Thoughts on humanizing technology
Malala Yousafzai is the youngest person ever to be nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize, for actions starting when she was just 12 years old.
Sending people to school is the best way to fight terrorism.
Link to part 1 on TheDailyShow.com
Link to part 2 on TheDailyShow.com
Link to part 3 on TheDailyShow.com
See also an interesting discussion on Quora: Is Malala Yousafzai a good example or bad?
Note: This was one of the earliest posts on this blog, written almost four years ago. I think it is still relevant and useful, so I’ve moved it up to the top. -gf
In the early 90s, I was a flight instructor at Watsonville, CA (WVI), teaching primary students how to get an airplane off the ground, take it somewhere else and land again without bending anything important. For the students, this took a fair amount of effort, not to mention a sizable investment of time and money.
One of the things that I realized after a while was that very little learning was done in the airplane. It’s a high stress environment, in which (at least by the end of their training) the student needed to aviate, navigate and communicate simultaneously and there was no pulling off to the side of the road to sort things out. Because they were operating at full mental capacity most of the time, there was simply no space to absorb new information. So my mantra became: you learn on the ground, you practice in the air.
In my current life as a web developer and adviser to many people on all things Internet, I often find myself in mental overload and I know that at those times, my ability to learn and think creatively is diminished. I don’t have a solution to this, other than to recognize it and know that at those times all I can do is practice what I already know.
It’s clear to me that we need time away from our daily chores to create, generate new ideas, take the long view, to learn. A few things that I find help facilitate this process:
Of course, in most cases we want our learning to have a practical outcome. It seems to take a lot of switching back and forth between learning and practicing before we can produce something of value, especially something new. I’m very interested to know how you go about about finding the balance. Please leave your thoughts and ideas in comments.
Piper Tomahawk Photo by Simon Schoeters. [Note: I’ve spent a lot of time in Tomahawks, including during my own primary training at Santa Monica (SMO), where there was a tower controller who insisted on calling them “Tommyhawks”. Good times.]
I received the following email from my friend, noted playwright Rick Foster. While it is not about technology per se, it struck a chord with me and I asked Rick if I could share it on this blog. I also pointed out that this is why he should have a blog of his own.
So I received an automated call this afternoon. A male voice asked if I would take a minute to answer a few very important questions.
I said, “yes”.
The first question was whether I believed that “marriage should be allowed between only one man and only one woman”?
I cringed at the infelicitous phrasing and noted that the two placements of the word “only” within the phrase governed by the preposition “between” meant that the “onlys” modified just the following two words and not the whole prepositional phrase. So an accurate paraphrase of the question would be:
“Do you believe a marriage should be allowed if it involves only one man and only one woman?”
Well, of course I do. So does everyone I know. And as for marriages between some-number-other-than-one man and some-number-other-than-one woman (say a group thing marrying seven men to four women) — well this question solicits no opinion.
Ever vigilant to defend the chastity of my Lady of English Grammar, I suggested to the voice that the question did not accurately solicit the information it wished to obtain.
It informed me that unless I answered “yes” “no” or “repeat the question” it would hang up.
I asked to hear it again, just to make sure. It was as I remembered.
So I answered the question as asked, pretty sure that the owners of the voice would gleefully interpret my “yes” as meaning something that I don’t believe at all.
And I was right, of course. The voice, showing more indignation concerning what it went on to say than pleasure at receiving the answer it hoped for, asked if I knew that Republican Tom Campbell actually supports same-sex marriage.
I can’t say that I really knew that; but I was not surprised as I’ve always respected Campbell’s independence of mind and basic decency. So I lied and said that I did know that. You’re way ahead of me by now; I don’t have to tell you that it soon got down to asking me for money to help defeat Campbell. At this point I had a pang of regret that there was no human brain at the other end of the line to which I could express my opinion of Proposition 8 and those who fanatically support it.
The only question I’m left with is: Do the people paying for this fundraising intentionally misuse basic English in order to deceive the respondent? Or must we revoke their high school diplomas and all subsequently obtained certificates and degrees?
Rick
Image by Mike Licht, NotionsCapital.com
My mother, who lives in Los Angeles, has been telling me about the new, young conductor of the LA Philharmonic and his involvement in music education for disadvantaged kids but it didn’t really sink in until I watched some YouTube videos (see below) of performances by the youth symphony that he directs in his native Venezuela. Having watched these and followed up with more reading, it’s fair to say that I’m blown away by this sweeping and successful program. Here’s the story.
Thirty three years ago, Jose Antonio Abreu had an ambitious dream to bring music to the youth of Venezuela, without regard for class or race. At the first gathering, his concern was that he had only 50 music stands for an expected 100 children. This turned out not to be a problem when only 11 showed up. From these tenuous beginnings, he forged El Sistema (The System), more formally known as the Fundación del Estado para el Sistema Nacional de las Orquestas Juveniles e Infantiles de Venezuela (National Network of Youth and Children’s Orchestras of Venezuela). Today, 300,000 children attend its music schools around the country and perform in its 600 orchestras.
The goal of El Sistema is not to produce virtuoso musicians but rather to promote social organization and community development. From a 2007 New York Times article:
The most remarkable feature of the Venezuelan music-education system is its instant immersion: the children begin playing in ensembles from the moment they pick up their instruments. Their instructors say the students are learning to behave as much as they are discovering how to make music. “In an orchestra, everybody respects meritocracy, everybody respects tempo, everybody knows he has to support everyone else, whether he is a soloist or not,” explains Igor Lanz, the executive director of the private foundation that administers the government-financed sistema. “They learn that the most important thing is to work together in one common aim.” Across Venezuela the sistema has established 246 centers, known as nucleos, which admit children between 2 and 18, assign them instruments and organize them into groups with instructors. Typically practicing for two or three hours every day, the children are performing recognizable music virtually from the outset.
Maestro Gustavo Dudamel is El Sistema’s most famous graduate. Last year, at age 28, he became the Music Director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra, while continuing as Music Director of the Gothenburg [Sweden] Symphony and the Simón Bolívar Youth Orchestra of Venezuela. (Interestingly, LA has a history of hiring the very young; Zubin Mehta was just 26 when he took over the Philharmonic in 1962.) Dudamel also brought El Sistema to Los Angeles, starting with his debut performance at the Hollywood Bowl. Jill Stewart, of the LA Weekly, blogged about the October 2009 concert:
The most amazing moment last night, by far, was when YOLA (Youth Orchestra Los Angeles), who were recruited from tough areas including gang-ridden South Central, performed Beethoven. Dudamel almost physically dragged these gifted-but-clearly-a-ways-to-go neophytes through the piece. It was incredible to watch him — and them.
Yes, you could hear a bit of discord, a few instruments coming in late, that sort of thing. But it was gorgeous — and at the triumphant ending, as the final notes rang out, the childrens’ mostly working class parents, sitting right up front in poolside seats that normally probably cost $100 or $200, absolutely ERUPTED with glee.
El Sistema has become a global movement, including established programs in Scotland and England. In the US, The New England Conservatory has launched El Sistema USA, whose first project is the Abreu Fellows Program. This program “provides tuition-free instruction and a living stipend for outstanding young postgraduate musicians, ‘passionate for their art and for social justice,’ who seek to guide the development of El Sistema programs in the U.S. and beyond. ”
To really appreciate the potential of this movement, watch the videos. The first is of Gustavo Dudamel conducting the Teresa Carreño Youth Orchestra, made up of outstanding high school (yes, high school!) musicians from El Sistema.
Also inspiring is this TED Talk by Jose Antonio Abreu, the founder of El Sistema.
Photo courtesy of the National System of Youth and Children’s Orchestras of Venezuela
The Scottish Executive, in 2001, defined adult literacy as, “The ability to read and write and use numeracy to handle information, to express ideas and opinions, to make decisions and solve problems, as family members, workers, citizens and lifelong learners.”
Pete Ashton writes on his blog ASH-10:
Digital literacy means being able to take digital stuff [and] make new things with it, just as literacy means taking words and making new sentences with them. Literacy is about understanding the rules of a thing so that they can be worked within or broken as applicable. It’s about making the world our own. This is why we teach reading and writing to children, not so that they can fill out forms or write tedious reports, but that they might question and understand the world in which they live in.
So, what should people know in order to be digitally literate? If we’re going to teach it like a class, what is the curriculum? Most importantly, how can we move away from rote learning of “computer skills” towards understanding the “rules of the thing”.
There are no courses like this in my local community college catalog but here are a few I’d like to see:
Web Browsers – History and Development
For many people, the World Wide Web and the Internet are synonymous. The web browser is the software through which we experience the web. In this course, we will learn the purpose of the web browser and its function in the online experience. We will also explore its history, from the early days of Mosaic (the first Internet-connected software to display images inline with text), through the rise of Internet Explorer and Netscape, to today’s modern Firefox and Chrome browsers.
Cloud Computing and the Rise of Online Applications
And once the programs have moved to the cloud, why not move the computers there too? Cloud computing also encompasses the outsourcing of hardware, eliminating the need for a closet full of servers.
The Hyperlink
Hyperlinks subvert hierarchies – David Weinberger
The term hyperlink was coined in 1965 by Ted Nelson, the founder of Project Xanadu, at Harvard University. Nelson hoped to facilitate non-sequential writing, in which the reader could choose their own path through a document. Project Xanadu was largely abandoned by 1989, when the English physicist Sir Tim Berners-Lee wrote a proposal for what would become the World Wide Web, a system of interlinked pages, housed on the Internet and navigated using hyperlinks.
The hyperlink is a radically different way of connecting people to information. In this course, we examine the effects of organizing information in a non-hierarchical system.
Evaluating Online Information
True or false?
SECURITY ALERT: $32,000 worth of UPS uniforms have been purchased over the last 30 days by person(s) unknown. Law enforcement is working on the case however no suspect(s) have been indentified (sic). Subjects may try to gain access by wearing one of these uniforms. If anyone has suspicions about a UPS delivery (i.e., no truck but driver, no UPS identification, etc., contact UPS to verify employment).
Assessing the accuracy of information found online is not always easy. This course draws on the journalistic tradition of verifying sources and establishing their trustworthiness. By considering factors such as verifiability, transparency, relevance, bias, clarity and validity, we can evaluate which online sources to believe and which to ignore.
Online Writing
It seems like everyone online suffers from ADOBSO (Attention Deficit Ooh…Bright Shiny Object), so how do we write in a way that captures their interest? This course looks at online comprehension studies to find effective writing styles. We will also practice writing for various online venues including blogs, web pages, Wikipedia, forums, emails and Twitter.
Syndication and Federation
Release your content into the wild using syndication. Share functionality with other online services using federation. This course examines the current state of machine-to-machine communication on the Internet and how users and site operators can leverage these connections. Technologies covered include RSS, oAuth, Facebook Connect, Friend Connect and Google Wave.
Wordle by Doug Belshaw.