And when I ask if it’s ok to release them, I hear “yes, yes” whispering in my ears.

Let me know if they’re useful.

Sketches / 12 DC Map

Sketches / 12 DC Map
Originally uploaded by anselm23

During this past week’s trip to Washington, DC with my school, I realized that I use the city’s layout (at least the downtown area), as a part of my Palace of Memory. When I need to remember various aspects of American history, I mentally fly myself down to Washington (or take the train, since I know Union Station so much better), and then I walk over to the Senate side of the Capitol building. I walk around the Capitol, and I recall certain aspects of history by standing on its steps and looking up at the sculpture. There are even corridors within the building that I can walk down and remember various parts of history. I go across the street to the Supreme Court, and review the Supreme Court cases I know while approaching its hallowed/desecrated steps (Any court that can be responsible for Bush v. Gore, the Dred Scott decision, and Brown v. Board of Ed. of Topeka, KS, can’t be all bad, to paraphrase W.C. Fields…). I walk around the Tidal Pool in my memory to visit the Bill of Rights and Thomas Jefferson’s presidency, and I can even go to the individual Smithsonian museums to remember various things that I’ve forgotten (Wright Brothers, Kitty Hawk, 1903… in room/gallery 209 at the National Air and Space Museum, south side of the National Mall… go up the first escalator on the left, and then turn right and go in the first gallery on the left. Trust me.)

On the back side of the Lincoln Memorial, there’s a spot where you can take off your jacket, and cover one of the halogen lamps that illuminate the building, and look down Memorial Bridge to the southwest. In the dimness of the oncoming traffic, you can make out a baleful red beacon at the top of a radio tower. Just below treeline, directly under that beacon, you’ll be able to make out a pale white triangle of roof, and the columns supporting that roof.

That’s the house of Robert E. Lee, chief general of the Confederacy. On May 3, 1862, General Meigs of the Union commandeered the house and the farm to be the Union cemetery, and so Arlington National Cemetery was born. It was Meigs’s way of getting back at Lee for abandoning the Union. Lee would never be able to go home again.

It’s hard to remember this sometimes, but the Lincoln Memorial stands squarely on the dividing line between North and South, between slavery and states’ rights, and freedom and the idea that your labor is your own to do with as you wish. In the Lincoln memorial, you can remember both Gettysburg (July 1-3, 1863) and the Gettysburg Address (November 1863), and the idea of “government of the people, by the people and for the people.”

There’s now a stone you can stand on at the Lincoln Memorial, marking the place where Martin Luther King, Jr. delivered the “I have a dream” speech (August 28, 1963) and look down the National Mall, over the reflecting pool, over the World War II Memorial, to the obelisk of the Washington Monument and the capitol beyond.

The earthquake last September (caused by fracking?) has cracked the Washington Monument, and rendered it unstable. It may collapse before any repairs are done.

Pierre L’Enfant presented the plan for Washington DC to Congress in 1791 — you can find part of that plan done in granite and white marble at Freedom Plaza, a short distance from the White House on the southeast side, flanking Pennsylvania Avenue. By 1900, the city’s plan was obscured by all kinds of deviant buildings, but the plan has been restored over the last century to reflect the vision of L’Enfant — a city whose walks and rides provide a way to recall American history to mind, and recall that a nation’s claim to greatness can fail all too suddenly: Seneca’s cliff awaits — greatness is achieved only by hard work and long labor, while catastrophe and ruin can come from single errors.

The President’s Box

The view from my seat
Originally uploaded by anselm23

Last Tuesday, I went with my school’s seventh grade to see “1776!”, the musical about the signing of the Declaration of Independence. It’s a hard story to render well as a musical, and in many ways it deserves to be categorized as an opera, or an operetta. But it needs more music to be thought of that way, I’m sure.

The performance took place in Ford’s Theater. As those of my readers who are not American may not know, this is the theater where Abraham Lincoln, our 16th president, was assassinated on the night of 14 April 1865. It was an awful conclusion to an awful war: a war about power, money, liberty and labor. A war which my students are studying now, through the diaries and letters of Connecticut soldiers and nurses and surgeons who fought in the terrible conflict.

My seat in the theater was here – across the way from the place where John Wilkes Booth shot Lincoln in the back of the head. I’ve heard it said that the big couch in the presidential box is still stained with the blood of our sixteenth President. It’s still draped with flags, and it still has the hanging portrait of George Washington below the balcony railing. Modern lights may both obscure and illumine the box, but it’s still the place where one of America’s wonderful but controversial leaders died from a killer’s bullet.

It still amazes me that I occasionally meet people who think that the American Civil War was not fought over slavery. South Carolina seceded from the Union over the question of “states’ rights”, but a mere four years earlier the Southern states were gleeful over the Dred Scott decision, which eviscerated “states’ rights” in favor of the private property rights of slaveholders. And Kansas was known as “Bleeding Kansas” for a few years because “states’ rights” included the concept of “terrorize and murder American citizens until they accept the idea that some people can own other people as chattel property.”

I’ve never been in Ford’s Theater before, but to see “1776!” there… well. It was beautifully horrifying to watch the character of Thomas Jefferson look to the President’s Box for just a moment, just a second really, before turning back to the draft of the Declaration, and strike the anti-slavery clause from the draft.

As actually happened. At the request of Edward Rutledge. The delegate from South Carolina. The state/colony founded by eight “proprietors” — slave lords, really — from Barbados.

It’s worth remembering, in this election season that there are people in America who still believe that the Civil War was the “glorious lost cause”, and who think that the effective result of that war should be overturned.

Taiji Day 65: Add something new

This morning, I woke up thinking, “it’s time to do eight pieces of silk.”

Ok, but I don’t know the Eight Pieces of Silk.  This is an internal qi gong form with three more postures than the one I do now, and some of its postures are rather different than the ones I do now. Nonetheless, I woke up from a sound sleep thinking, I should do this. 

So I did what any self-respecting 21st century qi gong practitioner should do.  I looked at YouTube, and found dozens, if not hundreds, of people showing off their interpretation of the Eight Pieces of Silk.  Here’s one of the ones I watched, to get a sense of how many of the exercises one is supposed to do.

I only did three of the exercises this morning, in addition to my regular practice.  It’s going to take some time to learn a full new form.  But here’s the thing.  My knees no longer creak, and my shoulders and arms and legs and flanks are getting stronger (my belly isn’t shrinking, but that’s a different problem. Really).    On the other hand, I’ve reached a plateau.  The Five Golden Coins in two months have opened up a lot of possibilities, but there’s limits to how much they can do.  Likewise the main taiji form: I can, and will, keep practicing it.  But accepting only its postures leads to another kind of rigidity.

Add something new from time to time.  Keep learning.  Keep moving.  Keep stretching the body.  Keep finding new ways to ask it to grow in strength, power, beauty and grace.