Know the Power of Image

How to make Google your allied spirit….

Chances are pretty good that somewhere on your hard drive is an image whose provenance you don’t know. Maybe it’s a picture of a Greek ostraka with a name that looks suspiciously like “Pericles” but you don’t remember where you downloaded the picture.  Or maybe, there’s an unattributed statue picture in one of your slideshows for class.  Or maybe one of your students doesn’t know the bibliographic data for a picture in her slideshow.

You should know how to find that information.  Here’s how.

First, go to Google’s homepage, Google.com.  Then find the button that takes you to Google Image.  Go there.  In the search bar, notice the little icon of the camera.  Click on that.  Upload the image with the missing provenance data, and search for the photo.  My friend Craig was looking for the identification of this goddess — surrounded by crooked Sunwheels, and dogs, and gees, and bullheads. Who was she?

Potnia Theon — mistress of animals. SOrry about the crooked crosses: does it help that they date to 680 BC? probably not.

My almost-thirty-year old memory of such things is that this was Geometric ware from ancient Greece, but older than the Parthenon, although younger than the Trojan War. That gave me a window, of call it 900 BC to 700 BC. Turns out that this is from Boeotia, near the ancient city of Thebes (of the seven gates, and the Sphinx riddling to Oedipus on the road). It dates from 680 BC, and she’s a Potnia Theron — a Mistress of Animals, akin to Artemis.  The original is in the Archaeological Museum in Athens.

We wouldn’t have known any of this without Google Reverse Image search, a Flickr user named Julianna (thank you!) , and my curious friend Craig.

But now we do.

Reflecting on this, I realized that if I’d wanted to answer Craig’s question fifteen years ago, I’d have had to find an art history library, and slog through books of Mycenaean and early Greek pottery for several hours. Instead, I had an answer in fifteen minutes… and that answer was not dependent AT ALL on what I’d previously known.  In college (actually, in grad school) I spent several hundred dollars on books, and probably a few thousand dollars on tuition, in order to learn the basic framework of Hellenic pottery patterns… and in the clutch, twenty years on, I was wrong.

Google was right, and able to construct the knowledge path from the visual image alone, to the etherial data of the photographer, to the more etherial data of the physical location of the object photographed, and to the even more etherial data of where and when the original potter had worked.  That’s a bizarre and alien sort of efficiency.

And yet, it’s the core efficiency of the Palace of Memory technique, for example.  Your brain is much better at remembering pictures than words, and better at remembering places than abstract information.  And it turns out that Google Images is capable of helping you construct those lines of connection between place and image quite rapidly.

And suddenly, the power of images becomes quite clear.

Pretty girl, all made of geometric patterns with inappropriate crooked crosses, geese, a bull’s head and a shaggy dog or two?  Boeotian, 680 BC ± 10 years?  Potnia Theron, or Mistress of Animals. Sure, I know her. She’s in the National Archaeological Museum in Athens… Why do you ask?

Well, sure I know that.  You have to know these things if you’re a magician…

Only, you don’t need to know that.  You need to be able to construct the path to that knowledge, but not necessarily what the knowledge is.  There may come a time when there will be no Google to call upon.  In the meantime, use it. Trace your imagery back to its sources. Learn what the external brain has to say about the images you treasured enough to keep, but not enough to keep the bibliographic data solidified.

You might surprise yourself.

Financial Accounting and the Teacher Gradebook

In financial accounting, there are three interlocking financial statements:

• The Balance Sheet
• The Profit and Loss Statement
• The Cash Flow statement

The purpose of these statements is different.  The balance sheet shows assets and liabilities… what does a particular person or business own? What does the business or person owe? It’s a “right now” sort of thing, although it can have a series of columns that show change to the balance sheet over time.

Profit and Loss, on the other hand, is a statement of what the business or person has done, what it cost them in time and money and effort and materials to do that work, and what their “administrative costs” were… what it took to get them to that point in the market.

The Cash Flow statement, though, is a set of numbers that detail what a business or person is making from their main line of work, what they’re making from investment and financing, and what the reconciliation is between them.

What does this have to do with gradebooks?

During a meeting today, I was asked about a student.  I flipped open my gradebook, and looked at the numbers, and said, “he’s making mistakes on homework, participating a lot in class, and doing great on quizzes.”  Which means, of course, that he’s using his homework and class-time as learning opportunities, and seeing quizzes as a major form of assessment for me (which they are).

But looking at my gradebook, I realized that those three statements of financial accounting were in fact hiding in the columns of my gradebook.  Maybe.

Join me on this thought experiment a moment:

• 1) The homework and classwork column are the balance statement, in a very real way.  There’s a snapshot of how many homework assignments a given student has done, how many “empty” columns they’ve left unfilled by not completing work.  Completed homework is like inventory… it represents raw materials for studying; flash cards for new vocabulary; notes and doodles for remember information; diagrams for making sense of mysterious data.  Isn’t that all a kind of equity?  There’s a series of credits left by participating in class, and a series of debts left by not participating or acting up.  Not participating is short-term debt.  It can be rectified, relatively easily, and replaced with positive credits.  But long-term debt… preventing other people from communicating or learning in class, has to be tracked differently.  Sometimes that’s what we call as “acting up,” and we as teachers have an ethical standard to uphold… what’s the difference between acting up and being high-spirited and overeager?  There’s a difference between knowing a learning style, and just being impatient.
•  2) There’s a profit and loss statement, too.  I try to keep track of how organized a student is:  Is their binder neat and in order?  Are we wasting much time getting notebook and pen and paper and agenda and text all set and ready to go?  Is the student overloaded with materials?  That’s all administrative costs, because it costs us (and the class) learning time.  On quizzes and projects, though, is the student showing evidence of analytical thought?  Are they reading more than just the required reading?  Are they building quality projects, and are they making reasonable guesses on quizzes?
• 3) Finally, there’s a cash flow statement hidden in that gradebook, somewhere or somehow.  I’m sure of it.    Some of it is “attendance”.  Is the kid in school enough that he or she is getting enough face-time with classmates and colleagues?  I think it’s this: is the student using those homeworks and tests and quizzes in an efficient way, to actually learn something?  Are they building up an accumulation of cash to do something bigger and better? Or are they mechanically going through the motions for good grades?  Are they collecting good will by participating in class, and networking during study halls to build a good academic reputation by helping and tutoring others? Are they getting in the know, and by so doing, are they getting ready to do something bigger and better than they can do right now?

I don’t know if my gradebook can do all of these functions.  I know that without spending some time in an accounting mindset this summer, I wouldn’t have seen it today.   I may not have the idea down strongly enough to actually revise my gradebook to take this into account yet, but I think this is something worth building on… three interlocking statements of grades (probably powered by a spreadsheet or database) which help a teacher recognize what learning is occurring at multiple levels of the classroom and homework experience.

Teaching Scratch

Scratch, offered through the MIT website, is a free programming environment to teach kids the basics of computational thinking and programming. You can download it and teach yourself programming concepts too. If you’re an adult, eventually you’ll have to move on to a more serious form of programming language.  Still, I’ve realized how often a lack of programming knowledge gets in my way as the designer of the Design Program at my school, and so I’ve spent at least some time this summer noodling around in Scratch, trying to figure out how its various programming components work.  I can’t say that this process has been a complete success, but I’ve learned quite a bit.  It’s a bit like the Turtle programming environment that I experimented with so long ago at Constructing Modern Knowledge, where I made the Alhambra window (link to this image at Flickr broken and vanished… hmm), but Scratch makes possible a much wider range of possibilities, including random actions.

We have a period in the school week (Mondays and Fridays) when students can work on their own learning within a particular range of activities. And really before I knew it, I’d signed up to lead this activity program in “computer programming using scratch.” So, from now until Thanksgiving I’ll be teaching this little class in computer programming, and probably learning a lot about programming along the way. Yesterday, the class met for the first time.  While the eventual class will have ten students, yesterday we had three; and it was a beautiful opportunity to lay some ground work.

I showed them how Scratch was organized; how to find and assemble small computer programs, and how to move the cursor around and draw things with it.  They made a simple program (each of the four of us solved the problem in a slightly different way)  that centered the cursor (shaped like a cat) on the 0,0 point of the cartesian plane, and then drew a 100×100 box of red color centered on that point, and then re-positioned the cursor at 0,0.

It was kind of amazing how long that little task took. I think if I can introduce a few computer programming tasks each week, and develop a range of skills in our students, that they’ll be better prepared to understand how computer programming works, and gradually they’ll wake up to other possibilities, like designing games and other more-fully-realized applications of this startling technology.

You can’t think with tools you don’t have

Three short stories, and an axe to grind. Bear with me, and I’ll get to the point.

You can’t think with tools you don’t have. Seems simple enough, right?

Story number one. My mother saw the new computer at college that I’d bought through the tech department’s arrangement with Apple Computer, and said, “what do you need one of those for?” I told her, “writing papers, making art, sending email, publishing a newsletter. You have to get one.” she asked me, incredulously, “what would I use it for?” I told her to get one first, and find out what she used it for later. Twenty-five years later, she’s used it to be the president of a board of trustees, to be a graphic designer, a home-business entrepreneur, an accountant, a data-gatherer, a phenomenal correspondent and a journalist.

If she’d waited to get a computer until she knew what she was going to do with it, she’d still be waiting.

Story number two. My friend Josh has built a pair of headband-mounted cat ears on servos, attached to an EKG reader and an Arduino chip. When you wear the ears, and mount the EKG sensor on your forehead with a little grounding clipped to your ear, the ears swivel left and right, up and down, depending on how much attention you’re paying to what’s going on around you. To build them, he needed a soldering iron, a Cupcake MakerBot (3-D printing), various electronics parts, and a community of folks interested in Arduino devices and having them read code from EkG sensors. Ultimately, he even needed the expertise of some serious electronics designers to solve a power problem.

But he couldn’t have done any of it without a set of tools he already knew how to use, and some ambition (in the form of a cosplaying lady friend).

Third story. Around a million years ago, more or less, our hominid ancestors started making tools. They’d been making “tool” for around a million years, but the Acheulian Hand Axe was our go-to device for a million years. The archaeological record strongly suggests we didn’t know how to make anything else. But then, over a few thousand years, we invented a stunning number of tools in very short order — hammers, knives, needles, fishhooks, harpoons, bowls, cups, baskets, fishing line, arrows, bows, swords… The list goes on and on, and really the business of inventing specialty tools hasn’t stopped at any time in the last million years. A million years of tool-making.

I’m simplifying these tales a lot, because I want to grind an axe, and then I want to chop a point onto this spear I’m pointing. Today, an adequate “school kit” should contain more than just pens and pencils. I realize we’re worried about violence in schools, but safety scissors are dumb. Can we please give kids real tools, and let them have at least a pocket knife in their school bag? For a million years, kids as young as two have been given sharp implements and instruction in how to use them effectively. This is the patrimony of the planet, and if a kid doesn’t know how to use a knife safely by the time she learns to read, how is she going to feed herself, hmmm?

End of axe-grinding. Onto the point.

If the Kavad, and my designer friends, have taught me anything, it’s that you can’t learn to think through problems with tools you don’t have or have never learned to use. Walking around my friend Matt’s new house with him, we thought nothing of looking at misplaced doors and locations where there should be windows. He’s a carpenter! Walls in old houses aren’t solid to him. He has the tools and technology to rebuild them. My friend C takes apart commercially-made toy puppets because they don’t serve his hands very well. He rebuilds them to suit his improv games. He knows how to use a sewing machine and a glue gun, and he knows how fabric behaves when it has a head-shaped piece of foam under it. My friend Jared codes websites for a living, because he understands CSS and HTML and Java from the process of goofing around on his computer, and learning these tools. My friend K is a moderately successful chef in large part because he was cutting vegetables and making food from an early age. He knows his way around a kitchen.

These are anecdotes, of course. But it doesn’t change the reality — tools are the heritage and patrimony of the human species, and yet most schools expect and count on students to graduate with only a strong familiarity with six of them: pencil, pen, college-ruled lined paper, textbook, and correcting pen. If they’re really lucky, scissors, glue stick, ruler, rubber band, and (cheap, plastic) geometry compass will appear on the secondary list. oh, and one of the most villainous tools of all, they learn to use quite well: the bubble test.

This is appalling.

One of the things that appears so often on the list of things that American businesses want from employees is creativity. Yet they can’t get creativity from their employees because their employees learned to be creative despite (rather than because of) schools. It’s seen as an “extracurricular” skill at best. Kids learn to analyze literature only, instead of learning to create it. They study history to learn what they’re stuck with, rather than how to change it, or how to make it. And left to themselves, students learn how to use Facebook instead of learning how to make memes that take over Facebook.

So, in the comments here, i’d like you to name five tools that belong in a new, revamped “back to school kit.” They can be digital or analog. They can be online tools or physical objects. At least one of them has to be sharp, and one of them has to be upsetting. You can specify grade level or type of class, but be a little risky, and a little frisky.

Go on, I dare you.

A magician’s modern toolkit

Over at Blood and Bone, there’s an article today about resources for Technomancers.  He (she?) is writing for a magical/occult audience, but there’s a powerful list of tools that make a huge difference it keeping yourself organized as the very model of a modern magic practitioner.  It’s an interesting list of tools, and I’ll be downloading some of the suggestions. As I’ve noted here, I find the ability to use the tools of magic and magical mindset to be very useful in thinking about alternate ways to be a teacher, and a teacher of design thinking. Not all of these tools are going to be useful to all my teacher friends, but I can’t recommend the first few from Blood and Bone enough:

General Software

• Evernote is becoming absolutely critical to my process.  I drop all kinds of things into it: photographs I admire, graphs and charts, design process diagrams by other authors and other schools, scripts and lesson plans, to-do lists and materials-acquisitions list (for the DLab).  The ability to access ANYTHING in Evernote, almost anywhere – phone, web, iPad, desktop computer, is a godsend.
• Paper by fiftythree.com is becoming my go-to drawing program.  Drawing and diagramming is becoming so critical to my creative process that I can’t imagine trying to be a teacher, or a design thinker, without drawing. If you’re not drawing, you’re losing half your audience. If you’re not encouraging your students to draw — on paper, on computer, wherever — you are failing to be an effective teacher (Side note: if you don’t know Dave Gray’s “Forms, fields and flows” yet, if you haven’t COMMITTED THAT LESSON TO MEMORY, so you can give it to anyone, anywhere in the world, in 10 minutes or less, you are failing to be a 21st century teacher.  In my opinion, not humble at all.
• DayOne Journal app for iPhone, iPad, and desktop machine is my go-to journal application.  I should use Evernote, I know, but I find the process of starting a new document in EverNote for a journal entry to be clunky and difficult.  It’s probably the case that all of us teachers should be journaling a lot more than we do — which kid said what, on what day, and when, and to whom.  It’s difficult; we have other things going on; we have plenty of other demands on our time.  But we live in a digitally connected world, and we have to be prepared to justify grades, more and more,
• Gradekeeper is my tool of choice for keeping a grade book.  The fact that I can have it on my desktop and my iPad is a godsend; if I could get both versions to work from a common iCloud file, or from a server cloud storage area like Evernote, that would be awesome. For now, I work files back and forth between two places.  Brilliant and useful, though I wish the reporting features were more robust. What magicians would use this eminently teacher-centric software for, I don’t know, but it’s tremendously useful nonetheless.
• I also use the To-Do list program on my phone, as well as the voice recorder, for making recordings of things I’m trying to memorize, or to make audio notes while driving (and today I used to to record another chant, which I’ll post over at Tumblr shortly, as I did with the first [Hey, WordPress... Tumblr doesn't charge me a fee to post or present audio files... you do.  What are you going to do about that?]).

Magical Tools

I use Astrolgo (http://www.gandreas.com/iphone/astrolgo/) as my astrological tutor and charting tool. It’s a little more expensive than using astro.com, which is free, but I find it very helpful, and it’s easier to set up for someone like me who’s trying to learn more traditional astrology.

I’m using Sleep Cycle (http://www.sleepcycle.com/) as a way of tracking how many hours I’m sleeping, and how close I am to dream state, and how frequently, each night. I’ve had a REALLY irregular sleep schedule for more than a decade, and I’ve found that I need to fix my sleep schedule in order to get good habits for dreams.

I use the Mindfulness Bell by Spotlight Six Software for timing meditations.

I use TouchTarot for iPhone so I don’t have to carry around a Tarot deck with me all the time. I find that it gives me just as many reversed cards (A LOT … more than anyone else ever seems to get) as a regular deck does, which suggests strongly that I’ve got some things to fix in my life, or in my relationship with Tarot, or both.

I use Brian Browne Walker’s version of the iChing for consulting the Book of Changes. I don’t like it as much as my casual paperback book, but it’s not bad.

What’s the point?

There’s a couple of occultists reading who are already thinking, how am I going to use a grade book program? Or even just a grade book? and not in an ironic or self-conscious way. That’s just the kind of people occultists are. They think through the implications of questions like that, and even if they never come up with an answer, they will have thought about it.

But I imagine that the teachers are hard-pressed to think of something they would do with any of the digital/magical tools I mentioned. What would I use a Tarot program for?  I can hear several of my teaching colleagues asking that question. Why do I need to know what planetary hour it is, or what a horoscope is?

Leaving aside the question of whether or not these things are useful because they work (because our scientific material philosophy argues emphatically that they don’t work), I’d argue that these magical tools are all useful ways of slowing our brains down. We teachers are asked to do more and more, often with less and less, and we’re rarely cultivating the kind of mindset that allows us to understand the data we’re collecting or seeing the big picture in a kid’s understanding.  The information provided by occult tools is not exactly random, and not exactly freeform.  It opens up new paths of comprehension and new ways of seeing things. A magical mindset, practiced well enough, fits together odd data points collected by the unconscious as well as the conscious mind, with a set collection of perceived wisdom consulted in a selective way, and the result is…

insight.

 

Learning Tech Is Your Job

Our tech team at school is going through a lot of challenges right now; one staff member left partway through the year and we miss her terribly.  The other is on an extended leave of absence, and we miss her terribly.  We not only miss them for fixing our computers and network, but also because they were wonderful members of our community.  But it’s the computer and network issues I want to talk about most right now. Because of their absence, all kinds of tech problems have been cropping up around school. My colleagues have had three responses to this — how appropriate that the human response to digital difficulties is to resolve the ternary!

The first response was something like this — “we’re down one tech person anyway, already. Now we’re down two for an extended period of time… can’t we just hire a new person?”  This is sort of a nice way of saying, This isn’t my job description. That may be true.  But a lot of the things that our tech crew did for us (back in the days when we had a tech crew) were things that we could have been doing ourselves — answering kids’ questions about software during a tech lab, prepping the mobile laptop lab for a class, troubleshooting a machine, helping kids connect to their server accounts, and so on.

the result, for these (relatively few) folks, has been to back off of tech use, for the duration of the emergency. “We’re missing staff, so I’ll go back to paper methods until we have staff again.  I don’t want to be using the computer lab and risk damaging something.  And besides, it’s not my job.”  I see two different versions of this, actually.  One of them is a concern that having no tech department at all will become “the new normal”, and these teachers want to have an active tech department to help them out; they also don’t want the job of running the network to fall on them by default. Given that there are things which we, the ordinary users, shouldn’t be doing, I get this mindset, and I understand why they hang back. I even praise it — we need tech staff to do those part of the job that we can’t just learn in time to be effective at it.  The second variant of the backing-away-from-the-computer phenomenon, though, has been one more excuse to not use digital technologies.

The second option, of course, has been to dive right in anyway. These folks have sought out help from colleagues where they were unsure, or have used the mobile lab whenever they needed, or designed their projects anyway.  They’ve helped students do what they needed to do, and helped kids save their work to the server, and managed 95% of the tasks they’ve needed to by studying the technology, learning what they could in the short time we’ve been short-handed, and informing our tech department by e-mail of what they absolutely couldn’t do on their own.  It’s a can-do, “let’s figure it out” kind of mindset, and I’m proud of all my colleagues for adopting it so thoroughly

The third option, though, the one I see among so many of my colleagues, is to adopt an attitude of “I can learn this.” One of my colleagues has stepped up to learn the database system that runs our grades. Another has stepped up to help manage the mobile lab. Another has been teaching herself to use Keynote so that she can better support her students during one of their annual projects — a project she’s been running for years with tech help, but now has gamely decided to learn to do on her own.  Several other teachers have stepped up their commitment to learning to run video editing software, to better support programs all over the school.

These folks have made learning the technology a part of their job. They’re not demanding fancy training — they’re saying: “these are the tools of the next generation and my kids have to learn it… which means I have to learn it.”

Our short-handed tech staff has brought these three positions into the open, but in truth you probably see these three mindsets in your school, too.  But let me suggest to you that learning to use and understand technology is your job.  Understanding the philosophy and mindset of a digital user or programmer is part of your work as a teacher.  And if you’re not “playing” with the tools, and helping your colleagues learn them, you are disempowering yourself, and your kids, for the sake of your own pride.

Get over it. And get your hands on the keyboard today.  You’ve got learning to do.

American High-Tech

it’s not much to look at, but the industrial revolution in America was born in buildings not much different than this one in Williamsburg, Massachusetts. (Truth be told, this was a gristmill — not a political newschannel, but for making flour) Next to a fast-flowing river to provide power, this building harnessed water to generate momentum, and used momentum to do work: weave cloth, spin thread, hammer metal, and sew clothes. Despite the windows, it was likely dark and cold inside, and the workers made little in the way of money. Benefits? Leaving in three years with some wages saved and most of your fingers. Imperial? Of course. Instead of child laborers in Indonesia, black slaves toiled in Missouri to grow cotton to feed the machines here.

Now of course this building is filled with old farm equipment nobody wants any more, rather than the 19th-century latest in textile technology. It’s a reminder of how far to the periphery modern America has pushed its manufacturing, and agriculture, that we wouldn’t really recognize much of the old equipment that once inhabited this building, or the exhibits that it holds now.

I think one of the reasons why education is floundering in so many ways these days is that we don’t really know what our students will do once they leave school. Are they going to be graphic designers building websites? Probably not. The World Wide Web is dying, though the internet is stronger than ever. Are they going to be farmers and agriculturalists? Maybe. But Maybe Not. Are they going to be quantum mechanical geeks? Likely not, given that we don’t know how to teach this stuff in schools yet. We can’t even prevent adults from going all woo-woo about it now.

The high-tech changes of the last thirty years have created an environment in which the mind-set and world-view of the past — the world on which we adults are expected to teach the children — doesn’t really exist any more. Maybe my next business should be converting the Williamsburg Historical Society building into a server farm that runs on water power, and any business in town that wants a website gets storage space for free. It’s telling that here in a rural New England town, not 20 miles from the high-powered campus of the University of Massachusetts, the most powerful and important industries are a lumber mill, a brewery, and a blacksmith. How do we know what our students will be doing in 15 years when they graduate from their schooling and move into the workforce?

It’s simple.

We don’t.

Information technology and revolution

Information technology and revolution
 Originally uploaded by dgray_xplane

The sketch at right isn’t mine. But I think that the introduction of Design and Design Thinking into American middle schools will be every bit as powerful and (r)evolutionary as this device invented in Germany in the late 1440s.

Everybody assumes that Gutenberg’s press was the thing that kicked off the Reformation. But people forget that Germany was really thinking hard and long about revolt against the Church before Martin Luther came along.
When Gutenberg developed his press in Mainz, the city was in the middle of a decade-year revolt against their sovereign overlord, Archbishop Otto.

When the Archbishop retook the city in 1463, he expelled all the printers, including the penniless Gutenberg, and his now-bankrupted partner Jacob Furst. Without money, neither man could control the technology. Their apprentices claimed to be journeymen printers, and the journeymen claimed to be masters. By 1470, those men and their successors had opened printing shops all over Germany, and trained their successors.

The technology metastasized. And it was anti-clerical from the beginning. These guys had had to start from scratch, under difficult circumstances, against a reactionary and threatening government with more interest in protecting the wealthy than upholding the rights of the common people.

The technology of the internet is undergoing the same kind of revolution now. And the Occupy Wall Street movement is only the tip of the power-shift.

Be cautious what you call up.

(Hat Tip to Dave Gray for making the image available on his Flickr feed. Click through and give him some good vibes; he’s a major design mentor of mine.

Via Flickr:
Information technology and revolution.
This isn’t the first time in history that new information technologies have sparked revolution. It’s a recurring pattern.

Before the printing press, books were hand-written manuscripts available only to the clergy and the wealthy. The mostly-illiterate public relied on those in power to interpret humankind’s body of knowledge. Any communication between ordinary people relied on word of mouth and was mostly limited to short distances. In short, information was distributed in pockets and silos.

The printing press gave people a way to share information in a peer-to-peer way, bypassing the traditional power structures. The rapid information sharing that followed, via books, pamphlets, newspapers and scientific journals, effectively ended the Middle Ages and sparked the Age of Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution, and ultimately the political revolutions that resulted in the first constitutional democracies.

Today the web is having a similarly profound effect, allowing people to bypass traditional media channels and power structures to communicate with each other directly. Once again, information and ideas which were contained in pockets and silos are spreading far and wide. Once again, innovation is accelerating. Once again, mass peer-to-peer communication is enabling and empowering social, intellectual and political revolutions.

Peer-to-peer information technologies like the printing press and the web unleash powerful revolutionary forces. But revolutions begin in the streets. They often go unnoticed or ridiculed in their early stages. It took 100 years of bible-printing before Martin Luther nailed his 95 theses to a church door in Wittenburg. It was another hundred years before the first scientific journals were printed, and another hundred before the American Revolution broke out in 1775. It took more than ten years for colonial dissent to simmer before the American Revolution broke out into open war.

Travel

For a variety of reasons, this entry became lost shortly after being written last August. It’s kind of a cool story though, so it’s provided now.

I’m currently at SFO airport just outside San Francisco, drinking a Peet’s coffee and contemplating lessons learned today. In exchange for about three hours’ of extra waiting, I just scored about $700 in travel vouchers for the next year.

A lot of it rested on my willingness to be flexible, my willingness to wait until the moment was right to jump in the line to volunteer to give up my seat, and — and this was important — realizing that the passenger who was going to get bumped was a single young man, traveling with a young young woman on a last-minute vacation together. Now, it’s easy for me to make all sorts of possible assumptions about their relationship, any one of which could be wrong, but I was doing them a romantic favor. The economy is in turmoil, the political frame of our country is under severe stress, and anyone who decides to go away for a weekend under such circumstances deserves a break — which includes not stranding a couple hundreds of miles apart in two different airports. Plus, I’m a firm believer in recognizing that Friday is symbolically the day of Venus, and of love. Giving space for that when you see it — especially when the Universe is going to provide an instant symbolic reward in the form of a $700 travel credit — is, perhaps, meritorious.

I contrast this with the man who arrived just after the loving couple — the couple who took the last two seats on the place — arrived and demanded his seat. Who spoke in a loud and demanding voice for his right to board the plane. Who berated the gate manager for Southwest’s audacity in overbooking the plane. Who was almost belligerent with me when I interrupted his tirade with the gate manager. Who was boastful about his importance, even though he was dressed in casual clothes, and going to Las Vegas. Who only quieted when I said she was changing MY flight information. Who promptly got on his cellphone to complain loudly to his friend. Who may have been drinking. Who is, even now, sitting with the glazed look of a lost soul on his face, in the airport lounge just across from the dull waiting area where I sit, with a glass of some golden-amber liquid in front of him. Who, for his trouble and anger and lateness to the gate, got nothing but a wait in a bar and separation from his buddy who made the plane. He looks miserable.

Grace is a funny thing.

Someone had to experience delay on this trip. There were three people traveling, and one seat. Two were going to sit and wait for the next flight.

The Lover’s heart aches to be with the Beloved. Waiting, for them, would be an agony.The Warrior cares only for himself. Waiting is a slight to his honor and a strike to his strength that he cannot abide, yet he must. And the fury must be calmed with a bitter medicine. But the Sage acts from enlightened self-interest, greets delay with equanimity, and grows richer by strange ways. The Lover’s name is Billy, and he knows my name. His parting words? “I will remember you the rest of my days.”

It’s a fleeting form of legacy, this reckless promise of the Lover reunited with the Beloved. But that, plus $700? Very well… I accept.

Happy Friday.

Lucas’s Op-Ed at HuffPo

George Lucas, of Star Wars fame, has an editorial in yesterday’s Huffington Post which I thought was interesting.

Unfortunately, much of our system of education is locked in a time capsule that dates back to the Industrial Revolution, when learning became an exercise in pumping as much information into kids as possible. At the end of this education assembly line comes a diploma — if the student can spit back the facts correctly. But in an era where technology can deliver most of the world’s information on demand and knowledge is changing so rapidly, the model doesn’t work. Why spend $150 on textbooks that students use for only 15 weeks with information that soon becomes obsolete?

It’s a good question.  I think what it would cost for my school to go to a 1:1 iPad solution — maybe the best choice or maybe not the best, but moderately affordable for my school’s families and staff at around $600 (for software and books and device, I’m guessing)?  Call it $23,000 for staff to get hooked up, and $50,000 for middle school students (5th-8th grades).   For laptops — which for Apple gear start at around $1000? — we’re talking about $120,000.

(No, the numbers don’t make sense, Stephen.  I try to be a little coy about my school and its demographics, so I’ve introduced some fudge factors here, partly to hide the school’s demography data, and partly to include the cost of some of the new WiFi stuff we might have to install).

It’s expensive, no two ways about it.  Bringing a few small-to-midsize middle schools online is a million dollars.  We want kids to learn their machine and be successful with it — and we don’t want to burden the schools themselves with outdated inventory, either — so the schools have to get the tech or arrange for the students to buy it in a discounted or subsidized way, and then give it to the kids.

So each school is going to get a few hundred thousand dollars of equipment, and then immediately get rid of it.  And give up their right to control what’s on it.  And let students and teachers experiment with what tools and technologies work for them on their devices.

Yeah.

I just don’t see it happening in a lot of places.  There are schools out there that freak out about handing out textbooks to students, or novels, because it’s a waste of taxpayer money.  And I can see the field day to be had by Glenn Beck and the like if a school district handed out hundreds of thousands of dollars of free laptops paid for with “gov’mint money”.  And giving a laptop to a teacher?

I’m going to be a guest teacher at a school in a couple of weeks where they’re so poor, the school doesn’t even buy art supplies.   Allegedly the teachers have to provide their own supply needs like staples and paper clips.  I don’t see this school or many others, committing to a year-after-year program of spending hundreds of thousands of dollars for equipment that’s going to flee the building faster than Elvis.

Am I wrong?