I got an e-mail from Anna Mackay-Smith a few days ago to let me know she's playing opposite Ken Welsh in a special performance of Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune by Terrence McNally for the 12th Anniversary of Motley Theatre Company. Frankie and Johnny was Motley's very first playreading.
It's in Uxbridge, at the Royal Canadian Legion, 109 Franklin St., for only $15.00. Pay at the door. They're both seasoned, award-winning Stratford actors. Should be excellent.
This from Anna:
"It has been twelve years since the twinkle in Ken Welsh's and my eyes created the very first playreading that brought about the conception of The Motley Theatre Company. At the back of the old Combine Restaurant we performed a two hander called Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune by Terrence McNally on Valentine's Day, 1997. The success of that, led to another performance of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf by Edward Albee. This too was met with such enthusiasm that we started The Motley Theatre Company."
Sunday, February 8, 2009
(23) Try This Experiment with a passage from Gladwell's Blink
Read the following passage from Gladwell's B L I N K, (page 272 in my copy), and then do the quick "replacement exercise" suggested with the word at the end. I thought of this awhile ago when I was reading the book. Let me know what you think...
"But understanding someone’s statistical performance in a game is only one small part of understanding how good an athlete that person is. There is also the broader issue of ability. How good is he at the myriad of skills and attributes that it takes to be a successful athlete? How hard does he work? Is he a good teammate? Does he stay out all night drinking and doing drugs, or does he take his job seriously? Is he willing to learn from his coaches? How resilient is he in the face of adversity? When the pressure is greatest and the game is on the line, how well does he perform? Is he someone likely to be better over time or has he already peaked?
I think that we would all agree that these kinds of questions are much more complicated than --- and every bit as important as --- simple statistical measures of performance, particularly when it comes to the rarefied world of professional sports.
Imagine that you were looking at a seventeen-year-old Michael Jordan. He wasn’t the tallest or the biggest basketball player, nor the best jumper. His statistics weren’t the finest in the country. What set Michael Jordan apart from his peer was his attitude and motivation. And those qualities can’t be measured with formal tests and statistics. They can be measured only by exercising judgment, by an expert with long years of experience, drawing on that big database in his or her unconscious and concluding, yes, that they have it, or no, they don’t. The very best and most successful basketball teams --- like the best and most successful organizations of any kind --- are the ones that understand how to combine rational analysis with instinctive judgment.
Now replace the word "athlete" by "student," "coaches" with teachers" and reread the passage.
"But understanding someone’s statistical performance in a game is only one small part of understanding how good an athlete that person is. There is also the broader issue of ability. How good is he at the myriad of skills and attributes that it takes to be a successful athlete? How hard does he work? Is he a good teammate? Does he stay out all night drinking and doing drugs, or does he take his job seriously? Is he willing to learn from his coaches? How resilient is he in the face of adversity? When the pressure is greatest and the game is on the line, how well does he perform? Is he someone likely to be better over time or has he already peaked?
I think that we would all agree that these kinds of questions are much more complicated than --- and every bit as important as --- simple statistical measures of performance, particularly when it comes to the rarefied world of professional sports.
Imagine that you were looking at a seventeen-year-old Michael Jordan. He wasn’t the tallest or the biggest basketball player, nor the best jumper. His statistics weren’t the finest in the country. What set Michael Jordan apart from his peer was his attitude and motivation. And those qualities can’t be measured with formal tests and statistics. They can be measured only by exercising judgment, by an expert with long years of experience, drawing on that big database in his or her unconscious and concluding, yes, that they have it, or no, they don’t. The very best and most successful basketball teams --- like the best and most successful organizations of any kind --- are the ones that understand how to combine rational analysis with instinctive judgment.
Now replace the word "athlete" by "student," "coaches" with teachers" and reread the passage.
Saturday, February 7, 2009
(22) Outliers: The Story of Success, by Malcolm Gladwell - Time to rethink old ideas - MUST READ!
Alright, so people succeed because they're gifted, they work hard, they practise. Anyone can do it if they want to. Well, according to Gladwell in his latest book, this simply is not so. And he's got statistics to prove it.
Gladwell uses Canadian examples, for a refreshing change. Maybe it's because Gladwell himself graduated from the University of Toronto? He cleverly lulls us into thinking that successful hockey players are more talented, have practised more... Not so.
"People don't rise from nothing. We do owe something to parentage and patronage... It's not enough to ask what successful people are like. It is only by asking where they are from that we can unravel the logic behind who succeeds and who doesn't."
What he reveals is that most successful hockey players are born in January, February and March. It has nothing to do with astrology.
"It's simply that in Canada, the eligibility cutoff for age-class hockey is January 1. A boy who turns ten on January 2, then, could be playing alongside someone who doesn't turn ten until the end of the year -- and at that age, in preadolescence, a twelve-month gap in age represents an enormous difference in physical maturity."
Kind of surprising? Surprising because we're led to believe otherwise. It's talent, practice, being gifted, more motivated. Not so.
"In the beginning, (a young hockey player's) advantage isn't so much that he is inherently better, but only that he is a little older. By the age of thirteen or fourteen, with the benefit of better coaching and all that extra practice under his belt, he really is better, so he's the one more likely to make it to the Major Junior A league, and from there into the big leagues."
As it turns out then, by picking the boys who appear to be "the best" every year means that coaches are merely picking the eldest - those born in January, February and March.
Gladwell continues:
"Do you see the consequences of the way we have chosen to think about success? Because we so profoundly personalize success, we miss opportunities to lift others onto the top rung. We make rules that frustrate achievement. We prematurely write off people as failures. We are too much in awe of those who succeed and far too dismissive of those who fail. And, most of all, we become much too passive. We overlook just how large a role we all play --- and by "we" I mean society --- in determining who makes it and who doesn't.
It we chose to, we could acknowledge that cutoff dates matter. We could set up two or even three hockey leagues, divided up by month of birth...
Schools could do the same thing. Elementary and middle schools could put the January through April-born students in one class, the May through August in another class, and those born in September through December in the third class. They could let students learn with and compete against other students of the same maturity level. It would be a little more complicated administratively... but it would level the playing field for those who --- through no fault of their own --- have been dealt a big disadvantage by the educational system. We could easily take control of the machinery of achievement --- not just in sports... but in other more consequential areas as well. But we don't. And why? Because we cling to the idea that success is a simple function of individual merit and that the world in which we all grow up and the rules we choose to write as a society don't matter at all."
New ideas to break down old barriers - so interesting.
Gladwell uses Canadian examples, for a refreshing change. Maybe it's because Gladwell himself graduated from the University of Toronto? He cleverly lulls us into thinking that successful hockey players are more talented, have practised more... Not so.
"People don't rise from nothing. We do owe something to parentage and patronage... It's not enough to ask what successful people are like. It is only by asking where they are from that we can unravel the logic behind who succeeds and who doesn't."
What he reveals is that most successful hockey players are born in January, February and March. It has nothing to do with astrology.
"It's simply that in Canada, the eligibility cutoff for age-class hockey is January 1. A boy who turns ten on January 2, then, could be playing alongside someone who doesn't turn ten until the end of the year -- and at that age, in preadolescence, a twelve-month gap in age represents an enormous difference in physical maturity."
Kind of surprising? Surprising because we're led to believe otherwise. It's talent, practice, being gifted, more motivated. Not so.
"In the beginning, (a young hockey player's) advantage isn't so much that he is inherently better, but only that he is a little older. By the age of thirteen or fourteen, with the benefit of better coaching and all that extra practice under his belt, he really is better, so he's the one more likely to make it to the Major Junior A league, and from there into the big leagues."
As it turns out then, by picking the boys who appear to be "the best" every year means that coaches are merely picking the eldest - those born in January, February and March.
Gladwell continues:
"Do you see the consequences of the way we have chosen to think about success? Because we so profoundly personalize success, we miss opportunities to lift others onto the top rung. We make rules that frustrate achievement. We prematurely write off people as failures. We are too much in awe of those who succeed and far too dismissive of those who fail. And, most of all, we become much too passive. We overlook just how large a role we all play --- and by "we" I mean society --- in determining who makes it and who doesn't.
It we chose to, we could acknowledge that cutoff dates matter. We could set up two or even three hockey leagues, divided up by month of birth...
Schools could do the same thing. Elementary and middle schools could put the January through April-born students in one class, the May through August in another class, and those born in September through December in the third class. They could let students learn with and compete against other students of the same maturity level. It would be a little more complicated administratively... but it would level the playing field for those who --- through no fault of their own --- have been dealt a big disadvantage by the educational system. We could easily take control of the machinery of achievement --- not just in sports... but in other more consequential areas as well. But we don't. And why? Because we cling to the idea that success is a simple function of individual merit and that the world in which we all grow up and the rules we choose to write as a society don't matter at all."
New ideas to break down old barriers - so interesting.
Wednesday, February 4, 2009
(21) Is technology producing a decline in critical thinking and analysis? Must read - Too good to miss
Is technology producing a decline in critical thinking and analysis?
Studies shed light on multi-tasking, video games and learning
Stuart Wolpert , UCLA Newsroom Online. http://www.newsroom.ucla.edu/portal/ucla/default.aspx 1/27/2009
As technology has played a bigger role in our lives, our skills in critical thinking and analysis have declined, while our visual skills have improved, according to research by Patricia Greenfield, UCLA distinguished professor of psychology and director of the Children's Digital Media Center, Los Angeles.
Learners have changed as a result of their exposure to technology, says Greenfield, who analyzed more than 50 studies on learning and technology, including research on multi-tasking and the use of computers, the Internet and video games. Her research was published this month in the journal Science.
Reading for pleasure, which has declined among young people in recent decades, enhances thinking and engages the imagination in a way that visual media such as video games and television do not, Greenfield said.
How much should schools use new media, versus older techniques such as reading and classroom discussion?
"No one medium is good for everything," Greenfield said. "If we want to develop a variety of skills, we need a balanced media diet. Each medium has costs and benefits in terms of what skills each develops."
Schools should make more effort to test students using visual media, she said, by asking them to prepare PowerPoint presentations, for example.
"As students spend more time with visual media and less time with print, evaluation methods that include visual media will give a better picture of what they actually know," said Greenfield, who has been using films in her classes since the 1970s.
"By using more visual media, students will process information better," she said. "However, most visual media are real-time media that do not allow time for reflection, analysis or imagination — those do not get developed by real-time media such as television or video games. Technology is not a panacea in education, because of the skills that are being lost.
"Studies show that reading develops imagination, induction, reflection and critical thinking, as well as vocabulary," Greenfield said. "Reading for pleasure is the key to developing these skills. Students today have more visual literacy and less print literacy. Many students do not read for pleasure and have not for decades."
Parents should encourage their children to read and should read to their young children, she said.
Among the studies Greenfield analyzed was a classroom study showing that students who were given access to the Internet during class and were encouraged to use it during lectures did not process what the speaker said as well as students who did not have Internet access. When students were tested after class lectures, those who did not have Internet access performed better than those who did.
"Wiring classrooms for Internet access does not enhance learning," Greenfield said.
Another study Greenfield analyzed found that college students who watched "CNN Headline News" with just the news anchor on screen and without the "news crawl" across the bottom of the screen remembered significantly more facts from the televised broadcast than those who watched it with the distraction of the crawling text and with additional stock market and weather information on the screen.
These and other studies show that multi-tasking "prevents people from getting a deeper understanding of information," Greenfield said.
Yet, for certain tasks, divided attention is important, she added.
"If you're a pilot, you need to be able to monitor multiple instruments at the same time. If you're a cab driver, you need to pay attention to multiple events at the same time. If you're in the military, you need to multi-task too," she said. "On the other hand, if you're trying to solve a complex problem, you need sustained concentration. If you are doing a task that requires deep and sustained thought, multi-tasking is detrimental."
Do video games strengthen skill in multi-tasking?
New Zealand researcher Paul Kearney measured multi-tasking and found that people who played a realistic video game before engaging in a military computer simulation showed a significant improvement in their ability to multi-task, compared with people in a control group who did not play the video game. In the simulation, the player operates a weapons console, locates targets and reacts quickly to events.
Greenfield wonders, however, whether the tasks in the simulation could have been performed better if done alone.
More than 85 percent of video games contain violence, one study found, and multiple studies of violent media games have shown that they can produce many negative effects, including aggressive behavior and desensitization to real-life violence, Greenfield said in summarizing the findings.
In another study, video game skills were a better predictor of surgeons' success in performing laparoscopic surgery than actual laparoscopic surgery experience. In laparoscopic surgery, a surgeon makes a small incision in a patient and inserts a viewing tube with a small camera. The surgeon examines internal organs on a video monitor connected to the tube and can use the viewing tube to guide the surgery.
"Video game skill predicted laparoscopic surgery skills," Greenfield said. "The best video game players made 47 percent fewer errors and performed 39 percent faster in laparoscopic tasks than the worst video game players."
Visual intelligence has been rising globally for 50 years, Greenfield said. In 1942, people's visual performance, as measured by a visual intelligence test known as Raven's Progressive Matrices, went steadily down with age and declined substantially from age 25 to 65. By 1992, there was a much less significant age-related disparity in visual intelligence, Greenfield said.
"In a 1992 study, visual IQ stayed almost flat from age 25 to 65," she said.
Greenfield believes much of this change is related to our increased use of technology, as well as other factors, including increased levels of formal education, improved nutrition, smaller families and increased societal complexity.
The Children's Digital Media Center, Los Angeles, has received federal funding from the National Science Foundation.
UCLA is California's largest university, with an enrollment of nearly 38,000 undergraduate and graduate students. The UCLA College of Letters and Science and the university's 11 professional schools feature renowned faculty and offer more than 323 degree programs and majors. UCLA is a national and international leader in the breadth and quality of its academic, research, health care, cultural, continuing education and athletic programs. Four alumni and five faculty have been awarded the Nobel Prize.
http://www.newsroom.ucla.edu/portal/ucla/default.aspx
Studies shed light on multi-tasking, video games and learning
Stuart Wolpert , UCLA Newsroom Online. http://www.newsroom.ucla.edu/portal/ucla/default.aspx 1/27/2009
As technology has played a bigger role in our lives, our skills in critical thinking and analysis have declined, while our visual skills have improved, according to research by Patricia Greenfield, UCLA distinguished professor of psychology and director of the Children's Digital Media Center, Los Angeles.
Learners have changed as a result of their exposure to technology, says Greenfield, who analyzed more than 50 studies on learning and technology, including research on multi-tasking and the use of computers, the Internet and video games. Her research was published this month in the journal Science.
Reading for pleasure, which has declined among young people in recent decades, enhances thinking and engages the imagination in a way that visual media such as video games and television do not, Greenfield said.
How much should schools use new media, versus older techniques such as reading and classroom discussion?
"No one medium is good for everything," Greenfield said. "If we want to develop a variety of skills, we need a balanced media diet. Each medium has costs and benefits in terms of what skills each develops."
Schools should make more effort to test students using visual media, she said, by asking them to prepare PowerPoint presentations, for example.
"As students spend more time with visual media and less time with print, evaluation methods that include visual media will give a better picture of what they actually know," said Greenfield, who has been using films in her classes since the 1970s.
"By using more visual media, students will process information better," she said. "However, most visual media are real-time media that do not allow time for reflection, analysis or imagination — those do not get developed by real-time media such as television or video games. Technology is not a panacea in education, because of the skills that are being lost.
"Studies show that reading develops imagination, induction, reflection and critical thinking, as well as vocabulary," Greenfield said. "Reading for pleasure is the key to developing these skills. Students today have more visual literacy and less print literacy. Many students do not read for pleasure and have not for decades."
Parents should encourage their children to read and should read to their young children, she said.
Among the studies Greenfield analyzed was a classroom study showing that students who were given access to the Internet during class and were encouraged to use it during lectures did not process what the speaker said as well as students who did not have Internet access. When students were tested after class lectures, those who did not have Internet access performed better than those who did.
"Wiring classrooms for Internet access does not enhance learning," Greenfield said.
Another study Greenfield analyzed found that college students who watched "CNN Headline News" with just the news anchor on screen and without the "news crawl" across the bottom of the screen remembered significantly more facts from the televised broadcast than those who watched it with the distraction of the crawling text and with additional stock market and weather information on the screen.
These and other studies show that multi-tasking "prevents people from getting a deeper understanding of information," Greenfield said.
Yet, for certain tasks, divided attention is important, she added.
"If you're a pilot, you need to be able to monitor multiple instruments at the same time. If you're a cab driver, you need to pay attention to multiple events at the same time. If you're in the military, you need to multi-task too," she said. "On the other hand, if you're trying to solve a complex problem, you need sustained concentration. If you are doing a task that requires deep and sustained thought, multi-tasking is detrimental."
Do video games strengthen skill in multi-tasking?
New Zealand researcher Paul Kearney measured multi-tasking and found that people who played a realistic video game before engaging in a military computer simulation showed a significant improvement in their ability to multi-task, compared with people in a control group who did not play the video game. In the simulation, the player operates a weapons console, locates targets and reacts quickly to events.
Greenfield wonders, however, whether the tasks in the simulation could have been performed better if done alone.
More than 85 percent of video games contain violence, one study found, and multiple studies of violent media games have shown that they can produce many negative effects, including aggressive behavior and desensitization to real-life violence, Greenfield said in summarizing the findings.
In another study, video game skills were a better predictor of surgeons' success in performing laparoscopic surgery than actual laparoscopic surgery experience. In laparoscopic surgery, a surgeon makes a small incision in a patient and inserts a viewing tube with a small camera. The surgeon examines internal organs on a video monitor connected to the tube and can use the viewing tube to guide the surgery.
"Video game skill predicted laparoscopic surgery skills," Greenfield said. "The best video game players made 47 percent fewer errors and performed 39 percent faster in laparoscopic tasks than the worst video game players."
Visual intelligence has been rising globally for 50 years, Greenfield said. In 1942, people's visual performance, as measured by a visual intelligence test known as Raven's Progressive Matrices, went steadily down with age and declined substantially from age 25 to 65. By 1992, there was a much less significant age-related disparity in visual intelligence, Greenfield said.
"In a 1992 study, visual IQ stayed almost flat from age 25 to 65," she said.
Greenfield believes much of this change is related to our increased use of technology, as well as other factors, including increased levels of formal education, improved nutrition, smaller families and increased societal complexity.
The Children's Digital Media Center, Los Angeles, has received federal funding from the National Science Foundation.
UCLA is California's largest university, with an enrollment of nearly 38,000 undergraduate and graduate students. The UCLA College of Letters and Science and the university's 11 professional schools feature renowned faculty and offer more than 323 degree programs and majors. UCLA is a national and international leader in the breadth and quality of its academic, research, health care, cultural, continuing education and athletic programs. Four alumni and five faculty have been awarded the Nobel Prize.
http://www.newsroom.ucla.edu/portal/ucla/default.aspx
Sunday, February 1, 2009
(20) Michael Enright at the Ontario Library Association Superconference, January 30, 2009
Michael Enright, CBC's veteran broadcaster and journalist, was the focus of the all conference plenary session on Friday morning. However, "veteran" is a word Mr. Enright doesn't care for that much. "'Veteran journalist' is usually followed by 'I didn't know he was still alive,'" he quipped. "And a journalist borrows money from a reporter. A journalist is a someone with no ideas, and the ability to express them."
Libraries and reading have figured prominently in Mr. Enright's life and career. After he finished his shift at the Globe and Mail, he would go into the "morgue," or the library, and read his way through the microfiche of newspapers stored there.
His first library was Wychwood, though. What gave him the spark to read was the Hardy Boys, and then on to Robert Louis Stevenson and Mark Twain, followed by Dickens. Every year he rereads David Copperfield.
Enright admitted that he wasn't the best of students. "The car accident that was my high school career, I spent a couple of happy years in Grade 12." But this didn't prevent him from making a career out of words and writing. He says his enduring quality is his curiosity, and has a fellowship in Chinese History.
When he graduated from high school, he got a job at a newspaper in Brampton. And after renting a room at the local YMCA, he went directly to the local library, a Carnegie library, to pursue his quest for knowledge.
Unlike most people these days who spend about eight hours in front of a screen, Mr. Enright doesn't own a television. "I'm an addict to TV and electronic media, so if I had one, I'd lose my mortal soul."
Like many people, however, Enright thinks we're living in a post-print society, but he also wonders if "we're living in a post-literate society. Christopher Hitchens (author of God Is Not Great - http://www.hitchensweb.com) says the US is a profoundly post-literate society, where public discourse suffers. Political leaders now need not be competent, sincere... they just need a story. But in Canada, 87% of us read a book last year; 85% say reading is an important part of our lives."
Mr. Enright admitted that he reads "four newspapers a day, and the Toronto Sun. I'm supposed to be informed, but sometimes I feel less informed now that I did in my 20s."
"The late Neil Postman said that we're in danger of digitalizing ourselves. We're getting to a tipping point where e-books are becoming more prevalent. It's doubtful that electronic books will replace our print cousins, but do we want to increase the time we spend in front of a screen?"
"We are people of the book, no matter what our religion. Readership is up at many libraries. Toronto has the largest library system in North America. The library is the pace car, the anchor."
"Joseph Brodsky, recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature said, 'There are worse crimes than burning books. Not reading them is one of them.'"
Mr. Enright ended with one of my favourites: "According to Thomson-Reuters, 'Without knowledge, it's just data.'"
You should have been there!
Libraries and reading have figured prominently in Mr. Enright's life and career. After he finished his shift at the Globe and Mail, he would go into the "morgue," or the library, and read his way through the microfiche of newspapers stored there.
His first library was Wychwood, though. What gave him the spark to read was the Hardy Boys, and then on to Robert Louis Stevenson and Mark Twain, followed by Dickens. Every year he rereads David Copperfield.
Enright admitted that he wasn't the best of students. "The car accident that was my high school career, I spent a couple of happy years in Grade 12." But this didn't prevent him from making a career out of words and writing. He says his enduring quality is his curiosity, and has a fellowship in Chinese History.
When he graduated from high school, he got a job at a newspaper in Brampton. And after renting a room at the local YMCA, he went directly to the local library, a Carnegie library, to pursue his quest for knowledge.
Unlike most people these days who spend about eight hours in front of a screen, Mr. Enright doesn't own a television. "I'm an addict to TV and electronic media, so if I had one, I'd lose my mortal soul."
Like many people, however, Enright thinks we're living in a post-print society, but he also wonders if "we're living in a post-literate society. Christopher Hitchens (author of God Is Not Great - http://www.hitchensweb.com) says the US is a profoundly post-literate society, where public discourse suffers. Political leaders now need not be competent, sincere... they just need a story. But in Canada, 87% of us read a book last year; 85% say reading is an important part of our lives."
Mr. Enright admitted that he reads "four newspapers a day, and the Toronto Sun. I'm supposed to be informed, but sometimes I feel less informed now that I did in my 20s."
"The late Neil Postman said that we're in danger of digitalizing ourselves. We're getting to a tipping point where e-books are becoming more prevalent. It's doubtful that electronic books will replace our print cousins, but do we want to increase the time we spend in front of a screen?"
"We are people of the book, no matter what our religion. Readership is up at many libraries. Toronto has the largest library system in North America. The library is the pace car, the anchor."
"Joseph Brodsky, recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature said, 'There are worse crimes than burning books. Not reading them is one of them.'"
Mr. Enright ended with one of my favourites: "According to Thomson-Reuters, 'Without knowledge, it's just data.'"
You should have been there!
(19) Eckhart Tolle at Roy Thomson Hall (www.eckharttolle.com and www.soundstrue.com)
Eckhart Tolle hosted a full house at Roy Thomson Hall on January 30 with The Power of Presence: Going Beyond Ego, and January 31 with Enlightened Relationships: The Arising of the New Consciousness.
Both evenings, there wasn't a single seat empty in the hall. Middle-aged parents came with their early-20s children, or as Tolle put it in the second evening, "Grown-up children, if there is such a thing."
Singles, groups of friends, couples, people in wheelchairs, were all there to hear Tolle's message which you can find on his website (www.eckharttolle.com): The World Can Only Change From Within.
It was almost too coincidental that, when I walked into the hall the second evening, I met Larissa, with whom I had done a five-week meditation course (masks and Jung), just before Christmas, led by Dr. Mana Waite, a very experienced meditation teacher (http://www.openmindmeditation.com.au/about_mana.php).
Both evenings, Tami Simon, publisher of Sounds True (www.soundstrue.com), reminded the audience not to applaud when Mr. Tolle walked onto the stage. She also pointed out that Tolle is a "frequency holder" of calmness and being and transmits it to others.
However, Tolle has a humble presence. He's slightly stooped, wears simple clothing (a light brown vest over a yellow shirt, brown pants and shoes), and has a soft voice. He sat in a plain chair in front of a microphone and spoke slowly, non-stop, for a full two hours.
Mr. Tolle's presentations are sprinkled with frequent humour to set his audience at ease. He greeted us the second evening with, "I was in the green room and was lucky enough to pick up a brochure that told me I was to speak about enlightened relationships tonight. Oh..."
"Yes, I'm here to talk about the arising consciousness... It's arising, otherwise you wouldn't be here, that is, if you came here voluntarily."
Tolle reminded us, though, that this new consciousness isn't here permanently: "Your mind will be fully here tonight, but might also take you away to tomororw's plans or your problems; then it will come back to the present moment."
When we let go of the past and stop worrying about the future, we can then dwell in the present moment, without interference from "I am this, I am that." The most we can say, then, is "I am," no more, no less.
Then thinking becomes a beautiful tool. We can use our mind to express something beyond definitions or labels. We find that space inside ourselves, so the personal history is no longer important. We no longer carry around with us the story of the unhappy me. The past is gone, the future doesn't exist. Relationships and communication can then change.
And the signs of change are all around, according to Tolle. The election of Obama couldn't have happened twenty years ago. No one thought communism would fall, either. We thought it would be here for hundreds of years. Not so.
More prophetic were Tolle's final words, which he borrowed from the New Testament:
"The kingdom of heaven does not come with signs to be observed. It is therefore not outside, but within, the innermost reality."
Both evenings, there wasn't a single seat empty in the hall. Middle-aged parents came with their early-20s children, or as Tolle put it in the second evening, "Grown-up children, if there is such a thing."
Singles, groups of friends, couples, people in wheelchairs, were all there to hear Tolle's message which you can find on his website (www.eckharttolle.com): The World Can Only Change From Within.
It was almost too coincidental that, when I walked into the hall the second evening, I met Larissa, with whom I had done a five-week meditation course (masks and Jung), just before Christmas, led by Dr. Mana Waite, a very experienced meditation teacher (http://www.openmindmeditation.com.au/about_mana.php).
Both evenings, Tami Simon, publisher of Sounds True (www.soundstrue.com), reminded the audience not to applaud when Mr. Tolle walked onto the stage. She also pointed out that Tolle is a "frequency holder" of calmness and being and transmits it to others.
However, Tolle has a humble presence. He's slightly stooped, wears simple clothing (a light brown vest over a yellow shirt, brown pants and shoes), and has a soft voice. He sat in a plain chair in front of a microphone and spoke slowly, non-stop, for a full two hours.
Mr. Tolle's presentations are sprinkled with frequent humour to set his audience at ease. He greeted us the second evening with, "I was in the green room and was lucky enough to pick up a brochure that told me I was to speak about enlightened relationships tonight. Oh..."
"Yes, I'm here to talk about the arising consciousness... It's arising, otherwise you wouldn't be here, that is, if you came here voluntarily."
Tolle reminded us, though, that this new consciousness isn't here permanently: "Your mind will be fully here tonight, but might also take you away to tomororw's plans or your problems; then it will come back to the present moment."
When we let go of the past and stop worrying about the future, we can then dwell in the present moment, without interference from "I am this, I am that." The most we can say, then, is "I am," no more, no less.
Then thinking becomes a beautiful tool. We can use our mind to express something beyond definitions or labels. We find that space inside ourselves, so the personal history is no longer important. We no longer carry around with us the story of the unhappy me. The past is gone, the future doesn't exist. Relationships and communication can then change.
And the signs of change are all around, according to Tolle. The election of Obama couldn't have happened twenty years ago. No one thought communism would fall, either. We thought it would be here for hundreds of years. Not so.
More prophetic were Tolle's final words, which he borrowed from the New Testament:
"The kingdom of heaven does not come with signs to be observed. It is therefore not outside, but within, the innermost reality."
Saturday, January 31, 2009
(18) Norah Young's Spark on CBC: The Newspaper Is Not Dead! www.sparkblog.ca/spark
Strange things are happening out there in newspaper land, according to Norah Young in her Spark interview with Dan Pachenko on CBC this afternoon. You can find Young's interview already on the Printcasting website: http://www.printcasting.com, or the CBC podcast at http://www.cbc.ca/spark/2009/01/episode-64-january-28-31-2009. Check it out. Really interesting.
So, contrary to popular belief, the newspaper is not dead. People are now taking blogs and turning them into newspapers. Who would have thunk it? Ben Terrett has dont this in England.
With the help of Printcasting (check out the above-mentioned website), it will be posible for anyone "to create a local print newspaper, magazine or newsletter wiht local ads. No money, tools or design are required. Only passion!"
This has also been done in Chicago and San Francisco
And I'll leave the last word about this new phenomenon to the Latino community:
Printcasting.com promueve la edición en papel en la era digital - Periodismo Ciudadano [...] adiós al papel no parece tan sencillo, de hecho Printcasting nace para “hacer más relevante la impresión en la era digital”. En la portada de la [...]
A mas tarde,
Roberto
So, contrary to popular belief, the newspaper is not dead. People are now taking blogs and turning them into newspapers. Who would have thunk it? Ben Terrett has dont this in England.
With the help of Printcasting (check out the above-mentioned website), it will be posible for anyone "to create a local print newspaper, magazine or newsletter wiht local ads. No money, tools or design are required. Only passion!"
This has also been done in Chicago and San Francisco
And I'll leave the last word about this new phenomenon to the Latino community:
Printcasting.com promueve la edición en papel en la era digital - Periodismo Ciudadano [...] adiós al papel no parece tan sencillo, de hecho Printcasting nace para “hacer más relevante la impresión en la era digital”. En la portada de la [...]
A mas tarde,
Roberto
(17) Richard Florida, Stephen Marche, Will Richardson, Michael Enright, Eckhart Tolle
What happens to your brain when you attend seminars, all within the space of 48 hours, given by people such as Richard Florida, Stephen Marche, Will Richardson, Michael Enright, Eckhart Tolle, while reading A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule The Future, by Daniel Pink?
Where's the brain research on that one?
I probably won't know that answer for quite some time, if ever.
In all these discussions, however, a thought did occur to me. People keep talking about IT, or Information Technology, not KT, or Knowledge Technology. Information has always been more or less readily available in democratic, open societies, but not everyone has known how to use it or turn it into knowledge. Can there even be a "Knowledge Technology," then? "Knowledge Technology" doesn't even sound right. Can knowledge be created?
Knowledge is what will distinguish one individual from another, or will impress: "That's impressive. You know so much." or "She's very intelligent. She knows a lot."
Armed with a certain amount of knowledge, we're also in a better position to make connections and be better critical thinkers. Without knowledge, we exchange "opinions," often erroneous, based on nothing much at all. This is not critical thinking, but falling into mind traps, stereotypes, prejudices, perceptions and preconceived ideas.
Some people, like Will Richardson, feel that since information is even more readily available than ever, thanks to technology, we no longer have to memorize dry facts. "Why do my kids have to learn the capitals of the 50 US states?"
I would say that maybe, because we're born with a memory, we should be willing to develop it with some kind of knowledge relevant to places where we live. Why not learn the ten Canadian provinces and their capitals if you're Canadian? Why not learn the fifty states and their capitals if you're American? You can't die of "brain crammage."
And I would suggest we don't stop there. Learn the planet, learn the continents, the counries located there, maybe their capitals as well, so that if and when we are in a position of responsibility (or even not), we know where Africa, Irak or Russia are on the map, unlike Reagan, Bush or Palin who made "international fools" of themselves, and of their country, when they demonstrated their lack of knowledge about the world.
More later about Florida, Marche, Richardson, Enright, Tolle.
Stay tuned.
Where's the brain research on that one?
I probably won't know that answer for quite some time, if ever.
In all these discussions, however, a thought did occur to me. People keep talking about IT, or Information Technology, not KT, or Knowledge Technology. Information has always been more or less readily available in democratic, open societies, but not everyone has known how to use it or turn it into knowledge. Can there even be a "Knowledge Technology," then? "Knowledge Technology" doesn't even sound right. Can knowledge be created?
Knowledge is what will distinguish one individual from another, or will impress: "That's impressive. You know so much." or "She's very intelligent. She knows a lot."
Armed with a certain amount of knowledge, we're also in a better position to make connections and be better critical thinkers. Without knowledge, we exchange "opinions," often erroneous, based on nothing much at all. This is not critical thinking, but falling into mind traps, stereotypes, prejudices, perceptions and preconceived ideas.
Some people, like Will Richardson, feel that since information is even more readily available than ever, thanks to technology, we no longer have to memorize dry facts. "Why do my kids have to learn the capitals of the 50 US states?"
I would say that maybe, because we're born with a memory, we should be willing to develop it with some kind of knowledge relevant to places where we live. Why not learn the ten Canadian provinces and their capitals if you're Canadian? Why not learn the fifty states and their capitals if you're American? You can't die of "brain crammage."
And I would suggest we don't stop there. Learn the planet, learn the continents, the counries located there, maybe their capitals as well, so that if and when we are in a position of responsibility (or even not), we know where Africa, Irak or Russia are on the map, unlike Reagan, Bush or Palin who made "international fools" of themselves, and of their country, when they demonstrated their lack of knowledge about the world.
More later about Florida, Marche, Richardson, Enright, Tolle.
Stay tuned.
Thursday, January 29, 2009
(16) Too Much Information! The Ontario Library Association Superconference: You Live, You Learn.
Yes, too much information, but it won't give you indigestion.
Today's seminars exceeded all expectations, starting with Tim Gauntley's New Model for Inquiry in the School Library Program, followed by Dr. Don Klinger's report on Exemplary School Library Programs, Richard Florida's Creative Communities and Stephen Marche's Thousand Words About Our Culture.
So much to share and so little time. But I'll give a better rundown on all these events later.
You should have been there! Stay tuned...
Rob
Today's seminars exceeded all expectations, starting with Tim Gauntley's New Model for Inquiry in the School Library Program, followed by Dr. Don Klinger's report on Exemplary School Library Programs, Richard Florida's Creative Communities and Stephen Marche's Thousand Words About Our Culture.
So much to share and so little time. But I'll give a better rundown on all these events later.
You should have been there! Stay tuned...
Rob
Wednesday, January 28, 2009
(15) Identity Theft: Ixquick Metasearch Protects Your Privacy - Google Doesn't
http://Ixquick.com - That's right.
You heard it first from me!
"Be careful what you key into your search engine. It's all being recorded: every cough, every sneeze, every word. We need to start demanding that this information be made private."
This is what I heard early this morning on George Noory's Coast-to-Coast show (http://www.coasttocoastam.com - do yourself a favour and check it out), CKTB Radio 610, St. Catharines, or 640 Toronto, an alternate source of information that regular news providers don't give us. I've been listening to this show, originally hosted by Art Bell, controversial radio figure now retired, for at least ten years now, and have learned so much.
I didn't catch the lady's last name, but Catherine was talking about how our privacy is being eroded through the Internet, closed circuit television and microchip implants (that cause tumours and cancer in animals) to track our activities.
She strongly recommends that you use http://ixquick.com, a Dutch metasearch engine, which is the only one that promises not to record what you're searching. Leave it to the Dutch, those progressive people, to invent something that protects privacy and human rights.
I'll have to be sure to introduce this to the students at Langstaff and spread the word among my colleagues, even today at the Ontario Library Association's Superconference. More on that in my next post.
P.S. It's really Thursday morning, Toronto time. I don't know why this is still showing Wednesday.
You heard it first from me!
"Be careful what you key into your search engine. It's all being recorded: every cough, every sneeze, every word. We need to start demanding that this information be made private."
This is what I heard early this morning on George Noory's Coast-to-Coast show (http://www.coasttocoastam.com - do yourself a favour and check it out), CKTB Radio 610, St. Catharines, or 640 Toronto, an alternate source of information that regular news providers don't give us. I've been listening to this show, originally hosted by Art Bell, controversial radio figure now retired, for at least ten years now, and have learned so much.
I didn't catch the lady's last name, but Catherine was talking about how our privacy is being eroded through the Internet, closed circuit television and microchip implants (that cause tumours and cancer in animals) to track our activities.
She strongly recommends that you use http://ixquick.com, a Dutch metasearch engine, which is the only one that promises not to record what you're searching. Leave it to the Dutch, those progressive people, to invent something that protects privacy and human rights.
I'll have to be sure to introduce this to the students at Langstaff and spread the word among my colleagues, even today at the Ontario Library Association's Superconference. More on that in my next post.
P.S. It's really Thursday morning, Toronto time. I don't know why this is still showing Wednesday.
(14) Reading Crisis or Anxiety? Sunday Morning's Michael Enright interviews Marian Botsford Fraser, Lindsay Waters and Ben McNally, May 20, 2007
A couple of years ago, May 20, 2007, to be exact, I heard Michael Enright, CBC's distinguished Sunday Morning host, lead Marion Botsford Fraser, Ben McNally and Lindsay Waters in a fascinating discussion about books and reading.
Sunday Morning is my all-time weekend addiction. Everything stops till it's over. And while I listened to this particular show, I actually sat at my laptop and took notes! Read on. You won't want to miss the discussion.
Writer Marian Botsford Fraser's Requiem for My Brother was shortlisted for the 2007 British Columbia Award for Canadian Nonfiction, and winner of CBC's Northern Ontario Reads(http://www.marianbotsfordfraser.ca).
Lindsay Waters, author of Enemies of Promise: Publishing, Perishing, and the Eclipse of Scholarship (The University of Chicago Press, 2004, http://www.press.uchicago.edu/presssite/metadata.epl?mode=synopsis&bookkey=22847), maintains that the pressure to publish in the academic world is leading to the destruction of the "quality of educational institutions and the ideals of higher learning," and to the destruction of those who participate in it.
Ben McNally is owner of Ben McNally Books, 366 Bay Street Toronto (Bay and Queen, http://www.benmcnallybooks.com), and host of the Globe and Mail/Ben McNally Brunch. The next one is scheduled for Sunday, February 8, 2009, 10:00 am, King Edward Hotel: Ana Siljak, author of Angel of Vengeance; Elizabeth Abbott, author of Sugar: A Bittersweet History; Tim Cook, author of Shock Troops.
But wait - let's get back to the discussion with Enright.
Mr. Enright raised the interesting point that we're all under so much pressure to read these days that maybe we'd just rather watch TV. We rush to the bookstore to get the "Fifty Books You Must Read Before You Die."
Marian Botsford Fraser seemed to agree, adding that there's a type of "general anxiety, that there’s so much out there that we must be on top of it all. It's a great fallacy of our time – that we’ve Googled something, or we’ve read the Wikipedia entry that we’ve had the experience: it replaces the act of reading a book, rather than doing it; it’s on the screen, so we’ve done it. Anxiety that I’m so far behind, how am I going to do that – check out the New Yorker review to see what I’m missing."
Lindsay Waters commented that there's such a "pressure to increase the number of publications, that the actual content of the book doesn’t matter any more: if the book on my CV, it's just something that will be tabulated, the content doesn’t matter, the content is more distant from us."
Waters continued: "The anxiety about reading is yet another way of distancing us from another act. We want to speed everything up. We should slow down, otherwise we won’t enjoy reading. We need people pollinating from one brain to another, soul to another, psyche to another. If we don’t read slowly enough, this type of pollinating won’t take place."
What a fascinating take on reading. Can you see why I'm addicted to Enright's Sunday Morning?
Ben McNally added, "I can’t read quickly. I’ve always served a sophisticated clientele. People who come to my bookstore are looking for something different -- for enlightenment -- they don’t want to read a book like every other one. People are looking for value, rather than books that are disposable."
Marian Botsford Fraser: "There's a pressure to read the 'latest' – people want to because of this wash of info. out there. There's too much out there. My bedside table's disappeared under the volumes. 'What’s your summer reading, your beach reading? Do I have time for a huge book?' Because they’ve got too much to read."
Lindsay Waters: "I welcome this. As a publisher, I realize that we’re all looking for reasons not to read... We want to know that the world’s gotten bigger, better... But we’ve been burned many times by going out and reading something; don’t just listen to what Oprah tells you to read. What I’m going to take on my vacation takes us to the process of what’s at the heart of reading: up to page five, if it hasn’t grabbed me, I don't want to read it."
The point was also raised that we want to read books so we can go to a cocktail party and talk to someone we don’t know about a book we’ve read. Have you ever faked having read a book? I can't imagine that.
Michael Enright weighed in with a question: "Is there a book that you felt you had to read, but you couldn’t read it… Ulysses, or “Useless”. I’ve started that book 5,000 times…"
Alright, I must admit I'm guilty of that one.
Or what about, "Don't judge a book by its movie?"
"I dunno." But I think I'll stay addicted to reading...
Sunday Morning is my all-time weekend addiction. Everything stops till it's over. And while I listened to this particular show, I actually sat at my laptop and took notes! Read on. You won't want to miss the discussion.
Writer Marian Botsford Fraser's Requiem for My Brother was shortlisted for the 2007 British Columbia Award for Canadian Nonfiction, and winner of CBC's Northern Ontario Reads(http://www.marianbotsfordfraser.ca).
Lindsay Waters, author of Enemies of Promise: Publishing, Perishing, and the Eclipse of Scholarship (The University of Chicago Press, 2004, http://www.press.uchicago.edu/presssite/metadata.epl?mode=synopsis&bookkey=22847), maintains that the pressure to publish in the academic world is leading to the destruction of the "quality of educational institutions and the ideals of higher learning," and to the destruction of those who participate in it.
Ben McNally is owner of Ben McNally Books, 366 Bay Street Toronto (Bay and Queen, http://www.benmcnallybooks.com), and host of the Globe and Mail/Ben McNally Brunch. The next one is scheduled for Sunday, February 8, 2009, 10:00 am, King Edward Hotel: Ana Siljak, author of Angel of Vengeance; Elizabeth Abbott, author of Sugar: A Bittersweet History; Tim Cook, author of Shock Troops.
But wait - let's get back to the discussion with Enright.
Mr. Enright raised the interesting point that we're all under so much pressure to read these days that maybe we'd just rather watch TV. We rush to the bookstore to get the "Fifty Books You Must Read Before You Die."
Marian Botsford Fraser seemed to agree, adding that there's a type of "general anxiety, that there’s so much out there that we must be on top of it all. It's a great fallacy of our time – that we’ve Googled something, or we’ve read the Wikipedia entry that we’ve had the experience: it replaces the act of reading a book, rather than doing it; it’s on the screen, so we’ve done it. Anxiety that I’m so far behind, how am I going to do that – check out the New Yorker review to see what I’m missing."
Lindsay Waters commented that there's such a "pressure to increase the number of publications, that the actual content of the book doesn’t matter any more: if the book on my CV, it's just something that will be tabulated, the content doesn’t matter, the content is more distant from us."
Waters continued: "The anxiety about reading is yet another way of distancing us from another act. We want to speed everything up. We should slow down, otherwise we won’t enjoy reading. We need people pollinating from one brain to another, soul to another, psyche to another. If we don’t read slowly enough, this type of pollinating won’t take place."
What a fascinating take on reading. Can you see why I'm addicted to Enright's Sunday Morning?
Ben McNally added, "I can’t read quickly. I’ve always served a sophisticated clientele. People who come to my bookstore are looking for something different -- for enlightenment -- they don’t want to read a book like every other one. People are looking for value, rather than books that are disposable."
Marian Botsford Fraser: "There's a pressure to read the 'latest' – people want to because of this wash of info. out there. There's too much out there. My bedside table's disappeared under the volumes. 'What’s your summer reading, your beach reading? Do I have time for a huge book?' Because they’ve got too much to read."
Lindsay Waters: "I welcome this. As a publisher, I realize that we’re all looking for reasons not to read... We want to know that the world’s gotten bigger, better... But we’ve been burned many times by going out and reading something; don’t just listen to what Oprah tells you to read. What I’m going to take on my vacation takes us to the process of what’s at the heart of reading: up to page five, if it hasn’t grabbed me, I don't want to read it."
The point was also raised that we want to read books so we can go to a cocktail party and talk to someone we don’t know about a book we’ve read. Have you ever faked having read a book? I can't imagine that.
Michael Enright weighed in with a question: "Is there a book that you felt you had to read, but you couldn’t read it… Ulysses, or “Useless”. I’ve started that book 5,000 times…"
Alright, I must admit I'm guilty of that one.
Or what about, "Don't judge a book by its movie?"
"I dunno." But I think I'll stay addicted to reading...
Tuesday, January 27, 2009
(13) J. K. Rowlings and Tales of Beedle The Bardand Family Literacy Day
It's Family Literacy Day today. So read a book with your family!
Family literacy programs focus on parents as the means to improve the reading and writing skills of all family members. Family literacy is a powerful way to support parents by showing them how they can help their children become confident and effective communicators.
Check out this website for more information:
http://www.abc-canada.org/en/family_literacy/family_literacy_day/
CBC's Matt Galloway, morning host, 99.1 FM, will interview Robert Munsch between 7:30 am and 8:00 am, about the importance of reading as a family.
CBC's Shelagh Rogers will be talking to Janice Kulyk Keefer, Christopher Dewdney and Kim Echlin, former CBC Literary Award Winners, from noon till 1:00 pm at Ben McNally Books on the west side of Bay St., just south of Queen.
And along the same lines, catch this:
A long-time friend and colleague of mine, former English and English as a Learning Language teacher at Langstaff, e-mailed me yesterday afternoon to let me know that she’d passed my blogsite on to her daughter, whose daughter is a “reading machine,” and has read the Harry Potter series twice. Her family also reads together.
Too coincidental. Read on.
I had to stop for essentials (like Perrier water and bananas) at the Humbertown Loblaws, Royal York Road and Dundas, on my way home. I didn’t have much to buy, so I lined up in the 8-items-or-less line (no less), and what do I see on a small stand, beside the National Enquirer, People Magazine and Your Horoscope, but The Tales of Beedle The Bard by J.K. Rowling, for $8.95, regular $14.50 Canadian, or 6.99 English pounds. Such a bargoon. It’s on remainder.
I picked it up and started to leaf through it, thinking I’d get it for the grandson of a friend of mine. I was next in line, so didn’t have much time to look through it. Impulse buying, you know. Should I, or shouldn’t I, buy it? It reminded me of the time I found a copy of Zamyatin’s We, for $1.99, at Price Chopper’s, East Mall and Rathburn. You’ll recall that this was the book that influenced Orwell to write Animal Farm, and is sometimes touted as the most influential science fiction book of the 20th century. “Food for your mind at the grocery store…” It’s still in the fiction collection at the school library.
But back to The Beedle. The book flipped open to the end pages to reveal Children’s High Level Group: Health, Education, Welfare. “What’s this all about?” It’s my turn to put my groceries on the conveyor belt.
All I had time to read was the first paragraph:
Dear Reader,
Thank you very much for buying this unique and special book. I wanted to take this opportunity to explain just how your support will help us to make a real difference to the lives of so many vulnerable children.
Well, I had to buy it! Read on:
More than 1 million children live in large residential institutions across Europe. Contrary to popular belief, most of them are not orphans, but are in care because their families are poor, disabled or from ethnic minorities. Many of these children have disabilities and handicaps, but often remain without any health or educational interventions. In some cases they do not receive life’s basics, such as adequate food. Almost always they are without human or emotional contact and stimulation.
To change the lives of institutionalized and marginalized children, and try to make sure that no future generation suffers in this way, J. K. Rowling and I set up the Children’s High Level Group (CHLG) charity in 2005. We wanted to give these abandoned children a voice: to allow their stories to be heard.
CHLG aims to bring an end to the use of large institutions and promote ways that allow children to live with families --- their own, foster or national adoptive parents --- or in small group homes.
The campaign helps around a quarter of a million children each year. We fund a dedicated, independent child helpline that provides support and information to hundreds of thousands of children annually. We also run education activities, including the ‘Community Action’ project, in which young people from mainstream education work with special needs children in institutions; and ‘Edelweiss’, which allows young people who are marginalized and institutionalized to express themselves through their creativity and talents. And in Romania, CHLG has created a national children’s council to represent the rights of children, and which allows them to speak out about their own experiences.
But our reach goes only so far. We need funds to scale up and replicate our work, to reach out into more countries and help even more children who are in such desperate need.
CHLG has a unique character amongst non-governmental organizations in this field, namely working with governments and state institutions, civil society, professionals and voluntary organizations, as well as practical providers of services on the ground.
CHLG aims to achieve full implementation of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child across Europe and, ultimately, around the world. In only two years, we have already assisted governments to develop strategies to prevent the abandonment of babies in hospitals and to improve the care of children with disabilities and handicaps, and have developed a manual of best practice in de-institutionalisation.
We are truly grateful for your support in buying this book. These vital funds will allow CHLG to continue our activities, giving hundreds of thousands more children the chance of a decent and healthy life.
To find out more about us, and how you can get further involved, please visit: www.chlg.org.
Thank you,
Baroness Nicholson of Winterbourne MEP
Co-Chair of CHLG
Did you know all that?
If you’d like a copy of the book, tell me quick, before they’re all gone. I think I’ll have to read it before I pass it along. Also, on the CHLG website, you can sign up for a free newsletter or make a donation. The main focus of their work is done in Romania, Moldova, Armenia and Georgia and the Czech Republic.
Rob
Family literacy programs focus on parents as the means to improve the reading and writing skills of all family members. Family literacy is a powerful way to support parents by showing them how they can help their children become confident and effective communicators.
Check out this website for more information:
http://www.abc-canada.org/en/family_literacy/family_literacy_day/
CBC's Matt Galloway, morning host, 99.1 FM, will interview Robert Munsch between 7:30 am and 8:00 am, about the importance of reading as a family.
CBC's Shelagh Rogers will be talking to Janice Kulyk Keefer, Christopher Dewdney and Kim Echlin, former CBC Literary Award Winners, from noon till 1:00 pm at Ben McNally Books on the west side of Bay St., just south of Queen.
And along the same lines, catch this:
A long-time friend and colleague of mine, former English and English as a Learning Language teacher at Langstaff, e-mailed me yesterday afternoon to let me know that she’d passed my blogsite on to her daughter, whose daughter is a “reading machine,” and has read the Harry Potter series twice. Her family also reads together.
Too coincidental. Read on.
I had to stop for essentials (like Perrier water and bananas) at the Humbertown Loblaws, Royal York Road and Dundas, on my way home. I didn’t have much to buy, so I lined up in the 8-items-or-less line (no less), and what do I see on a small stand, beside the National Enquirer, People Magazine and Your Horoscope, but The Tales of Beedle The Bard by J.K. Rowling, for $8.95, regular $14.50 Canadian, or 6.99 English pounds. Such a bargoon. It’s on remainder.
I picked it up and started to leaf through it, thinking I’d get it for the grandson of a friend of mine. I was next in line, so didn’t have much time to look through it. Impulse buying, you know. Should I, or shouldn’t I, buy it? It reminded me of the time I found a copy of Zamyatin’s We, for $1.99, at Price Chopper’s, East Mall and Rathburn. You’ll recall that this was the book that influenced Orwell to write Animal Farm, and is sometimes touted as the most influential science fiction book of the 20th century. “Food for your mind at the grocery store…” It’s still in the fiction collection at the school library.
But back to The Beedle. The book flipped open to the end pages to reveal Children’s High Level Group: Health, Education, Welfare. “What’s this all about?” It’s my turn to put my groceries on the conveyor belt.
All I had time to read was the first paragraph:
Dear Reader,
Thank you very much for buying this unique and special book. I wanted to take this opportunity to explain just how your support will help us to make a real difference to the lives of so many vulnerable children.
Well, I had to buy it! Read on:
More than 1 million children live in large residential institutions across Europe. Contrary to popular belief, most of them are not orphans, but are in care because their families are poor, disabled or from ethnic minorities. Many of these children have disabilities and handicaps, but often remain without any health or educational interventions. In some cases they do not receive life’s basics, such as adequate food. Almost always they are without human or emotional contact and stimulation.
To change the lives of institutionalized and marginalized children, and try to make sure that no future generation suffers in this way, J. K. Rowling and I set up the Children’s High Level Group (CHLG) charity in 2005. We wanted to give these abandoned children a voice: to allow their stories to be heard.
CHLG aims to bring an end to the use of large institutions and promote ways that allow children to live with families --- their own, foster or national adoptive parents --- or in small group homes.
The campaign helps around a quarter of a million children each year. We fund a dedicated, independent child helpline that provides support and information to hundreds of thousands of children annually. We also run education activities, including the ‘Community Action’ project, in which young people from mainstream education work with special needs children in institutions; and ‘Edelweiss’, which allows young people who are marginalized and institutionalized to express themselves through their creativity and talents. And in Romania, CHLG has created a national children’s council to represent the rights of children, and which allows them to speak out about their own experiences.
But our reach goes only so far. We need funds to scale up and replicate our work, to reach out into more countries and help even more children who are in such desperate need.
CHLG has a unique character amongst non-governmental organizations in this field, namely working with governments and state institutions, civil society, professionals and voluntary organizations, as well as practical providers of services on the ground.
CHLG aims to achieve full implementation of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child across Europe and, ultimately, around the world. In only two years, we have already assisted governments to develop strategies to prevent the abandonment of babies in hospitals and to improve the care of children with disabilities and handicaps, and have developed a manual of best practice in de-institutionalisation.
We are truly grateful for your support in buying this book. These vital funds will allow CHLG to continue our activities, giving hundreds of thousands more children the chance of a decent and healthy life.
To find out more about us, and how you can get further involved, please visit: www.chlg.org.
Thank you,
Baroness Nicholson of Winterbourne MEP
Co-Chair of CHLG
Did you know all that?
If you’d like a copy of the book, tell me quick, before they’re all gone. I think I’ll have to read it before I pass it along. Also, on the CHLG website, you can sign up for a free newsletter or make a donation. The main focus of their work is done in Romania, Moldova, Armenia and Georgia and the Czech Republic.
Rob
Monday, January 26, 2009
(12) Speaking of the Brain: School and the Reading Brain
All these articles I seem to be finding "by coincidence," but some people believe that there's no such thing (as coincidence, I mean).
In Blog Post No. 11, neuroscientist Dr. Gary Small says that surfing the Internet can alter your brain, for good and bad.
In this post, thanks to a 2008 article in The Ontario Secondary School Teachers' Federation Education Forum, by Jon Cowans (recently retired from Durham District School Board), you'll find the results and comments of two authors, Maryanne Wolf [Proust and the Squid (2007)], and Mark Bauerlein [The Dumbest Generation (2008)], who say that reading alters your brain.
"Who would have thunk it without all this research?" Or is this just another case of "the perfect grasp of the obvious?" I strongly feel that teachers were among the first to know that something was happening "out there" when basic reading was supplanted with so many other priorities. Reading cannot help but be the cornerstone of understanding information from both print and electronic sources.
Reading can also be a struggle at times for learners, as well as for people who think they've already mastered that skill. How many times do you catch yourself rereading a sentence, paragraph or whole chapter because you felt you just didn't get it? Could be that you're tired, you're distracted, or that the text is just a bit beyond your understanding. All three reasons are valid.
If you want to improve your tennis, you always play with someone better than yourself. If you want to improve your reading, same thing: read something slightly beyond your grasp, outside your interest or specialty area. It only stands to reason that this will improve your knowledge, as well as your brain. Ask anyone who has learned a foreign language to near-native fluency. It's always a frustrating process, but the rewards, both concrete and intangible, are beyond words!
After attending a post-secondary institution, the person who has earned a community college, not a university, diploma, is often the one who will be required to read the most in his/her working life: the garage mechanic or the aircraft maintenance technician must remain current with the latest developments in technology by reading manuals and other technical documents.
Alright, now, here's the article, and thank you, Jon Cowans and OSSTF!
Teaching students to read: it is the school’s original and still primary function. Nowadays, it is also its most challenging one.
Since the publication of Rudolph Flesch’s controversial bestseller Why Johnny Can’t Read in 1955, there has been widespread public concern that a growing number of students are leaving school unable to read proficiently. In response, education authorities across North America have invested heavily in remediation classes, reading programs and literacy tests. Yet real success has proven elusive.
What then makes the teaching of reading so difficult? To Flesch, the problem lay primarily with the flawed reading pedagogy of the 1950s, the so-called “look-say” method, but this explanation alone is inadequate.
Two recent books, Maryanne Wolf’s Proust and the Squid (2007), and Mark Bauerlein’s The Dumbest Generation (2008), offer insights not discernable half a century ago as to why Johnny can’t read.
We were never born to read
The subtitle of Wolf’s work, The Story and Science of the Reading Brain, identifies her subject matter more clearly than the cryptic main title. A professor of child development at Tufts University and director of its Center for Reading and Language Research, Wolf brings to the book both expertise and a strong personal belief in reading as a civilizing activity. In clear, non-technical language, she describes the historical development of reading and the results of the latest research into how reading changes the brain.
Wolf’s opening statement, “We were never born to read,” establishes the central problem with acquiring facility in the medium. Unlike the spoken language, which is partly innate, the written language is a cultural invention. Just a few thousand years old, it works by piggybacking on other basic brain functions. In doing so, reading modifies the physical structures of the adapting organ. But the change is not just physical: “In much the way reading reflects the brain’s capacity for going beyond its structures, it also reflects the reader’s capacity to go beyond what is given in the text.”
Through reading, the natural mind is enlarged, and thereby enabled to reason, imagine, create, feel and experience life more fully and subtly. Over the course of history, human thought and literature have grown in a reciprocal union. As a result, the written language has become more extensive and complex than the spoken, making the former harder and slower to master—to the frustration of generations of students.
Wolf informs us: “To acquire this unnatural process, children need instructional environments that support all the circuit parts that need bolting for the brain to read.” The initial environment for this is the home, but, unfortunately, not all homes are equal in this respect. The average middle-class five-year-old, she informs us, will enter school having heard an astounding 32 million more words than an underprivileged child. The result is obvious: “Children who begin kindergarten having heard and used thousands of words, whose meanings are already understood, classified, and stored away in their young brains, have the advantage..."
In some cases, a student’s original disadvantage comes from another source—the reading disability known as dyslexia. Wolf devotes two of her nine chapters to this topic. Her interest is both professional and personal: her son Ben is dyslexic.
Wolf’s detailed discussion of dyslexia and the various theories accounting for it will be of particular value to educators. Ongoing research suggests that the disability stems from a variety of causes, one of which concerns how the left and right hemispheres of the dyslexic brain are wired. Even here, the evidence is ambiguous, and Wolf is unsure “whether right-hemisphere reading circuits are the cause of not being able to name letters and read words, or the consequence.”
Another impediment to reading development is cultural, namely the potentially adverse effects of digital media, leading Wolf to ask: “What would be lost to us if we replaced the skills honed by the reading brain with those now being formed in our next generation of ‘digital natives,’ who sit and read transfixed before a screen?” She wonders whether “the immediacy and seeming comprehensiveness of the on-screen information” render students less willing to engage in the close reading and creative interpretation of texts they they increasingly regard as anachronistic.
(...)
In 2004, Bauerlein oversaw the publication of the National Endowment for the Art’s controversial report Reading at Risk, which revealed a substantial decline in American reading habits among both young and old over the past three decades. The title of his most recent book, The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future, bluntly sets forth the work’s provocative tone and topic.
(...)
In part, The Dumbest Generation is a response to Steven Johnson’s 2005 bestseller, Everything Bad Is Good for You: How Today’s Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter. Johnson contends that popular media, once regarded as dumbed-down and potentially harmful, has matured to the point that it actually increases intelligence. His evidence? The fact that scores on IQ tests have been rising over the past half-century, a trend only accountable, he claims, by a rise in the level of popular culture.
Bauerlein answers Johnson’s use of IQ test evidence with several strong counter-arguments, of which the most convincing is his question: “Why haven’t knowledge and skill levels followed the same path?” Bauerlein cites a host of studies indicating that students’ knowledge and skill levels have in fact fallen markedly over recent decades. Educators can decide for themselves whether his evidence corresponds to their own classroom experience.
Bauerlein identifies reading, especially, as being under threat from digital media. Using a variety of data, he demonstrates that not only has students’ ability to read declined, but so too has their desire, naming them “the new bibliophobes.” He cites a few telling statistics:
1. The 2003 National Assessment of Adult Literacy: Only 31 per cent of university graduates tested attained “proficiency” in reading.
2. The 2005 American Time Use Survey: 15- to 24-year-olds read on average about eight minutes a day in their spare time.
3. The 2007 National Freshman Attitudes Report: 53.3 per cent of students disagreed with the statement “I get a great deal of satisfaction from reading” while 42.9 per cent disagreed with “Over the year, books have broadened my horizons and stimulated my imagination.” (These are first-year university students, remember.)
Compare these to a fourth statistic:
4. The 2005 Generation M: Media in the Lives of 8 18-Year-Olds: Those tested spent an average of five-and-a-half hours a day in front of a screen (TV and computer) outside school. (Time devoted to IPod, cell phone and radio use was not tracked.)
(...)
Accordingly, he questions the school’s increasing use of electric media to make curriculum seem more relevant accessible. Bauerlein argues that the young “don’t need more pop culture and youth perspective in the classroom. They get enough of these on their own.” The trend towards relevance merely reinforces the limited and narcissistic worldview served up to the young in the digital culture, one focused largely on their present personal and social needs. Bauerlein describes the result: “Dissociated from tradition, with nobody telling them that sometimes they must mute the voices inside them and heed instead the voices of distant greatness, young people miss one of the sanative, humbling mechanisms of maturity…. Tradition provides grounding against and refuge from the mercurial ebb and flow of youth culture.”
The most comprehensive medium through which the “voices of distant greatness” can be heard is reading, the very activity many students now neglect. In doing so, they cut themselves off from its significant benefits: “more civic and historical knowledge, familiarity with current events and government actions, a larger vocabulary, better writing skills, eloquence, inexpensive recreation, and contact with the great thoughts and expressions of the past.”
Bauerlein dismisses the claim that the same benefits can be gained through on-line learning. In spite of the growing availability of educational resources on the Internet, he argues that the seductive, multiform nature of the medium distracts the young, and reduces reading to mere scanning: “With the read/write/film/view/browse/message/buy/sell web, adolescent users govern their own exposure, and the didactic and artistic content of smarter sites flies by unseen…. The popular digital practices of teens and 20-year-olds didn’t and don’t open the world. They close the doors to maturity, eroding habits of the classroom, pulling hours away from leisure practices that complement classroom habits.”
Apparently, the young aren’t the only ones whose reading ability is being compromised by the Internet. In a recent article in Atlantic Monthly (July/August 2008), “Is Google Making Us Stupid?”, writer Nicholas Carr complains that extensive use of the Internet for personal research has been “chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. My mind now expects to take in information the way the Internet distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles…. I’m not the only one. When I mention my troubles with reading to friends and acquaintances—literary types, most of them—many say they’re having similar experiences.”
In defense of reading
The Dumbest Generation could be more forthright in assigning blame for the decline it describes. If many young people are no longer making books their first choice of media, they are merely following the general drift of their cultural environment, one created by adults. It therefore seems hypocritical of the latter to decry the young’s declining reading ability while providing them with the very devices responsible for it, and reading less themselves.
Parents, in particular, need regular reminding that reading must be nurtured at home as well as at school, and that children’s use of digital media, now far more plentiful in most homes than books and newspapers, has to be monitored and regulated. Educators, meanwhile, must set as their principal task—at all levels of education—the immediate improvement of students’ reading skills.
Here are some simple ways that I (Jon Cowans) think Ontario’s secondary schools
1. Build 15 minutes of daily quiet reading into all academic courses, where practical. (The semester’s 75-minute period is ideal for this purpose). In a four-period schedule, this would result in one hour of sustained reading per day and compensate for any lack of personal reading outside school. Allow students to choose their own subject-related material. Include this reading in their evaluation.
2. Remove the media strand from English courses. Since there are now three media arts courses in the Ontario curriculum, media study no longer needs to piggyback on English, a subject which requires all the time it can get.
3. Replace the library’s computers with books. Let students do their web surfing, academic or otherwise, at home and use the library for the print-based research characteristic of higher learning.
4. Get rid of the Literacy Test. This multi-million-dollar exercise in political PR shows teachers, students and parents nothing they don’t already know from the classroom. If anything, the test turns kids off reading and writing. Invest the money saved into more library books—and more librarians.
I find it's very hard to disagree with Mr. Cowans' recommendations. I've always thought that if educators are encouraging increased use of electronic media, at the expense of reading, we only have ourselves to blame for the results. Ask yourself, "Could a person of Trudeau's or Obama's stature and eloquence have been raised and educated exclusively with electronic methods and resources?"
Later,
Rob
In Blog Post No. 11, neuroscientist Dr. Gary Small says that surfing the Internet can alter your brain, for good and bad.
In this post, thanks to a 2008 article in The Ontario Secondary School Teachers' Federation Education Forum, by Jon Cowans (recently retired from Durham District School Board), you'll find the results and comments of two authors, Maryanne Wolf [Proust and the Squid (2007)], and Mark Bauerlein [The Dumbest Generation (2008)], who say that reading alters your brain.
"Who would have thunk it without all this research?" Or is this just another case of "the perfect grasp of the obvious?" I strongly feel that teachers were among the first to know that something was happening "out there" when basic reading was supplanted with so many other priorities. Reading cannot help but be the cornerstone of understanding information from both print and electronic sources.
Reading can also be a struggle at times for learners, as well as for people who think they've already mastered that skill. How many times do you catch yourself rereading a sentence, paragraph or whole chapter because you felt you just didn't get it? Could be that you're tired, you're distracted, or that the text is just a bit beyond your understanding. All three reasons are valid.
If you want to improve your tennis, you always play with someone better than yourself. If you want to improve your reading, same thing: read something slightly beyond your grasp, outside your interest or specialty area. It only stands to reason that this will improve your knowledge, as well as your brain. Ask anyone who has learned a foreign language to near-native fluency. It's always a frustrating process, but the rewards, both concrete and intangible, are beyond words!
After attending a post-secondary institution, the person who has earned a community college, not a university, diploma, is often the one who will be required to read the most in his/her working life: the garage mechanic or the aircraft maintenance technician must remain current with the latest developments in technology by reading manuals and other technical documents.
Alright, now, here's the article, and thank you, Jon Cowans and OSSTF!
Teaching students to read: it is the school’s original and still primary function. Nowadays, it is also its most challenging one.
Since the publication of Rudolph Flesch’s controversial bestseller Why Johnny Can’t Read in 1955, there has been widespread public concern that a growing number of students are leaving school unable to read proficiently. In response, education authorities across North America have invested heavily in remediation classes, reading programs and literacy tests. Yet real success has proven elusive.
What then makes the teaching of reading so difficult? To Flesch, the problem lay primarily with the flawed reading pedagogy of the 1950s, the so-called “look-say” method, but this explanation alone is inadequate.
Two recent books, Maryanne Wolf’s Proust and the Squid (2007), and Mark Bauerlein’s The Dumbest Generation (2008), offer insights not discernable half a century ago as to why Johnny can’t read.
We were never born to read
The subtitle of Wolf’s work, The Story and Science of the Reading Brain, identifies her subject matter more clearly than the cryptic main title. A professor of child development at Tufts University and director of its Center for Reading and Language Research, Wolf brings to the book both expertise and a strong personal belief in reading as a civilizing activity. In clear, non-technical language, she describes the historical development of reading and the results of the latest research into how reading changes the brain.
Wolf’s opening statement, “We were never born to read,” establishes the central problem with acquiring facility in the medium. Unlike the spoken language, which is partly innate, the written language is a cultural invention. Just a few thousand years old, it works by piggybacking on other basic brain functions. In doing so, reading modifies the physical structures of the adapting organ. But the change is not just physical: “In much the way reading reflects the brain’s capacity for going beyond its structures, it also reflects the reader’s capacity to go beyond what is given in the text.”
Through reading, the natural mind is enlarged, and thereby enabled to reason, imagine, create, feel and experience life more fully and subtly. Over the course of history, human thought and literature have grown in a reciprocal union. As a result, the written language has become more extensive and complex than the spoken, making the former harder and slower to master—to the frustration of generations of students.
Wolf informs us: “To acquire this unnatural process, children need instructional environments that support all the circuit parts that need bolting for the brain to read.” The initial environment for this is the home, but, unfortunately, not all homes are equal in this respect. The average middle-class five-year-old, she informs us, will enter school having heard an astounding 32 million more words than an underprivileged child. The result is obvious: “Children who begin kindergarten having heard and used thousands of words, whose meanings are already understood, classified, and stored away in their young brains, have the advantage..."
In some cases, a student’s original disadvantage comes from another source—the reading disability known as dyslexia. Wolf devotes two of her nine chapters to this topic. Her interest is both professional and personal: her son Ben is dyslexic.
Wolf’s detailed discussion of dyslexia and the various theories accounting for it will be of particular value to educators. Ongoing research suggests that the disability stems from a variety of causes, one of which concerns how the left and right hemispheres of the dyslexic brain are wired. Even here, the evidence is ambiguous, and Wolf is unsure “whether right-hemisphere reading circuits are the cause of not being able to name letters and read words, or the consequence.”
Another impediment to reading development is cultural, namely the potentially adverse effects of digital media, leading Wolf to ask: “What would be lost to us if we replaced the skills honed by the reading brain with those now being formed in our next generation of ‘digital natives,’ who sit and read transfixed before a screen?” She wonders whether “the immediacy and seeming comprehensiveness of the on-screen information” render students less willing to engage in the close reading and creative interpretation of texts they they increasingly regard as anachronistic.
(...)
In 2004, Bauerlein oversaw the publication of the National Endowment for the Art’s controversial report Reading at Risk, which revealed a substantial decline in American reading habits among both young and old over the past three decades. The title of his most recent book, The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future, bluntly sets forth the work’s provocative tone and topic.
(...)
In part, The Dumbest Generation is a response to Steven Johnson’s 2005 bestseller, Everything Bad Is Good for You: How Today’s Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter. Johnson contends that popular media, once regarded as dumbed-down and potentially harmful, has matured to the point that it actually increases intelligence. His evidence? The fact that scores on IQ tests have been rising over the past half-century, a trend only accountable, he claims, by a rise in the level of popular culture.
Bauerlein answers Johnson’s use of IQ test evidence with several strong counter-arguments, of which the most convincing is his question: “Why haven’t knowledge and skill levels followed the same path?” Bauerlein cites a host of studies indicating that students’ knowledge and skill levels have in fact fallen markedly over recent decades. Educators can decide for themselves whether his evidence corresponds to their own classroom experience.
Bauerlein identifies reading, especially, as being under threat from digital media. Using a variety of data, he demonstrates that not only has students’ ability to read declined, but so too has their desire, naming them “the new bibliophobes.” He cites a few telling statistics:
1. The 2003 National Assessment of Adult Literacy: Only 31 per cent of university graduates tested attained “proficiency” in reading.
2. The 2005 American Time Use Survey: 15- to 24-year-olds read on average about eight minutes a day in their spare time.
3. The 2007 National Freshman Attitudes Report: 53.3 per cent of students disagreed with the statement “I get a great deal of satisfaction from reading” while 42.9 per cent disagreed with “Over the year, books have broadened my horizons and stimulated my imagination.” (These are first-year university students, remember.)
Compare these to a fourth statistic:
4. The 2005 Generation M: Media in the Lives of 8 18-Year-Olds: Those tested spent an average of five-and-a-half hours a day in front of a screen (TV and computer) outside school. (Time devoted to IPod, cell phone and radio use was not tracked.)
(...)
Accordingly, he questions the school’s increasing use of electric media to make curriculum seem more relevant accessible. Bauerlein argues that the young “don’t need more pop culture and youth perspective in the classroom. They get enough of these on their own.” The trend towards relevance merely reinforces the limited and narcissistic worldview served up to the young in the digital culture, one focused largely on their present personal and social needs. Bauerlein describes the result: “Dissociated from tradition, with nobody telling them that sometimes they must mute the voices inside them and heed instead the voices of distant greatness, young people miss one of the sanative, humbling mechanisms of maturity…. Tradition provides grounding against and refuge from the mercurial ebb and flow of youth culture.”
The most comprehensive medium through which the “voices of distant greatness” can be heard is reading, the very activity many students now neglect. In doing so, they cut themselves off from its significant benefits: “more civic and historical knowledge, familiarity with current events and government actions, a larger vocabulary, better writing skills, eloquence, inexpensive recreation, and contact with the great thoughts and expressions of the past.”
Bauerlein dismisses the claim that the same benefits can be gained through on-line learning. In spite of the growing availability of educational resources on the Internet, he argues that the seductive, multiform nature of the medium distracts the young, and reduces reading to mere scanning: “With the read/write/film/view/browse/message/buy/sell web, adolescent users govern their own exposure, and the didactic and artistic content of smarter sites flies by unseen…. The popular digital practices of teens and 20-year-olds didn’t and don’t open the world. They close the doors to maturity, eroding habits of the classroom, pulling hours away from leisure practices that complement classroom habits.”
Apparently, the young aren’t the only ones whose reading ability is being compromised by the Internet. In a recent article in Atlantic Monthly (July/August 2008), “Is Google Making Us Stupid?”, writer Nicholas Carr complains that extensive use of the Internet for personal research has been “chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. My mind now expects to take in information the way the Internet distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles…. I’m not the only one. When I mention my troubles with reading to friends and acquaintances—literary types, most of them—many say they’re having similar experiences.”
In defense of reading
The Dumbest Generation could be more forthright in assigning blame for the decline it describes. If many young people are no longer making books their first choice of media, they are merely following the general drift of their cultural environment, one created by adults. It therefore seems hypocritical of the latter to decry the young’s declining reading ability while providing them with the very devices responsible for it, and reading less themselves.
Parents, in particular, need regular reminding that reading must be nurtured at home as well as at school, and that children’s use of digital media, now far more plentiful in most homes than books and newspapers, has to be monitored and regulated. Educators, meanwhile, must set as their principal task—at all levels of education—the immediate improvement of students’ reading skills.
Here are some simple ways that I (Jon Cowans) think Ontario’s secondary schools
1. Build 15 minutes of daily quiet reading into all academic courses, where practical. (The semester’s 75-minute period is ideal for this purpose). In a four-period schedule, this would result in one hour of sustained reading per day and compensate for any lack of personal reading outside school. Allow students to choose their own subject-related material. Include this reading in their evaluation.
2. Remove the media strand from English courses. Since there are now three media arts courses in the Ontario curriculum, media study no longer needs to piggyback on English, a subject which requires all the time it can get.
3. Replace the library’s computers with books. Let students do their web surfing, academic or otherwise, at home and use the library for the print-based research characteristic of higher learning.
4. Get rid of the Literacy Test. This multi-million-dollar exercise in political PR shows teachers, students and parents nothing they don’t already know from the classroom. If anything, the test turns kids off reading and writing. Invest the money saved into more library books—and more librarians.
I find it's very hard to disagree with Mr. Cowans' recommendations. I've always thought that if educators are encouraging increased use of electronic media, at the expense of reading, we only have ourselves to blame for the results. Ask yourself, "Could a person of Trudeau's or Obama's stature and eloquence have been raised and educated exclusively with electronic methods and resources?"
Later,
Rob
Sunday, January 25, 2009
(11) Internet, "Evolutionary Change," ADD: Is Surfing the Internet Altering Your Brain? asks Gary Small, UCLA Neuroscientist
Check out this article. It was part of my Yahoo welcome screen today (but first published back in October, 2008), that annoying list that comes up every time you're trying to retrieve your e-mail.
According to Dr. Gary Small, author of Surviving the Technological Alteration of the Modern Mind (HarperCollins, 2008), Director of the Memory & Aging Research Center at the Semel Institute for Neuroscience & Human Behavior and the Center on Aging at UCLA, there are benefits, but also drawbacks, including damage to neural networks, when we use this communication tool.
Asks Small: "Where do you fit in on the evolutionary chain? What are the professional, social, and political impacts of this new brain evolution? How must you adapt and at what price?"
I've already ordered the book (for a review: http://www.harpercollins.com/books/9780061340338/iBrain/index.aspx), and will ADD it to my reading list.
Once again, do yourself a favour and READ this one:
Is Surfing the Internet Altering your Brain?
By Belinda Goldsmith, Reuters
The Internet is not just changing the way people live but altering the way our brains work with a neuroscientist arguing this is an evolutionary change which will put the tech-savvy at the top of the new social order.
Gary Small, a neuroscientist at UCLA in California who specializes in brain function, has found through studies that Internet searching and text messaging has made brains more adept at filtering information and making snap decisions.
But while technology can accelerate learning and boost creativity it can have drawbacks as it can create Internet addicts whose only friends are virtual and has sparked a dramatic rise in Attention Deficit Disorder diagnoses.
Small, however, argues that the people who will come out on top in the next generation will be those with a mixture of technological and social skills.
"We're seeing an evolutionary change. The people in the next generation who are really going to have the edge are the ones who master the technological skills and also face-to-face skills," Small told Reuters in a telephone interview.
"They will know when the best response to an email or Instant Message is to talk rather than sit and continue to email."
In his newly released fourth book iBrain: Surviving the Technological Alteration of the Modern Mind, Small looks at how technology has altered the way young minds develop, function and interpret information.
Small, the director of the Memory & Aging Research Center at the Semel Institute for Neuroscience & Human Behavior and the Center on Aging at UCLA, said the brain was very sensitive to the changes in the environment such as those brought by technology.
He said a study of 24 adults as they used the Web found that experienced Internet users showed double the activity in areas of the brain that control decision-making and complex reasoning as Internet beginners.
"The brain is very specialized in its circuitry and if you repeat mental tasks over and over it will strengthen certain neural circuits and ignore others," said Small.
"We are changing the environment. The average young person now spends nine hours a day exposing their brain to technology. Evolution is an advancement from moment to moment and what we are seeing is technology affecting our evolution."
Small said this multi-tasking could cause problems.
He said the tech-savvy generation, whom he calls "digital natives," are always scanning for the next bit of new information which can create stress and even damage neural networks.
"There is also the big problem of neglecting human contact skills and losing the ability to read emotional expressions and body language," he said.
"But you can take steps to address this. It means taking time to cut back on technology, like having a family dinner, to find a balance. It is important to understand how technology is affecting our lives and our brains and take control of it."
(Editing by Paul Casciato)
So, what do you think of that?
Rob
According to Dr. Gary Small, author of Surviving the Technological Alteration of the Modern Mind (HarperCollins, 2008), Director of the Memory & Aging Research Center at the Semel Institute for Neuroscience & Human Behavior and the Center on Aging at UCLA, there are benefits, but also drawbacks, including damage to neural networks, when we use this communication tool.
Asks Small: "Where do you fit in on the evolutionary chain? What are the professional, social, and political impacts of this new brain evolution? How must you adapt and at what price?"
I've already ordered the book (for a review: http://www.harpercollins.com/books/9780061340338/iBrain/index.aspx), and will ADD it to my reading list.
Once again, do yourself a favour and READ this one:
Is Surfing the Internet Altering your Brain?
By Belinda Goldsmith, Reuters
The Internet is not just changing the way people live but altering the way our brains work with a neuroscientist arguing this is an evolutionary change which will put the tech-savvy at the top of the new social order.
Gary Small, a neuroscientist at UCLA in California who specializes in brain function, has found through studies that Internet searching and text messaging has made brains more adept at filtering information and making snap decisions.
But while technology can accelerate learning and boost creativity it can have drawbacks as it can create Internet addicts whose only friends are virtual and has sparked a dramatic rise in Attention Deficit Disorder diagnoses.
Small, however, argues that the people who will come out on top in the next generation will be those with a mixture of technological and social skills.
"We're seeing an evolutionary change. The people in the next generation who are really going to have the edge are the ones who master the technological skills and also face-to-face skills," Small told Reuters in a telephone interview.
"They will know when the best response to an email or Instant Message is to talk rather than sit and continue to email."
In his newly released fourth book iBrain: Surviving the Technological Alteration of the Modern Mind, Small looks at how technology has altered the way young minds develop, function and interpret information.
Small, the director of the Memory & Aging Research Center at the Semel Institute for Neuroscience & Human Behavior and the Center on Aging at UCLA, said the brain was very sensitive to the changes in the environment such as those brought by technology.
He said a study of 24 adults as they used the Web found that experienced Internet users showed double the activity in areas of the brain that control decision-making and complex reasoning as Internet beginners.
"The brain is very specialized in its circuitry and if you repeat mental tasks over and over it will strengthen certain neural circuits and ignore others," said Small.
"We are changing the environment. The average young person now spends nine hours a day exposing their brain to technology. Evolution is an advancement from moment to moment and what we are seeing is technology affecting our evolution."
Small said this multi-tasking could cause problems.
He said the tech-savvy generation, whom he calls "digital natives," are always scanning for the next bit of new information which can create stress and even damage neural networks.
"There is also the big problem of neglecting human contact skills and losing the ability to read emotional expressions and body language," he said.
"But you can take steps to address this. It means taking time to cut back on technology, like having a family dinner, to find a balance. It is important to understand how technology is affecting our lives and our brains and take control of it."
(Editing by Paul Casciato)
So, what do you think of that?
Rob
Friday, January 23, 2009
(10) The Demographic Watershed: Growing Up Collaborating and the Internet, from Wikinomics (Who are the "authorities," anyway?)
Of course, by now, "everyone's read Wikinomics (!)" by Don Tapscott and Canadian Anthony D. Williams(http://www.wikinomics.com/book).
It's a great read.
This book might provide a partial explanation as to why people have lost interest and confidence in traditional "authorities", as laments Andrew Keen in his book, The Cult of the Amateur. (See my blog Post No. 4). When we're wondering just what's happening "out there," or why it seems people might be reading less (but I'm not convinced of that), it might be good to keep in mind the following:
"All generations in developed (and increasingly, developing) countries use the Web. Seniors, for example, have time to spend and new motives for going online --- communicating with their grandchildren may be the most important. However, a new generation of youngsters has grown up online, and they are bringing a new ethic of openness, participation, and interactivity to workplaces, communities, and markets. For this reason, they merit special investigation. They represent the new breed of workers, learners, consumers, and citizens. Think of them as the demographic engine of collaboration and the reason why the perfect storm is not a flash in the pan but a persistent tempest that will gather force as they mature.
Demographers call them the "baby-boom echo," but we prefer the Net Generation, as Don (Tapscott) dubbed them in his 1997 book Growing Up Digital. (...)
Born between 1977 and 1996 inclusive, this generation is bigger than the baby boom itself, and through sheer demographic muscle they will dominate the twenty-first century. While it is smaller in some countries (particularly those in Western Europe), internationally the Net Generation is huge, numbering over two billion people. This is the first generation to grow up in the digital age, and that makes them a force for collaboration. They are growing up bathed in bits. The vast majority of North American adolescents know how to use the Net. The same is true in a growing number of countires around the world. Indeed, there are more youngsters in this age group who use the Net in China than there are in the United States. This is the collaboration generation for one main reason: unlike their parents in the United States, who watched twenty-four hours of television per week, these youngsters are growing up interacting.
Rather than being passive recipients of mass consumer culture, the Net Gen spend time searching, reading, scrutinizing, authenticating, collaborating, and organizing (everything from their MP3 files to protest demonstrations). The Internet makes life an ongoing, massive collaboration, and this generation loves it. They typically can't imagine a life where citizens didn't have the tools to constantly think critically, exchange views, challenge, authenticate, verify, or debunk. While their parents were passive consumers of media, youth today are active creators of media content and hungry for interaction.
They are also a generatino of scrutinizers. They are more skeptical of authority as they sift through information at the speed of light by themselves or with their network of peers. Though they have greater self-confidence than previous generations, they are nevertheless worried about their futures. It's not their own abilities that they are insecure about --- it's the external adult world and how it may lack opportunity.
(...) Throughout adolescence and later in life, they tend to oppose censorship by governments and by parents. They also want to be treated fairly --- there is a strong ethos, for example, that I "should share in the wealth I create." They have a very strong sense of the common good and of collective social and civic responsibility.
Further, this is the first time in human history when our children are the authorities on something really important. An N-Gener's father may have been an authority on model trains. Today young people are authorities on the digital revolution that is changing every institution in society.
Wikinomics, by Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams (Portfolio, 2007)
It's a great read.
This book might provide a partial explanation as to why people have lost interest and confidence in traditional "authorities", as laments Andrew Keen in his book, The Cult of the Amateur. (See my blog Post No. 4). When we're wondering just what's happening "out there," or why it seems people might be reading less (but I'm not convinced of that), it might be good to keep in mind the following:
"All generations in developed (and increasingly, developing) countries use the Web. Seniors, for example, have time to spend and new motives for going online --- communicating with their grandchildren may be the most important. However, a new generation of youngsters has grown up online, and they are bringing a new ethic of openness, participation, and interactivity to workplaces, communities, and markets. For this reason, they merit special investigation. They represent the new breed of workers, learners, consumers, and citizens. Think of them as the demographic engine of collaboration and the reason why the perfect storm is not a flash in the pan but a persistent tempest that will gather force as they mature.
Demographers call them the "baby-boom echo," but we prefer the Net Generation, as Don (Tapscott) dubbed them in his 1997 book Growing Up Digital. (...)
Born between 1977 and 1996 inclusive, this generation is bigger than the baby boom itself, and through sheer demographic muscle they will dominate the twenty-first century. While it is smaller in some countries (particularly those in Western Europe), internationally the Net Generation is huge, numbering over two billion people. This is the first generation to grow up in the digital age, and that makes them a force for collaboration. They are growing up bathed in bits. The vast majority of North American adolescents know how to use the Net. The same is true in a growing number of countires around the world. Indeed, there are more youngsters in this age group who use the Net in China than there are in the United States. This is the collaboration generation for one main reason: unlike their parents in the United States, who watched twenty-four hours of television per week, these youngsters are growing up interacting.
Rather than being passive recipients of mass consumer culture, the Net Gen spend time searching, reading, scrutinizing, authenticating, collaborating, and organizing (everything from their MP3 files to protest demonstrations). The Internet makes life an ongoing, massive collaboration, and this generation loves it. They typically can't imagine a life where citizens didn't have the tools to constantly think critically, exchange views, challenge, authenticate, verify, or debunk. While their parents were passive consumers of media, youth today are active creators of media content and hungry for interaction.
They are also a generatino of scrutinizers. They are more skeptical of authority as they sift through information at the speed of light by themselves or with their network of peers. Though they have greater self-confidence than previous generations, they are nevertheless worried about their futures. It's not their own abilities that they are insecure about --- it's the external adult world and how it may lack opportunity.
(...) Throughout adolescence and later in life, they tend to oppose censorship by governments and by parents. They also want to be treated fairly --- there is a strong ethos, for example, that I "should share in the wealth I create." They have a very strong sense of the common good and of collective social and civic responsibility.
Further, this is the first time in human history when our children are the authorities on something really important. An N-Gener's father may have been an authority on model trains. Today young people are authorities on the digital revolution that is changing every institution in society.
Wikinomics, by Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams (Portfolio, 2007)
Thursday, January 22, 2009
(9) Doris Lessing: A Partial Biography
Doris Lessing: A Retrospective: http://www.dorislessing.org
From the pamphlet: A Reader's Guide to The Golden Notebook & Under My Skin,
HarperPerennial, 1995
Doris Lessing was born Doris May Tayler in Persia (now Iran) on October 22, 1919. Both of her parents were British: her father, who had been crippled in World War I, was a clerk in the Imperial Bank of Persia; her mother had been a nurse. In 1925, lured by the promise of getting rich through maize farming, the family moved to the British colony in Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe). Doris's mother adapted to the rough life in the settlement, energetically trying to reproduce what was, in her view, a civilized, Edwardian life among savages; but her father did not, and the thousand-odd acres of bush he had bought failed to yield the promised wealth.
Lessing has described her childhood as an uneven mix of some pleasure and much pain. The natural world, which she explored with her brother, Harry, was one retreat from an otherwise miserable existence. Her mother, obsessed with raising a proper daughter, enforced a rigid system of rules and hygiene at home, then installed Doris in a convent school, where nuns terrified their charges with stories of hell and damnation. Lessing was later sent to an all-girls high school in the capital of Salisbury, from which she soon dropped out. She was thirteen; and it was the end of her formal education.
But like other women writers from southern African who did not graduate from high school (such as Olive Schreiner and Nadine Gordimer), Lessing made herself into a self-educated intellectual. She recently commented that unhappy childhoods seem to produce fiction writers. "Yes, I think that is true. Though it wasn't apparent to me then. Of course, I wasn't thinking in terms of being a writer then - I was just thinking about how to escape, all the time."
The parcels of books ordered from London fed her imagination, laying out other worlds to escape into. Lessing's early reading included Dickens, Scott, Stevenson, Kipling; later she discovered D.H. Lawrence, Stendhal, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky. Bedtime stories also nurtured her youth: her mother told them to the children and Doris herself kept her younger brother awake, spinning out tales. Doris's early years were also spent absorbing her fathers bitter memories of World War I, taking them in as a kind of "poison." "We are all of us made by war," Lessing has written, "twisted and warped by war, but we seem to forget it."
For more details, go to: http://www.dorislessing.org
Have fun.
From the pamphlet: A Reader's Guide to The Golden Notebook & Under My Skin,
HarperPerennial, 1995
Doris Lessing was born Doris May Tayler in Persia (now Iran) on October 22, 1919. Both of her parents were British: her father, who had been crippled in World War I, was a clerk in the Imperial Bank of Persia; her mother had been a nurse. In 1925, lured by the promise of getting rich through maize farming, the family moved to the British colony in Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe). Doris's mother adapted to the rough life in the settlement, energetically trying to reproduce what was, in her view, a civilized, Edwardian life among savages; but her father did not, and the thousand-odd acres of bush he had bought failed to yield the promised wealth.
Lessing has described her childhood as an uneven mix of some pleasure and much pain. The natural world, which she explored with her brother, Harry, was one retreat from an otherwise miserable existence. Her mother, obsessed with raising a proper daughter, enforced a rigid system of rules and hygiene at home, then installed Doris in a convent school, where nuns terrified their charges with stories of hell and damnation. Lessing was later sent to an all-girls high school in the capital of Salisbury, from which she soon dropped out. She was thirteen; and it was the end of her formal education.
But like other women writers from southern African who did not graduate from high school (such as Olive Schreiner and Nadine Gordimer), Lessing made herself into a self-educated intellectual. She recently commented that unhappy childhoods seem to produce fiction writers. "Yes, I think that is true. Though it wasn't apparent to me then. Of course, I wasn't thinking in terms of being a writer then - I was just thinking about how to escape, all the time."
The parcels of books ordered from London fed her imagination, laying out other worlds to escape into. Lessing's early reading included Dickens, Scott, Stevenson, Kipling; later she discovered D.H. Lawrence, Stendhal, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky. Bedtime stories also nurtured her youth: her mother told them to the children and Doris herself kept her younger brother awake, spinning out tales. Doris's early years were also spent absorbing her fathers bitter memories of World War I, taking them in as a kind of "poison." "We are all of us made by war," Lessing has written, "twisted and warped by war, but we seem to forget it."
For more details, go to: http://www.dorislessing.org
Have fun.
Wednesday, January 21, 2009
(8) Connection: Doris Lessing's Acceptance Speech for the 2007 Nobel Prize for Literature, Literacy, Writing, Africa and School Libraries
I am standing in a doorway looking through clouds of blowing dust to where I am told there is still uncut forest. Yesterday I drove through miles of stumps, and charred remains of fires where, in 1956, there was the most wonderful forest I have ever seen, all now destroyed. People have to eat. They have to get fuel for fires.
This is north-west Zimbabwe early in the 80s, and I am visiting a friend who was a teacher in a school in London. He is here "to help Africa", as we put it. He is a gently idealistic soul and what he found in this school shocked him into a depression, from which it was hard to recover.
This school is like every other built after Independence. It consists of four large brick rooms side by side, put straight into the dust, one two three four, with a half room at one end, which is the library.
In these classrooms are blackboards, but my friend keeps the chalks in his pocket, as otherwise they would be stolen. There is no atlas or globe in the school, no textbooks, no exercise books or Biros.
In the library there are no books of the kind the pupils would like to read, but only tomes from American universities, hard even to lift, rejects from white libraries, detective stories, or titles like Weekend in Paris and Felicity Finds Love.
(...)
The pupils range from six to 26, because some who did not get schooling as children are here to make it up. Some pupils walk many miles every morning, rain or shine and across rivers. They cannot do homework because there is no electricity in the villages, and you can't study easily by the light of a burning log. The girls have to fetch water and cook before they set off for school and when they get back.
As I sit with my friend in his room, people shyly drop in, and everyone begs for books. "Please send us books when you get back to London," one man says. "They taught us to read but we have no books." Everybody I met, everyone, begged for books.
(...)
The next day I am to give a talk at a school in North London, a very good school. It is a school for boys, with beautiful buildings and gardens. The children here have a visit from some well-known person every week: these may be fathers, relatives, even mothers of the pupils; a visit from a celebrity is not unusual for them.
As I talk to them, the school in the blowing dust of north-west Zimbabwe is in my mind, and I look at the mildly expectant English faces in front of me and try to tell them about what I have seen in the last week.
Classrooms without books, without textbooks, or an atlas, or even a map pinned to a wall. A school where the teachers beg to be sent books to tell them how to teach, they being only 18 or 19 themselves. I tell these English boys how everybody begs for books: "Please send us books." But there are no images in their minds to match what I am telling them: of a school standing in dust clouds, where water is short, and where the end-of-term treat is a just-killed goat cooked in a great pot.
Is it really so impossible for these privileged students to imagine such bare poverty? I do my best. They are polite. I'm sure that some of them will one day win prizes.
Then the talk is over. Afterwards I ask the teachers how the library is, and if the pupils read. In this privileged school, I hear what I always hear when I go to such schools and even universities. "You know how it is," one of the teachers says. "A lot of the boys have never read at all, and the library is only half used."
Yes, indeed we do know how it is. All of us.
We are in a fragmenting culture, where our certainties of even a few decades ago are questioned and where it is common for young men and women, who have had years of education, to know nothing of the world, to have read nothing, knowing only some speciality or other, for instance, computers.
What has happened to us is an amazing invention - computers and the internet and TV. It is a revolution. This is not the first revolution the human race has dealt with. The printing revolution, which did not take place in a matter of a few decades, but took much longer, transformed our minds and ways of thinking. A foolhardy lot, we accepted it all, as we always do, never asked: "What is going to happen to us now, with this invention of print?" In the same way, we never thought to ask, "How will our lives, our way of thinking, be changed by the internet, which has seduced a whole generation with its inanities so that even quite reasonable people will confess that, once they are hooked, it is hard to cut free, and they may find a whole day has passed in blogging etc?"
Very recently, anyone even mildly educated would respect learning, education and our great store of literature. Of course we all know that when this happy state was with us, people would pretend to read, would pretend respect for learning. But it is on record that working men and women longed for books, evidenced by the founding of working-men's libraries, institutes, and the colleges of the 18th and 19th centuries. Reading, books, used to be part of a general education. Older people, talking to young ones, must understand just how much of an education reading was, because the young ones know so much less.
We all know this sad story. But we do not know the end of it. We think of the old adage, "Reading maketh a full man" - reading makes a woman and a man full of information, of history, of all kinds of knowledge.
Not long ago, a friend in Zimbabwe told me about a village where the people had not eaten for three days, but they were still talking about books and how to get them, about education.
I belong to an organisation which started out with the intention of getting books into the villages. There was a group of people who in another connection had travelled Zimbabwe at its grassroots. They told me that the villages, unlike what is reported, are full of intelligent people, teachers retired, teachers on leave, children on holidays, old people. I myself paid for a little survey to discover what people in Zimbabwe wanted to read, and found the results were the same as those of a Swedish survey I had not known about. People want to read the same kind of books that people in Europe want to read - novels of all kinds, science fiction, poetry, detective stories, plays, and do-it-yourself books, like how to open a bank account. All of Shakespeare too. A problem with finding books for villagers is that they don't know what is available, so a set book, like The Mayor of Casterbridge, becomes popular simply because it just happens to be there. Animal Farm, for obvious reasons, is the most popular of all novels.
(...)
I have a friend from Zimbabwe, a black writer. He taught himself to read from the labels on jam jars, the labels on preserved fruit cans. He was brought up in an area I have driven through, an area for rural blacks. The earth is grit and gravel, there are low sparse bushes. The huts are poor, nothing like the well-cared-for huts of the better off.
There was a school, but like the one I have described. He found a discarded children's encyclopaedia on a rubbish heap and taught himself from that.
On Independence in 1980 there was a group of good writers in Zimbabwe, truly a nest of singing birds. They were bred in old Southern Rhodesia, under the whites - the mission schools, the better schools. Writers are not made in Zimbabwe, not easily, not under Mugabe.
All the writers travelled a difficult road to literacy, let alone to becoming writers. I would say learning to read from the printed labels on jam jars and discarded encyclopaedias was not uncommon. And we are talking about people hungering for standards of education beyond them, living in huts with many children -an overworked mother, a fight for food and clothing.
Yet despite these difficulties, writers came into being. And we should also remember that this was Zimbabwe, conquered less than 100 years before. The grandparents of these people might have been storytellers working in the oral tradition. In one or two generations, the transition was made from these stories remembered and passed on, to print, to books.
Books were literally wrested from rubbish heaps and the detritus of the white man's world. But a sheaf of paper is one thing, a published book quite another. I have had several accounts sent to me of the publishing scene in Africa. Even in more privileged places like North Africa, to talk of a publishing scene is a dream of possibilities.
Here I am talking about books never written, writers who could not make it because the publishers are not there. Voices unheard. It is not possible to estimate this great waste of talent, of potential. But even before that stage of a book's creation which demands a publisher, an advance, encouragement, there is something else lacking.
Writers are often asked: "How do you write? With a word processor? an electric typewriter? a quill? longhand?" But the essential question is: "Have you found a space, that empty space, which should surround you when you write? Into that space, which is like a form of listening, of attention, will come the words, the words your characters will speak, ideas - inspiration."
If a writer cannot find this space, then poems and stories may be stillborn. When writers talk to each other, what they discuss is always to do with this imaginative space, this other time. "Have you found it? Are you holding it fast?"
Let us now jump to an apparently very different scene. We are in London, one of the big cities. There is a new writer. We cynically enquire: "Is she good-looking?" If this is a man: "Charismatic? Handsome?" We joke, but it is not a joke.
This new find is acclaimed, possibly given a lot of money. The buzzing of hype begins in their poor ears. They are feted, lauded, whisked about the world. Us old ones, who have seen it all, are sorry for this neophyte, who has no idea of what is really happening. He, she, is flattered, pleased. But ask in a year's time what he or she is thinking: "This is the worst thing that could have happened to me."
Some much-publicised new writers haven't written again, or haven't written what they wanted to, meant to. And we, the old ones, want to whisper into those innocent ears: "Have you still got your space? Your soul, your own and necessary place where your own voices may speak to you, you alone, where you may dream. Oh, hold on to it, don't let it go."
My mind is full of splendid memories of Africa that I can revive and look at whenever I want. How about those sunsets, gold and purple and orange, spreading across the sky at evening? How about butterflies and moths and bees on the aromatic bushes of the Kalahari? Or, sitting on the pale grassy banks of the Zambesi, the water dark and glossy, with all the birds of Africa darting about? Yes, elephants, giraffes, lions and the rest, there were plenty of those, but how about the sky at night, still unpolluted, black and wonderful, full of restless stars?
There are other memories too. A young African man, 18 perhaps, in tears, standing in what he hopes will be his "library". A visiting American, seeing that his library had no books, had sent a crate of them. The young man had taken each one out, reverently, and wrapped them in plastic. "But," we say, "these books were sent to be read, surely?" "No," he replies, "they will get dirty, and where will I get any more?"
I have seen a teacher in a school where there were no textbooks, not even a chalk for the blackboard. He taught his class of six- to 18-year-olds by moving stones in the dust, chanting: "Two times two is ... " and so on. I have seen a girl - perhaps not more than 20, also lacking textbooks, exercise books, biros - teach the ABC by scratching the letters in the dirt with a stick, while the sun beat down and the dust swirled.
I would like you to imagine yourselves somewhere in Southern Africa, standing in an Indian store, in a poor area, in a time of bad drought. There is a line of people, mostly women, with every kind of container for water. This store gets a bowser of precious water every afternoon from the town, and here the people wait.
The Indian is standing with the heels of his hands pressed down on the counter, and he is watching a black woman, who is bending over a wadge of paper that looks as if it has been torn out of a book. She is reading Anna Karenina. She is reading slowly, mouthing the words. It looks a difficult book. This is a young woman with two little children clutching at her legs. She is pregnant. The Indian is distressed, because the young woman's headscarf, which should be white, is yellow with dust. Dust lies between her breasts and on her arms. This man is distressed because of the lines of people, all thirsty, but he doesn't have enough water for them. He is angry because he knows there are people dying out there, beyond the dust clouds.
This man is curious. He says to the young woman: "What are you reading?"
"It is about Russia," says the girl.
"Do you know where Russia is?" He hardly knows himself.
The young woman looks straight at him, full of dignity, though her eyes are red from dust. "I was best in the class. My teacher said I was best."
The young woman resumes her reading: she wants to get to the end of the paragraph.
The Indian looks at the two little children and reaches for some Fanta, but the mother says: "Fanta makes them thirsty."
The Indian knows he shouldn't do this, but he reaches down to a great plastic container beside him, behind the counter, and pours out two plastic mugs of water, which he hands to the children. He watches while the girl looks at her children drinking, her mouth moving. He gives her a mug of water. It hurts him to see her drinking it, so painfully thirsty is she.
Now she hands over to him a plastic water container, which he fills. The young woman and the children watch him closely so that he doesn't spill any.
She is bending again over the book. She reads slowly but the paragraph fascinates her and she reads it again.
"Varenka, with her white kerchief over her black hair, surrounded by the children and gaily and good-humouredly busy with them, and at the same time visibly excited at the possibility of an offer of marriage from a man she cared for, Varenka looked very attractive. Koznyshev walked by her side and kept casting admiring glances at her. Looking at her, he recalled all the delightful things he had heard from her lips, all the good he knew about her, and became more and more conscious that the feeling he had for her was something rare, something he had felt but once before, long, long ago, in his early youth. The joy of being near her increased step by step, and at last reached such a point that, as he put a huge birch mushroom with a slender stalk and up-curling top into her basket, he looked into her eyes and, noting the flush of glad and frightened agitation that suffused her face, he was confused himself, and in silence gave her a smile that said too much."
This lump of print is lying on the counter, together with some old copies of magazines, some pages of newspapers, girls in bikinis.
It is time for her to leave the haven of the Indian store, and set off back along the four miles to her village. Outside, the lines of waiting women clamour and complain. But still the Indian lingers. He knows what it will cost this girl, going back home with the two clinging children. He would give her the piece of prose that so fascinates her, but he cannot really believe this splinter of a girl with her great belly can really understand it.
Why is perhaps a third of Anna Karenina stuck here on this counter in a remote Indian store? It is like this.
A certain high official, United Nations, as it happens, bought a copy of this novel in the bookshop when he set out on his journeys to cross several oceans and seas. On the plane, settled in his business-class seat, he tore the book into three parts. He looked around at his fellow passengers as he did this, knowing he would see looks of shock, curiosity, but some of amusement. When he was settled, his seatbelt tight, he said aloud to whomever could hear: "I always do this when I've a long trip. You don't want to have to hold up some heavy great book." The novel was a paperback, but, true, it is a long book. This man was used to people listening when he spoke. When people looked his way, curiously or not, he confided in them. "No, it is really the only way to travel."
When he reached the end of a section of the book, he called the airhostess, and sent it back to his secretary, who was travelling in the cheaper seats. This caused much interest, condemnation, certainly curiosity, every time a section of the great Russian novel arrived, mutilated, but readable, in the back part of the plane.
Meanwhile, down in the Indian store, the young woman is holding on to the counter, her little children clinging to her skirts. She wears jeans, since she is a modern woman, but over them she has put on the heavy woollen skirt, part of traditional garb of her people: her children can easily cling on to it, the thick folds.
She sends a thankful look at the Indian, who she knows likes her and is sorry for her, and she steps out into the blowing clouds. The children have gone past crying, and their throats are full of dust anyway.
This is hard, oh yes, it is hard, this stepping, one foot after another, through the dust that lays in soft deceiving mounds under her feet. Hard, hard - but she is used to hardship, is she not? Her mind is on the story she has been reading. She is thinking: "She is just like me, in her white headscarf, and she is looking after children, too. I could be her, that Russian girl. And the man there, he loves her and will ask her to marry him. (She has not finished more than that one paragraph). Yes, and a man will come for me, and take me away from all this, take me and the children, yes, he will love me and look after me."
She thinks. My teacher said there was a library there, bigger than the supermarket, a big building, and it is full of books. The young woman is smiling as she moves on, the dust blowing in her face. I am clever, she thinks. Teacher said I am clever. The cleverest in the school. My children will be clever, like me. I will take them to the library, the place full of books, and they will go to school, and they will be teachers - my teacher told me I could be a teacher. They will live far from here, earning money. They will live near the big library and enjoy a good life.
You may ask how that piece of the Russian novel ever ended up on that counter in the Indian store?
It would make a pretty story. Perhaps someone will tell it.
On goes that poor girl, held upright by thoughts of the water she would give her children once home, and drink a little herself. On she goes, through the dreaded dusts of an African drought.
We are a jaded lot, we in our world - our threatened world. We are good for irony and even cynicism. Some words and ideas we hardly use, so worn out have they become. But we may want to restore some words that have lost their potency.
We have a treasure-house of literature, going back to the Egyptians, the Greeks, the Romans. It is all there, this wealth of literature, to be discovered again and again by whoever is lucky enough to come up on it. Suppose it did not exist. How impoverished, how empty we would be.
We have a bequest of stories, tales from the old storytellers, some of whose names we know, but some not. The storytellers go back and back, to a clearing in the forest where a great fire burns, and the old shamans dance and sing, for our heritage of stories began in fire, magic, the spirit world. And that is where it is held, today.
Ask any modern storyteller and they will say there is always a moment when they are touched with fire, with what we like to call inspiration, and this goes back and back to the beginning of our race, to fire and ice and the great winds that shaped us and our world.
The storyteller is deep inside everyone of us. The story-maker is always with us. Let us suppose our world is attacked by war, by the horrors that we all of us easily imagine. Let us suppose floods wash through our cities, the seas rise . . . but the storyteller will be there, for it is our imaginations which shape us, keep us, create us - for good and for ill. It is our stories that will recreate us, when we are torn, hurt, even destroyed. It is the storyteller, the dream-maker, the myth-maker, that is our phoenix, that represents us at our best, and at our most creative.
That poor girl trudging through the dust, dreaming of an education for her children, do we think that we are better than she is - we, stuffed full of food, our cupboards full of clothes, stifling in our superfluities?
I think it is that girl and the women who were talking about books and an education when they had not eaten for three days, that may yet define us.
© The Nobel Foundation 2007
This is north-west Zimbabwe early in the 80s, and I am visiting a friend who was a teacher in a school in London. He is here "to help Africa", as we put it. He is a gently idealistic soul and what he found in this school shocked him into a depression, from which it was hard to recover.
This school is like every other built after Independence. It consists of four large brick rooms side by side, put straight into the dust, one two three four, with a half room at one end, which is the library.
In these classrooms are blackboards, but my friend keeps the chalks in his pocket, as otherwise they would be stolen. There is no atlas or globe in the school, no textbooks, no exercise books or Biros.
In the library there are no books of the kind the pupils would like to read, but only tomes from American universities, hard even to lift, rejects from white libraries, detective stories, or titles like Weekend in Paris and Felicity Finds Love.
(...)
The pupils range from six to 26, because some who did not get schooling as children are here to make it up. Some pupils walk many miles every morning, rain or shine and across rivers. They cannot do homework because there is no electricity in the villages, and you can't study easily by the light of a burning log. The girls have to fetch water and cook before they set off for school and when they get back.
As I sit with my friend in his room, people shyly drop in, and everyone begs for books. "Please send us books when you get back to London," one man says. "They taught us to read but we have no books." Everybody I met, everyone, begged for books.
(...)
The next day I am to give a talk at a school in North London, a very good school. It is a school for boys, with beautiful buildings and gardens. The children here have a visit from some well-known person every week: these may be fathers, relatives, even mothers of the pupils; a visit from a celebrity is not unusual for them.
As I talk to them, the school in the blowing dust of north-west Zimbabwe is in my mind, and I look at the mildly expectant English faces in front of me and try to tell them about what I have seen in the last week.
Classrooms without books, without textbooks, or an atlas, or even a map pinned to a wall. A school where the teachers beg to be sent books to tell them how to teach, they being only 18 or 19 themselves. I tell these English boys how everybody begs for books: "Please send us books." But there are no images in their minds to match what I am telling them: of a school standing in dust clouds, where water is short, and where the end-of-term treat is a just-killed goat cooked in a great pot.
Is it really so impossible for these privileged students to imagine such bare poverty? I do my best. They are polite. I'm sure that some of them will one day win prizes.
Then the talk is over. Afterwards I ask the teachers how the library is, and if the pupils read. In this privileged school, I hear what I always hear when I go to such schools and even universities. "You know how it is," one of the teachers says. "A lot of the boys have never read at all, and the library is only half used."
Yes, indeed we do know how it is. All of us.
We are in a fragmenting culture, where our certainties of even a few decades ago are questioned and where it is common for young men and women, who have had years of education, to know nothing of the world, to have read nothing, knowing only some speciality or other, for instance, computers.
What has happened to us is an amazing invention - computers and the internet and TV. It is a revolution. This is not the first revolution the human race has dealt with. The printing revolution, which did not take place in a matter of a few decades, but took much longer, transformed our minds and ways of thinking. A foolhardy lot, we accepted it all, as we always do, never asked: "What is going to happen to us now, with this invention of print?" In the same way, we never thought to ask, "How will our lives, our way of thinking, be changed by the internet, which has seduced a whole generation with its inanities so that even quite reasonable people will confess that, once they are hooked, it is hard to cut free, and they may find a whole day has passed in blogging etc?"
Very recently, anyone even mildly educated would respect learning, education and our great store of literature. Of course we all know that when this happy state was with us, people would pretend to read, would pretend respect for learning. But it is on record that working men and women longed for books, evidenced by the founding of working-men's libraries, institutes, and the colleges of the 18th and 19th centuries. Reading, books, used to be part of a general education. Older people, talking to young ones, must understand just how much of an education reading was, because the young ones know so much less.
We all know this sad story. But we do not know the end of it. We think of the old adage, "Reading maketh a full man" - reading makes a woman and a man full of information, of history, of all kinds of knowledge.
Not long ago, a friend in Zimbabwe told me about a village where the people had not eaten for three days, but they were still talking about books and how to get them, about education.
I belong to an organisation which started out with the intention of getting books into the villages. There was a group of people who in another connection had travelled Zimbabwe at its grassroots. They told me that the villages, unlike what is reported, are full of intelligent people, teachers retired, teachers on leave, children on holidays, old people. I myself paid for a little survey to discover what people in Zimbabwe wanted to read, and found the results were the same as those of a Swedish survey I had not known about. People want to read the same kind of books that people in Europe want to read - novels of all kinds, science fiction, poetry, detective stories, plays, and do-it-yourself books, like how to open a bank account. All of Shakespeare too. A problem with finding books for villagers is that they don't know what is available, so a set book, like The Mayor of Casterbridge, becomes popular simply because it just happens to be there. Animal Farm, for obvious reasons, is the most popular of all novels.
(...)
I have a friend from Zimbabwe, a black writer. He taught himself to read from the labels on jam jars, the labels on preserved fruit cans. He was brought up in an area I have driven through, an area for rural blacks. The earth is grit and gravel, there are low sparse bushes. The huts are poor, nothing like the well-cared-for huts of the better off.
There was a school, but like the one I have described. He found a discarded children's encyclopaedia on a rubbish heap and taught himself from that.
On Independence in 1980 there was a group of good writers in Zimbabwe, truly a nest of singing birds. They were bred in old Southern Rhodesia, under the whites - the mission schools, the better schools. Writers are not made in Zimbabwe, not easily, not under Mugabe.
All the writers travelled a difficult road to literacy, let alone to becoming writers. I would say learning to read from the printed labels on jam jars and discarded encyclopaedias was not uncommon. And we are talking about people hungering for standards of education beyond them, living in huts with many children -an overworked mother, a fight for food and clothing.
Yet despite these difficulties, writers came into being. And we should also remember that this was Zimbabwe, conquered less than 100 years before. The grandparents of these people might have been storytellers working in the oral tradition. In one or two generations, the transition was made from these stories remembered and passed on, to print, to books.
Books were literally wrested from rubbish heaps and the detritus of the white man's world. But a sheaf of paper is one thing, a published book quite another. I have had several accounts sent to me of the publishing scene in Africa. Even in more privileged places like North Africa, to talk of a publishing scene is a dream of possibilities.
Here I am talking about books never written, writers who could not make it because the publishers are not there. Voices unheard. It is not possible to estimate this great waste of talent, of potential. But even before that stage of a book's creation which demands a publisher, an advance, encouragement, there is something else lacking.
Writers are often asked: "How do you write? With a word processor? an electric typewriter? a quill? longhand?" But the essential question is: "Have you found a space, that empty space, which should surround you when you write? Into that space, which is like a form of listening, of attention, will come the words, the words your characters will speak, ideas - inspiration."
If a writer cannot find this space, then poems and stories may be stillborn. When writers talk to each other, what they discuss is always to do with this imaginative space, this other time. "Have you found it? Are you holding it fast?"
Let us now jump to an apparently very different scene. We are in London, one of the big cities. There is a new writer. We cynically enquire: "Is she good-looking?" If this is a man: "Charismatic? Handsome?" We joke, but it is not a joke.
This new find is acclaimed, possibly given a lot of money. The buzzing of hype begins in their poor ears. They are feted, lauded, whisked about the world. Us old ones, who have seen it all, are sorry for this neophyte, who has no idea of what is really happening. He, she, is flattered, pleased. But ask in a year's time what he or she is thinking: "This is the worst thing that could have happened to me."
Some much-publicised new writers haven't written again, or haven't written what they wanted to, meant to. And we, the old ones, want to whisper into those innocent ears: "Have you still got your space? Your soul, your own and necessary place where your own voices may speak to you, you alone, where you may dream. Oh, hold on to it, don't let it go."
My mind is full of splendid memories of Africa that I can revive and look at whenever I want. How about those sunsets, gold and purple and orange, spreading across the sky at evening? How about butterflies and moths and bees on the aromatic bushes of the Kalahari? Or, sitting on the pale grassy banks of the Zambesi, the water dark and glossy, with all the birds of Africa darting about? Yes, elephants, giraffes, lions and the rest, there were plenty of those, but how about the sky at night, still unpolluted, black and wonderful, full of restless stars?
There are other memories too. A young African man, 18 perhaps, in tears, standing in what he hopes will be his "library". A visiting American, seeing that his library had no books, had sent a crate of them. The young man had taken each one out, reverently, and wrapped them in plastic. "But," we say, "these books were sent to be read, surely?" "No," he replies, "they will get dirty, and where will I get any more?"
I have seen a teacher in a school where there were no textbooks, not even a chalk for the blackboard. He taught his class of six- to 18-year-olds by moving stones in the dust, chanting: "Two times two is ... " and so on. I have seen a girl - perhaps not more than 20, also lacking textbooks, exercise books, biros - teach the ABC by scratching the letters in the dirt with a stick, while the sun beat down and the dust swirled.
I would like you to imagine yourselves somewhere in Southern Africa, standing in an Indian store, in a poor area, in a time of bad drought. There is a line of people, mostly women, with every kind of container for water. This store gets a bowser of precious water every afternoon from the town, and here the people wait.
The Indian is standing with the heels of his hands pressed down on the counter, and he is watching a black woman, who is bending over a wadge of paper that looks as if it has been torn out of a book. She is reading Anna Karenina. She is reading slowly, mouthing the words. It looks a difficult book. This is a young woman with two little children clutching at her legs. She is pregnant. The Indian is distressed, because the young woman's headscarf, which should be white, is yellow with dust. Dust lies between her breasts and on her arms. This man is distressed because of the lines of people, all thirsty, but he doesn't have enough water for them. He is angry because he knows there are people dying out there, beyond the dust clouds.
This man is curious. He says to the young woman: "What are you reading?"
"It is about Russia," says the girl.
"Do you know where Russia is?" He hardly knows himself.
The young woman looks straight at him, full of dignity, though her eyes are red from dust. "I was best in the class. My teacher said I was best."
The young woman resumes her reading: she wants to get to the end of the paragraph.
The Indian looks at the two little children and reaches for some Fanta, but the mother says: "Fanta makes them thirsty."
The Indian knows he shouldn't do this, but he reaches down to a great plastic container beside him, behind the counter, and pours out two plastic mugs of water, which he hands to the children. He watches while the girl looks at her children drinking, her mouth moving. He gives her a mug of water. It hurts him to see her drinking it, so painfully thirsty is she.
Now she hands over to him a plastic water container, which he fills. The young woman and the children watch him closely so that he doesn't spill any.
She is bending again over the book. She reads slowly but the paragraph fascinates her and she reads it again.
"Varenka, with her white kerchief over her black hair, surrounded by the children and gaily and good-humouredly busy with them, and at the same time visibly excited at the possibility of an offer of marriage from a man she cared for, Varenka looked very attractive. Koznyshev walked by her side and kept casting admiring glances at her. Looking at her, he recalled all the delightful things he had heard from her lips, all the good he knew about her, and became more and more conscious that the feeling he had for her was something rare, something he had felt but once before, long, long ago, in his early youth. The joy of being near her increased step by step, and at last reached such a point that, as he put a huge birch mushroom with a slender stalk and up-curling top into her basket, he looked into her eyes and, noting the flush of glad and frightened agitation that suffused her face, he was confused himself, and in silence gave her a smile that said too much."
This lump of print is lying on the counter, together with some old copies of magazines, some pages of newspapers, girls in bikinis.
It is time for her to leave the haven of the Indian store, and set off back along the four miles to her village. Outside, the lines of waiting women clamour and complain. But still the Indian lingers. He knows what it will cost this girl, going back home with the two clinging children. He would give her the piece of prose that so fascinates her, but he cannot really believe this splinter of a girl with her great belly can really understand it.
Why is perhaps a third of Anna Karenina stuck here on this counter in a remote Indian store? It is like this.
A certain high official, United Nations, as it happens, bought a copy of this novel in the bookshop when he set out on his journeys to cross several oceans and seas. On the plane, settled in his business-class seat, he tore the book into three parts. He looked around at his fellow passengers as he did this, knowing he would see looks of shock, curiosity, but some of amusement. When he was settled, his seatbelt tight, he said aloud to whomever could hear: "I always do this when I've a long trip. You don't want to have to hold up some heavy great book." The novel was a paperback, but, true, it is a long book. This man was used to people listening when he spoke. When people looked his way, curiously or not, he confided in them. "No, it is really the only way to travel."
When he reached the end of a section of the book, he called the airhostess, and sent it back to his secretary, who was travelling in the cheaper seats. This caused much interest, condemnation, certainly curiosity, every time a section of the great Russian novel arrived, mutilated, but readable, in the back part of the plane.
Meanwhile, down in the Indian store, the young woman is holding on to the counter, her little children clinging to her skirts. She wears jeans, since she is a modern woman, but over them she has put on the heavy woollen skirt, part of traditional garb of her people: her children can easily cling on to it, the thick folds.
She sends a thankful look at the Indian, who she knows likes her and is sorry for her, and she steps out into the blowing clouds. The children have gone past crying, and their throats are full of dust anyway.
This is hard, oh yes, it is hard, this stepping, one foot after another, through the dust that lays in soft deceiving mounds under her feet. Hard, hard - but she is used to hardship, is she not? Her mind is on the story she has been reading. She is thinking: "She is just like me, in her white headscarf, and she is looking after children, too. I could be her, that Russian girl. And the man there, he loves her and will ask her to marry him. (She has not finished more than that one paragraph). Yes, and a man will come for me, and take me away from all this, take me and the children, yes, he will love me and look after me."
She thinks. My teacher said there was a library there, bigger than the supermarket, a big building, and it is full of books. The young woman is smiling as she moves on, the dust blowing in her face. I am clever, she thinks. Teacher said I am clever. The cleverest in the school. My children will be clever, like me. I will take them to the library, the place full of books, and they will go to school, and they will be teachers - my teacher told me I could be a teacher. They will live far from here, earning money. They will live near the big library and enjoy a good life.
You may ask how that piece of the Russian novel ever ended up on that counter in the Indian store?
It would make a pretty story. Perhaps someone will tell it.
On goes that poor girl, held upright by thoughts of the water she would give her children once home, and drink a little herself. On she goes, through the dreaded dusts of an African drought.
We are a jaded lot, we in our world - our threatened world. We are good for irony and even cynicism. Some words and ideas we hardly use, so worn out have they become. But we may want to restore some words that have lost their potency.
We have a treasure-house of literature, going back to the Egyptians, the Greeks, the Romans. It is all there, this wealth of literature, to be discovered again and again by whoever is lucky enough to come up on it. Suppose it did not exist. How impoverished, how empty we would be.
We have a bequest of stories, tales from the old storytellers, some of whose names we know, but some not. The storytellers go back and back, to a clearing in the forest where a great fire burns, and the old shamans dance and sing, for our heritage of stories began in fire, magic, the spirit world. And that is where it is held, today.
Ask any modern storyteller and they will say there is always a moment when they are touched with fire, with what we like to call inspiration, and this goes back and back to the beginning of our race, to fire and ice and the great winds that shaped us and our world.
The storyteller is deep inside everyone of us. The story-maker is always with us. Let us suppose our world is attacked by war, by the horrors that we all of us easily imagine. Let us suppose floods wash through our cities, the seas rise . . . but the storyteller will be there, for it is our imaginations which shape us, keep us, create us - for good and for ill. It is our stories that will recreate us, when we are torn, hurt, even destroyed. It is the storyteller, the dream-maker, the myth-maker, that is our phoenix, that represents us at our best, and at our most creative.
That poor girl trudging through the dust, dreaming of an education for her children, do we think that we are better than she is - we, stuffed full of food, our cupboards full of clothes, stifling in our superfluities?
I think it is that girl and the women who were talking about books and an education when they had not eaten for three days, that may yet define us.
© The Nobel Foundation 2007
Monday, January 19, 2009
(7) Speaking of Newspapers: The Future of Newspapers in a Digital Age, with Angus Frame, Group Director, Digital Media, The Globe and Mail
COUCHICHING ROUND TABLE
Wednesday, January 28, 2009
7:00 p.m. - 9:30 p.m.
University of Toronto Faculty Club
41 Willcocks Avenue
THE FUTURE OF NEWSPAPERS IN A DIGITAL AGE with Angus Frame, Group Director, Digital Media, The Globe and Mail
What's happening to the newspapers? Will they still land on our doorstep five years from now or will we will we all have to fold our napkins, instead of our paper, and read the news on our computer as we sip our morning coffee? Are inky fingers a thing of the past? We keep hearing about cutbacks and layoffs at our daily newspapers, and some of us may even remember the days of morning and evening editions of the same paper, let alone tipping the delivery boy who came to collect the subscription payments. (Some of us were those newspaper boys!) Every day someone bemoans the end of the newspaper, yet newspapers are ubiquitous: in any TTC car or bus, someone will be reading a paper; newspaper boxes still adorn many street corners throughout our city; someone is always posting a link to a newspaper article on their Facebook page or talking about something read in one paper or another. And we're no longer limited to our local newspapers -- today we can read local news from almost anywhere in the world, and read coverage of international events from as many perspectives as we have time and inclination to seek out.
Obviously, when it comes to what some call the tension between fibre -- paper -- and cyber -- the online world, there is lots to discuss. And ANGUS FRAME knows about both realms. Trained at journalism at Ryerson University and political science at McMaster University, from 2001 to 2008 angus was the editor of globaleandmail.com, one of North America's most successful online newspaper editions, and assumed the role of group director of digital media at The Globe and Mail in September 2008. Indeed, he joined the Globe in 1996 and has worked in various capacities in the news as well as with the Report on Business. He also speaks frequently on the state of affairs in 21st century journalism. And if you came to last summer's Couchiching conference on "The Power of Knowledge" you watched him chair a lively session on "citizen journalism or amateur hour", with Paul Sullivan and Andrew Keen. But on January 28th we will all be able to hear Angus's views in more detail.
He is just the right person to lead us in a wide-ranging conversation about the future of newspapers in the digital age at our next Couchiching Round Table on January 28th, so please join us!
FEE:
$35 for CIPA members, $20 for CIPA student members $40 for nonmembers, $25 for students. Includes hot and cold hors d'oeuvres with wine from Henry of Pelham Family Estate GST not included. Call 416 494-1440, ext. 225, or e-mail, or register online at: http://www.couch.ca/calendar/index.html.
HOLD THE DATE!
The 78th annual Couchiching Conference on THE GLOBAL POLITICS OF FOOD
August 6-9, 2009, Geneva Park, Ontario Visit our website regularly for updates at http://www.couch.ca/conference
+++
If you're not on our mailing list already, get on it! Call us at 416 494 1440 or e-mail couch@couch.ca. We promise never to give your address out to anyone nor will we send you mailings unrelated to the Couchiching Institute on Public Affairs: http://www.couch.ca/conference
Wednesday, January 28, 2009
7:00 p.m. - 9:30 p.m.
University of Toronto Faculty Club
41 Willcocks Avenue
THE FUTURE OF NEWSPAPERS IN A DIGITAL AGE with Angus Frame, Group Director, Digital Media, The Globe and Mail
What's happening to the newspapers? Will they still land on our doorstep five years from now or will we will we all have to fold our napkins, instead of our paper, and read the news on our computer as we sip our morning coffee? Are inky fingers a thing of the past? We keep hearing about cutbacks and layoffs at our daily newspapers, and some of us may even remember the days of morning and evening editions of the same paper, let alone tipping the delivery boy who came to collect the subscription payments. (Some of us were those newspaper boys!) Every day someone bemoans the end of the newspaper, yet newspapers are ubiquitous: in any TTC car or bus, someone will be reading a paper; newspaper boxes still adorn many street corners throughout our city; someone is always posting a link to a newspaper article on their Facebook page or talking about something read in one paper or another. And we're no longer limited to our local newspapers -- today we can read local news from almost anywhere in the world, and read coverage of international events from as many perspectives as we have time and inclination to seek out.
Obviously, when it comes to what some call the tension between fibre -- paper -- and cyber -- the online world, there is lots to discuss. And ANGUS FRAME knows about both realms. Trained at journalism at Ryerson University and political science at McMaster University, from 2001 to 2008 angus was the editor of globaleandmail.com, one of North America's most successful online newspaper editions, and assumed the role of group director of digital media at The Globe and Mail in September 2008. Indeed, he joined the Globe in 1996 and has worked in various capacities in the news as well as with the Report on Business. He also speaks frequently on the state of affairs in 21st century journalism. And if you came to last summer's Couchiching conference on "The Power of Knowledge" you watched him chair a lively session on "citizen journalism or amateur hour", with Paul Sullivan and Andrew Keen. But on January 28th we will all be able to hear Angus's views in more detail.
He is just the right person to lead us in a wide-ranging conversation about the future of newspapers in the digital age at our next Couchiching Round Table on January 28th, so please join us!
FEE:
$35 for CIPA members, $20 for CIPA student members $40 for nonmembers, $25 for students. Includes hot and cold hors d'oeuvres with wine from Henry of Pelham Family Estate GST not included. Call 416 494-1440, ext. 225, or e-mail
HOLD THE DATE!
The 78th annual Couchiching Conference on THE GLOBAL POLITICS OF FOOD
August 6-9, 2009, Geneva Park, Ontario Visit our website regularly for updates at http://www.couch.ca/conference
+++
If you're not on our mailing list already, get on it! Call us at 416 494 1440 or e-mail couch@couch.ca. We promise never to give your address out to anyone nor will we send you mailings unrelated to the Couchiching Institute on Public Affairs: http://www.couch.ca/conference
(6) Walking Shadows: Orson Welles, William Randolph Hearst, and Citizen Kane AND Media Manipulation
Another great read that will make you think about how manipulated we are by the media is Walking Shadows: Orson Welles, William Randolph Hearst, and Citizen Kane, by John Evangelist Walsh (The University of Wisconsin Press, 2004), an independent scholar and writer. I started and finished it almost without putting it down a few weeks ago.
Walsh is an American author of almost twenty works of biography and history: The Execution of Major Andre; Unraveling Piltdown: The Science Fraud of the Century and Its Solution; Midnight Dreary: The Mysterious Death of Edgar Allan Poe, among others. For more information about him, go to http://us.macmillan.com/moonlight.
Like most of us, I've seen Citizen Kane, but a long time ago, and must admit that I couldn't really understand why that movie could be so controversial, since I didn't live back then. Walsh even explains the significance of the word "Rosebud." Bet you can't guess what it is.
What I had no idea about was the power of William Randolph Hearst who was challenged by the genius of Orson Welles.
John Walsh puts the whole movie in historical context in a highly-readable way.
Hearst began his newspaper career in 1887 when he received, as a gift(!) from his father, no less, the San Francisco Examiner, at the age of 24. Hearst had just been expelled from Harvard, so rewarding bad behaviour is really nothing new.
According to Walsh, "he soon turned the respected old journal from legitimate reporting to a career of sensationalism. Solely for the sake of circulation he adopted and improved on every low trick and technique of the day's 'yellow journalism.' A frothy blend of exaggeration, distortion, excess, and outright fakery became the Examiner's hallmark --- scandal, pseudo-science, disasters, an undercurrent of sexual innuendo, all wrapped in a variety of noisy 'crusades' on behalf of a vague entity called 'the people'."
His mother bought the New York Journal for him. Hearst then wasted no time acquiring other papers and made them into one of the first chains in the US.
But catch this. In 1906, Theodore Roosevelt said of Hearst, "'He preaches the gospel of envy, hatred, and unrest. ... He cares nothing for the nation nor for any citizen in it. ... He is the most potent single influence for evil we have in our life.'"
Time magazine said the same thing about him 33 years later: "No other press lord wielded his power with less sense of responsibility; no other press matched the Hearst press for flamboyance, perversity and incitement of man's hysteria. ... His appeal was not to men's minds but to those infantile emotions which he never conquered in himself: arrogance, hatred, frustration, fear."
Did you know that Hearst is blamed for bringing on the Spanish-American War over Cuba in 1898? The public was brainwashed into accepting it.
Even worse, according to Walsh: "Most chilling of all was his role in the assassination of President McKinley in 1901, a role which earned him fierce public condemnation, and from which he recovered only with great difficulty. Always a bitter opponent of McKinely, editorials in Hearst's papers against the president and his policies grew increasingly savage in tone until they actually encouraged the idea of assassination. 'If bad institutions and bad men cannot be got rid of except by killing,' counseled an editorial in the New York Evening Journal on McKinley's reelection, 'then the killing must be done.'"
Pravda and Izvestia, move over. Who needs the CIA or the KGB?
Does any or all of this remind you of what we're living through today? A Canadian media baron brought to trial in Chicago, then jailed in Florida. Wars in the Middle East supported and distorted by so much press, embedded journalists, TV, and nowadays the Internet, that it's been almost impossible to sift fact from fiction to form an opinion.
If we limit our research to just one source of information, we cannot help but be manipulated by what we're reading. Independent thought can only come from reading and listening to different sources before we can draw any conclusions - all the more reason for a "blended approach" when it comes to learning.
For a bit of levity in this debate, try Susan Townsend's Adrian Mole and the Weapons of Mass Destruction (Adrian Mole Diaries). You'll laugh. You'll cry. You'll thank me later...
Walsh is an American author of almost twenty works of biography and history: The Execution of Major Andre; Unraveling Piltdown: The Science Fraud of the Century and Its Solution; Midnight Dreary: The Mysterious Death of Edgar Allan Poe, among others. For more information about him, go to http://us.macmillan.com/moonlight.
Like most of us, I've seen Citizen Kane, but a long time ago, and must admit that I couldn't really understand why that movie could be so controversial, since I didn't live back then. Walsh even explains the significance of the word "Rosebud." Bet you can't guess what it is.
What I had no idea about was the power of William Randolph Hearst who was challenged by the genius of Orson Welles.
John Walsh puts the whole movie in historical context in a highly-readable way.
Hearst began his newspaper career in 1887 when he received, as a gift(!) from his father, no less, the San Francisco Examiner, at the age of 24. Hearst had just been expelled from Harvard, so rewarding bad behaviour is really nothing new.
According to Walsh, "he soon turned the respected old journal from legitimate reporting to a career of sensationalism. Solely for the sake of circulation he adopted and improved on every low trick and technique of the day's 'yellow journalism.' A frothy blend of exaggeration, distortion, excess, and outright fakery became the Examiner's hallmark --- scandal, pseudo-science, disasters, an undercurrent of sexual innuendo, all wrapped in a variety of noisy 'crusades' on behalf of a vague entity called 'the people'."
His mother bought the New York Journal for him. Hearst then wasted no time acquiring other papers and made them into one of the first chains in the US.
But catch this. In 1906, Theodore Roosevelt said of Hearst, "'He preaches the gospel of envy, hatred, and unrest. ... He cares nothing for the nation nor for any citizen in it. ... He is the most potent single influence for evil we have in our life.'"
Time magazine said the same thing about him 33 years later: "No other press lord wielded his power with less sense of responsibility; no other press matched the Hearst press for flamboyance, perversity and incitement of man's hysteria. ... His appeal was not to men's minds but to those infantile emotions which he never conquered in himself: arrogance, hatred, frustration, fear."
Did you know that Hearst is blamed for bringing on the Spanish-American War over Cuba in 1898? The public was brainwashed into accepting it.
Even worse, according to Walsh: "Most chilling of all was his role in the assassination of President McKinley in 1901, a role which earned him fierce public condemnation, and from which he recovered only with great difficulty. Always a bitter opponent of McKinely, editorials in Hearst's papers against the president and his policies grew increasingly savage in tone until they actually encouraged the idea of assassination. 'If bad institutions and bad men cannot be got rid of except by killing,' counseled an editorial in the New York Evening Journal on McKinley's reelection, 'then the killing must be done.'"
Pravda and Izvestia, move over. Who needs the CIA or the KGB?
Does any or all of this remind you of what we're living through today? A Canadian media baron brought to trial in Chicago, then jailed in Florida. Wars in the Middle East supported and distorted by so much press, embedded journalists, TV, and nowadays the Internet, that it's been almost impossible to sift fact from fiction to form an opinion.
If we limit our research to just one source of information, we cannot help but be manipulated by what we're reading. Independent thought can only come from reading and listening to different sources before we can draw any conclusions - all the more reason for a "blended approach" when it comes to learning.
For a bit of levity in this debate, try Susan Townsend's Adrian Mole and the Weapons of Mass Destruction (Adrian Mole Diaries). You'll laugh. You'll cry. You'll thank me later...
Sunday, January 18, 2009
(5) Washington Post Mensa Invitational - Too Funny - Too Clever
A friend of mine, Anna Mackay-Smith, actor, producer of Women In Transition at the Orillia Opera House in November, 2008, sent me this list of words from the Washington Post Mensa Invitational (http://soundingcircle.com/newslog2.php/__show_article/_a000195-000817.htm):
Washington Post readers were asked to take any word from the dictionary, alter it by adding, subtracting, or changing one letter, and supply a new definition.
Here are the winners:
1. Cashtration: The act of buying a house, which renders the subject financially impotent for an indefinite period of time.
2. Ignoranus: A person who is both stupid and an asshole.
3. Intaxication: Euphoria at getting a tax refund, which lasts until you realize it was your money to start with.
4. Reintarnation: Coming back to life as a hillbilly.
5. Bozone: The substance surrounding stupid people that stops bright ideas from penetrating.
6. Foreploy: Any misrepresentation about yourself for the purpose of getting laid.
7. Giraffiti: Vandalism spray-painted very, very high.
8. Sarchasm: The gulf between the author of sarcastic wit and the person who doesn't get it.
9. Inoculatte: To take coffee intravenously when you are running late.
10. Osteopornosis: A degenerate disease. (This one got extra credit.)
11. Karmageddon: It's like, when everybody is sending off all these really bad vibes, right? And then, like, the Earth explodes and it's like, a serious bummer.
12. Decafalon (n.): The grueling event of getting through the day consuming only things that are good for you.
13. Glibido: All talk and no action.
14. Dopeler Effect: The tendency of stupid ideas to seem smarter when they come at you rapidly.
15. Arachnoleptic Fit: The frantic dance performed just after you've accidentally walked through a spider web.
16. Beelzebug: Satan in the form of a mosquito, that gets into your bedroom at three in the morning and cannot be cast out.
17. Caterpallor: The color you turn after finding half a worm in the fruit you're eating.
The Washington Post has also published the winning submissions to its yearly contest in which readers are asked to supply alternate meanings for common words. And the winners are:
1. Coffee, n. The person upon whom one coughs.
2. Flabbergasted, adj. Appalled by discovering how much weight one has gained.
3. Abdicate, v. To give up all hope of ever having a flat stomach.
4. Esplanade, v. To attempt an explanation while drunk.
5. Willy-nilly, adj. Impotent.
6. Negligent, adj. To absentmindedly answer the door when wearing only a nightgown.
7. Lymph, v. To walk with a lisp.
8. Gargoyle, n. Olive-flavored mouthwash.
9. Flatulence, n. Emergency vehicle that picks up someone who has been run over by a steamroller.
10. Balderdash, n. A rapidly receding hairline.
11. Testicle n. A humorous question on an exam.
12. Rectitude, n. The formal, dignified bearing adopted by proctologists.
13. Pokemon, n. A Rastafarian proctologist.
14. Oyster, n. A person who sprinkles his conversation with yiddishisms.
Washington Post readers were asked to take any word from the dictionary, alter it by adding, subtracting, or changing one letter, and supply a new definition.
Here are the winners:
1. Cashtration: The act of buying a house, which renders the subject financially impotent for an indefinite period of time.
2. Ignoranus: A person who is both stupid and an asshole.
3. Intaxication: Euphoria at getting a tax refund, which lasts until you realize it was your money to start with.
4. Reintarnation: Coming back to life as a hillbilly.
5. Bozone: The substance surrounding stupid people that stops bright ideas from penetrating.
6. Foreploy: Any misrepresentation about yourself for the purpose of getting laid.
7. Giraffiti: Vandalism spray-painted very, very high.
8. Sarchasm: The gulf between the author of sarcastic wit and the person who doesn't get it.
9. Inoculatte: To take coffee intravenously when you are running late.
10. Osteopornosis: A degenerate disease. (This one got extra credit.)
11. Karmageddon: It's like, when everybody is sending off all these really bad vibes, right? And then, like, the Earth explodes and it's like, a serious bummer.
12. Decafalon (n.): The grueling event of getting through the day consuming only things that are good for you.
13. Glibido: All talk and no action.
14. Dopeler Effect: The tendency of stupid ideas to seem smarter when they come at you rapidly.
15. Arachnoleptic Fit: The frantic dance performed just after you've accidentally walked through a spider web.
16. Beelzebug: Satan in the form of a mosquito, that gets into your bedroom at three in the morning and cannot be cast out.
17. Caterpallor: The color you turn after finding half a worm in the fruit you're eating.
The Washington Post has also published the winning submissions to its yearly contest in which readers are asked to supply alternate meanings for common words. And the winners are:
1. Coffee, n. The person upon whom one coughs.
2. Flabbergasted, adj. Appalled by discovering how much weight one has gained.
3. Abdicate, v. To give up all hope of ever having a flat stomach.
4. Esplanade, v. To attempt an explanation while drunk.
5. Willy-nilly, adj. Impotent.
6. Negligent, adj. To absentmindedly answer the door when wearing only a nightgown.
7. Lymph, v. To walk with a lisp.
8. Gargoyle, n. Olive-flavored mouthwash.
9. Flatulence, n. Emergency vehicle that picks up someone who has been run over by a steamroller.
10. Balderdash, n. A rapidly receding hairline.
11. Testicle n. A humorous question on an exam.
12. Rectitude, n. The formal, dignified bearing adopted by proctologists.
13. Pokemon, n. A Rastafarian proctologist.
14. Oyster, n. A person who sprinkles his conversation with yiddishisms.
(4) Michael Wesch and the Future of Education: Form(at) or Content?
Thanks to the Digital Literacy Leadership Seminar (Module 2 - http://moodle.abel.yorku.ca/login/index.php), created by York University and York Region District School Board, I had the opportunity to listen to Michael Wesch and the Future of Education, a podcast from The University of Manitoba. Do yourself a HUGE favour and listen to it: http://umanitoba.ca/ist/production/streaming/podcast_wesch.html. Michael Wesch is Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology, Kansas State University.
And then spread the word.
What I found revealing, or interesting, is that Wesch mentions the word information all the way throughout his talk but, for whatever reason, doesn't mention the word knowledge.
I came to understand the distinction between the two (information as opposed to knowledge), in the context of the Internet information explosion, after attending The Couchiching Conference - The Power of Knowledge: The New Global Currency, August 7-10, 2008: http://www.couch.ca/history/index.html. Take a look; spread the word.
The opening keynote address, The Uncertain Path from Noise to Wisdom was given by Canadian musician Bill Buxton, University of Toronto Professor, Microsoft CEO (www.billbuxton.com) - There, among other gems, you'll find: The blackboard fundamentally changed the social and physical organization of classroom education, by better supporting teaching and demonstrating to the group, rather than the individual, and by enabling timely support material to be displayed in the visible periphery, while the students worked on their personal slates. No, Buxton doesn't stop at the blackboard...), and author of Sketching Experiences: Getting the Design Right and the Right Design.
In his opening address at the Conference, August 7, Buxton stated, "If we accomplish nothing else here tonight, when you hear the words Information Revolution, you'll be able to say, 'Hogwash'."
Yes, I took notes. Had to dig them up, though.
Buxton went on to say that what we're experiencing right now with the Internet is not the same as the changes started by the Gutenberg Press, or the Copernicus Encyclopedia, or the Industrial Revolution. "Who said technology is informing us better than before?"
And: "If you're going to be good at one technology, don't pick hardware or software, but wetware, as in the human brain, which is 92% water." How revolutionary and refreshing is that?
Even before hearing Buxton speak, I strongly felt that we've always had too much information to consume and digest, with or without the Internet, but the issues get more complicated when we don't make the distinction between data or information gathering, as contrasted with our pursuit of knowledge and wisdom (knowledge without wisdom = evil - they say that even in Russian).
The Internet, a great tool, provides us with speedy, easy access to information, any kind of information, created by anyone at all. However, into the debate we must be aware of questions raised by authors such as, among others, Bill Buxton and Andrew Keen, English critic and writer of The Cult of the Amateur: How The Internet Is Killing Our Culture (Doubleday, 2007 - a great read, and well-reviewed by The New York Times).
Keen also spoke at the 2008 Couchiching Conference, as well as at the Ontario Library Association Superconference last year. I heard him on both occasions, read his book, and I think he has a few good points we should keep in our wetware, although he sometimes comes across as being a bit of a whiner:
"What’s wrong with Web 2.0? Sure, it’s great at creating space for self-expression, Keen said, one of his few points of clear agreement with Web 2.0 supporters. There’s no question, he said, that 'when you go to YouTube, or to MySpace, there’s an awful lot of content.'"
Despite his distrust of the Internet, Keen does have a blog, surprisingly enough: http://andrewkeen.typepad.com/ (Andrew Keen: On Media, Culture and Politics: the future with a twist - take a look).
In his view, though, "'most of that content is worthless' because it is published without going through traditional gatekeepers: the record labels, newspaper editors, magazine and book publishers, scholars, and other cultural producers who are paid to sort good from bad and truth from lies." Source:
http://www.ridhwansyah.com/how-the-internet-is-killing-our-culture.php
When I spoke to Mr. Keen very briefly, as he was autographing my book at The Couchiching Conference, he admitted that he might have exaggerated a little. Fine. Many authors do in order to make their points.
One of the reasons I think the Internet has gained so much popularity, besides its ease-of-access and "content craziness," is because we've lost faith and confidence in these "traditional gatekeepers", as Keen calls them. Whether it's politics, religion, education, advertising, the medical or psychiatric professions, etc., the public knows it has been lied to and manipulated so many times in the past that we now have a problem believing anything we hear from "the authorities" in this age of scepticism. (See my blog Post No. 10 for another explanation provided by the authors of Wikinomics)
Even our school textbooks cannot be trusted (because they can't be updated fast enough) if you read Gavin Menzies' book, 1434: How China Changed the World (Harper Collins, 2008).
You've got to take a look at Menzies' site: http://www.gavinmenzies.net/index.asp.
He's gathered a lot of convincing evidence, leading to knowledge and perhaps wisdom, that the Chinese were actually in North America (no, I didn't say, "discovered" North America), thanks to their huge fleets of ships carrying volumes of encyclopedias, well before the Europeans, and were responsible for the Italian Renaissance. I know it sounds pretty crazy, but Menzies' evidence sure made me challenge everything I was taught about the early Portuguese, Spanish and Italian explorers. I read the book over the summer - I highly recommend it. This knowledge has yet to trickle down to our school system and teaching, and the public in general.
We, as educators, cannot "un-ring the bell" - in other words, get rid of the Internet as a source of information. That's clear. But many people are concerned that an exclusive dependence on this way of "learning"(?) might be detrimental to our critical thinking skills. Maggie Jackson writes about this in her book Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age (Prometheus, 2008), as do Alison Armstrong and Charles Casement, Canadian co-authors of The Child and the Machine: Why Computers May Put Our Children's Education at Risk (Key Porter Books, 1999).
Wow! I've really digressed from Wesch's Future of Education seminar. Alright, sorry.
I agree with Wesch. A person must be engaged in his/her learning, but I would also add, must be committed to his/her pursuit of knowledge and wisdom. However, if you put a computer in front of someone who's sitting in a lecture hall, myself included, where the main focus is supposed to be an instructor or a professor, it's not surprising that the person's attention will be drawn to the computer, no matter who the person is at the front of the amphitheatre. There's really no competition. It's a "no wetwarer."
I think there also must be a distinction between content and form. When our attention is so overwhelmed by form, to the detriment or exclusion of content, then there's a problem (people were seduced by Hitler's charisma in the 1930s, and really didn't listen closely to the actual message, the content of his speeches), we have to rethink what we are doing, what we want to learn and what we're pursuing in our quest for knowledge, not just raw information. Wesch fortunately does address some of this in his presentation. Glad I watched it.
To find out more about Wesch, use these URLs:
http://umanitoba.ca/ist/production/streaming/podcast_wesch.html
http://www.ksu.edu/sasw/anthro/wesch.htm
Also, check out the 2009 Couchiching Conference, just north of Orillia. This year's topic is The Global Politics of Food: http://www.couch.ca/conference/ It's well worth attending. See you there.
Show parent | Reply
And then spread the word.
What I found revealing, or interesting, is that Wesch mentions the word information all the way throughout his talk but, for whatever reason, doesn't mention the word knowledge.
I came to understand the distinction between the two (information as opposed to knowledge), in the context of the Internet information explosion, after attending The Couchiching Conference - The Power of Knowledge: The New Global Currency, August 7-10, 2008: http://www.couch.ca/history/index.html. Take a look; spread the word.
The opening keynote address, The Uncertain Path from Noise to Wisdom was given by Canadian musician Bill Buxton, University of Toronto Professor, Microsoft CEO (www.billbuxton.com) - There, among other gems, you'll find: The blackboard fundamentally changed the social and physical organization of classroom education, by better supporting teaching and demonstrating to the group, rather than the individual, and by enabling timely support material to be displayed in the visible periphery, while the students worked on their personal slates. No, Buxton doesn't stop at the blackboard...), and author of Sketching Experiences: Getting the Design Right and the Right Design.
In his opening address at the Conference, August 7, Buxton stated, "If we accomplish nothing else here tonight, when you hear the words Information Revolution, you'll be able to say, 'Hogwash'."
Yes, I took notes. Had to dig them up, though.
Buxton went on to say that what we're experiencing right now with the Internet is not the same as the changes started by the Gutenberg Press, or the Copernicus Encyclopedia, or the Industrial Revolution. "Who said technology is informing us better than before?"
And: "If you're going to be good at one technology, don't pick hardware or software, but wetware, as in the human brain, which is 92% water." How revolutionary and refreshing is that?
Even before hearing Buxton speak, I strongly felt that we've always had too much information to consume and digest, with or without the Internet, but the issues get more complicated when we don't make the distinction between data or information gathering, as contrasted with our pursuit of knowledge and wisdom (knowledge without wisdom = evil - they say that even in Russian).
The Internet, a great tool, provides us with speedy, easy access to information, any kind of information, created by anyone at all. However, into the debate we must be aware of questions raised by authors such as, among others, Bill Buxton and Andrew Keen, English critic and writer of The Cult of the Amateur: How The Internet Is Killing Our Culture (Doubleday, 2007 - a great read, and well-reviewed by The New York Times).
Keen also spoke at the 2008 Couchiching Conference, as well as at the Ontario Library Association Superconference last year. I heard him on both occasions, read his book, and I think he has a few good points we should keep in our wetware, although he sometimes comes across as being a bit of a whiner:
"What’s wrong with Web 2.0? Sure, it’s great at creating space for self-expression, Keen said, one of his few points of clear agreement with Web 2.0 supporters. There’s no question, he said, that 'when you go to YouTube, or to MySpace, there’s an awful lot of content.'"
Despite his distrust of the Internet, Keen does have a blog, surprisingly enough: http://andrewkeen.typepad.com/ (Andrew Keen: On Media, Culture and Politics: the future with a twist - take a look).
In his view, though, "'most of that content is worthless' because it is published without going through traditional gatekeepers: the record labels, newspaper editors, magazine and book publishers, scholars, and other cultural producers who are paid to sort good from bad and truth from lies." Source:
http://www.ridhwansyah.com/how-the-internet-is-killing-our-culture.php
When I spoke to Mr. Keen very briefly, as he was autographing my book at The Couchiching Conference, he admitted that he might have exaggerated a little. Fine. Many authors do in order to make their points.
One of the reasons I think the Internet has gained so much popularity, besides its ease-of-access and "content craziness," is because we've lost faith and confidence in these "traditional gatekeepers", as Keen calls them. Whether it's politics, religion, education, advertising, the medical or psychiatric professions, etc., the public knows it has been lied to and manipulated so many times in the past that we now have a problem believing anything we hear from "the authorities" in this age of scepticism. (See my blog Post No. 10 for another explanation provided by the authors of Wikinomics)
Even our school textbooks cannot be trusted (because they can't be updated fast enough) if you read Gavin Menzies' book, 1434: How China Changed the World (Harper Collins, 2008).
You've got to take a look at Menzies' site: http://www.gavinmenzies.net/index.asp.
He's gathered a lot of convincing evidence, leading to knowledge and perhaps wisdom, that the Chinese were actually in North America (no, I didn't say, "discovered" North America), thanks to their huge fleets of ships carrying volumes of encyclopedias, well before the Europeans, and were responsible for the Italian Renaissance. I know it sounds pretty crazy, but Menzies' evidence sure made me challenge everything I was taught about the early Portuguese, Spanish and Italian explorers. I read the book over the summer - I highly recommend it. This knowledge has yet to trickle down to our school system and teaching, and the public in general.
We, as educators, cannot "un-ring the bell" - in other words, get rid of the Internet as a source of information. That's clear. But many people are concerned that an exclusive dependence on this way of "learning"(?) might be detrimental to our critical thinking skills. Maggie Jackson writes about this in her book Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age (Prometheus, 2008), as do Alison Armstrong and Charles Casement, Canadian co-authors of The Child and the Machine: Why Computers May Put Our Children's Education at Risk (Key Porter Books, 1999).
Wow! I've really digressed from Wesch's Future of Education seminar. Alright, sorry.
I agree with Wesch. A person must be engaged in his/her learning, but I would also add, must be committed to his/her pursuit of knowledge and wisdom. However, if you put a computer in front of someone who's sitting in a lecture hall, myself included, where the main focus is supposed to be an instructor or a professor, it's not surprising that the person's attention will be drawn to the computer, no matter who the person is at the front of the amphitheatre. There's really no competition. It's a "no wetwarer."
I think there also must be a distinction between content and form. When our attention is so overwhelmed by form, to the detriment or exclusion of content, then there's a problem (people were seduced by Hitler's charisma in the 1930s, and really didn't listen closely to the actual message, the content of his speeches), we have to rethink what we are doing, what we want to learn and what we're pursuing in our quest for knowledge, not just raw information. Wesch fortunately does address some of this in his presentation. Glad I watched it.
To find out more about Wesch, use these URLs:
http://umanitoba.ca/ist/production/streaming/podcast_wesch.html
http://www.ksu.edu/sasw/anthro/wesch.htm
Also, check out the 2009 Couchiching Conference, just north of Orillia. This year's topic is The Global Politics of Food: http://www.couch.ca/conference/ It's well worth attending. See you there.
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