Remembering John Lennon

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John Lennon would be 72 today if he were still celebrating birthdays. I was 6 when he died. I don’t have any great story or specific memory about where I was when I heard that he died. I’m not sure I knew. My family isn’t big on talking about death.

I do know that I was already familiar with Lennon’s music by the time I was 6. I don’t carry around many childhood memories, but one of my earliest and most specific memories is driving through Cincinnati with Rocky Raccoon playing on the radio. That and Elton John’s “Don’t Go Breaking My Heart”.

I would have heard the Beatles more often because my dad listened to them some, but he wasn’t a heavy fan. My lifelong fascination with the Fab Four didn’t officially begin until I was 14. That’s when my friend, Chris Larson, gave me a cassette dub he had made of the White Album. This was my first chance to really obsess over the Beatles and listen to the songs over and over and over again. I listened to White Album maybe a thousand times that year and it changed me. It made me better.

Everything I came to discover about the Beatles, music and art in general started with that cassette tape. The White Album is a weird mix of songs that don’t quite hang together, a quilt of  30 oddly made pieces that are perfectly complete and individual in their own way yet which somehow belong together in a way that can be felt but not explained. The White Album offers some of the best and worst the Beatles had to give. The best of the best came from John: “Dear Prudence”, “Happiness is a Warm Gun”, “I Will”, “Julia”, “Yer Blues”, “Helter Skelter”, and “Revolution 1”. All of these songs had heavy mix from the other Beatles, but they each felt like direct gifts from John.

I should also note that the White Album gave me two of my most favorite songs of all time: “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” and “Long, Long, Long”. Both of these are George Harrison tracks and deserve their own post.

So here’s what I love about the Beatles. John, Paul and George were each geniuses in their own right. Each had a latent gift that the world needed. The thing is, the world would have never gotten the gift of that genius without the presence of the other Beatles. John had a brilliant, keen mind, an acerbic wit and and poet’s heart. Those gifts would not have been expressed if he hadn’t met Paul and George at the right time and started playing around. He would have been in jail or a baker or a sailor like his dad.

A hundred unlikely events occurred to allow the Beatles to happen. John Lennon was open to those events. He was ready for them. Before John Lennon made history, history made John Lennon. He always moved toward the unexpected and never stopped inventing himself up to the day he died. I admire that: brave, relentless, restless, a bit of pain in the ass and always ready to become something new. The Beatles never grew stale. They tore themselves apart, but they never grew stale. That was John’s energy that kept them moving forward, always exploring, never resting, never getting comfortable until the machine wore itself out and it was time to do something else.

John was 40 when he died. I’m 38. Hard to fathom how quick and deep his mark went. I am grateful.

Flash fiction: unnamed

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I get caught up in things and get carried away from myself. Words sometimes carry me back. Here’s a quick piece I wrote while listening to PJ Harvey and wondering where I put that inspired feeling I used to carry around inside.

******

The words had come easier a few days ago. First, a flood. A bone-shearing torrent of nouns and verbs, ideas and insights wrapped in language. A few days before, there had been no qualms about saying what needed saying. No second guessing over the way things sounded or the internal logic of his writing. And then mounds of crushed cigarettes burned down to the quick, sheaves of paper bruised with the daisy wheel hammer tap. It was a simple thing, laying out the words in row after row of letters which is only actually ink pressed onto the page.

And now, too many cigarettes. Too many empty soda cans. And the scrutiny of the page.

Where had she gone? Brian looked up from the wreck of his writing desk. Where had she gone and when? He felt sick with hunger and aching from lack of sleep. Had it been days already? Had she been gone days?

The light on his voicemail was blinking steady. Five unanswered messages. Had she called? Had he somehow missed her call?

“Dania.” He tried to call her name. His voice was a strange, pathetic thing trapped in the drainpipe of his throat. Her name hung in the air, unanswered. He stood from his chair and nearly fell. His legs were numb from disuse. He staggered to the bed, then the dresser, then the door.

“Dania.” An edge of real fear in his voice.

Gone?

“Dania.”

Gone. Gone. Gone.

There was nothing to do. He shuffled to the bedside phone and pressed play. A message from his mother. Two from the library collection agent. Another from a cruise line offering a fantastic experience of a lifetime if he would just press two. The fifth was her breathing – calm, quiet, steady. Sniffling the way she did sometimes when she was feeling ignored. Thirty seconds of silence. Quiet, reserved breathing in the space. Thirty seconds of silence that opened up and swallowed hims. Thirty seconds of silence which he fell into and drowned. Thirty seconds of silence that suddenly encapsulated the entire span of his life.

And then, “I’m gone. Don’t find me.” That was all she said. Don’t find me.

The message ended and he was more alone than he had ever been.

The words had come easier when she was with him and now she was gone and he was lost, lost, lost.

Don’t find me, she had said. Brian did the only thing he could possibly do. He put on his shoes and went out into the world to find her.

Books are not sacred objects

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I am a book person. For a long time, I believed that meant I was ordaned by Powers Greater Than Me to save books. I rescued books from free bins. I bought them at yard sales and flea markets. I stole them from basements. Wherever books were being mistreated and neglected, I was there to play rescue. I took these sad, saved creatures home, placed them on my shelf and never read them.

These were anxiety-ridden years. I was wracked with guilt at the numbers of grubby-spined tomes on my shelves that would never be read but yet could not be removed. I had to keep these these shabby miscreants because I “might” someday read them. I now understand that this condition is called hoarding. It is a psychological disorder that is treated by a regimen of meds, therapy and appearance on a cable TV reality show.

Now I am recovered. I have found balance, and I can once again enjoy books. I read eBooks. I can stop reading books that I am not enjoying and, sometimes, recycle the paperbacks. I give books away. I sell them. Sometimes, yes, they go into the trashcan.

I love books because of what’s inside. I cherish ideas. I adore controversial opinions well-stated. I like to wear other people’s lives and walk around in their borrowed skins for a few hundred pages.

Books are made to be used. Reading books makes my life larger, better.

But simply having books for the sake of having them is a bit of a burden. Much better that books be put to a good use. And so I find myself defending the idea that books, once no longer read, are great fodder for doing crafts. I’m not crafty but I appreciate the clever soul who can fashion a Kleenex holder, lamp or work desk out of old, unused books. Books worth reading should be read because reading is a sacred thing. Books that are no longer worth reading should be used some other way.

Rebecca Joines Schinsky says all of this much more eloquently that I am able. Read her blog post “Books Are Not Sacred Objects“. Spread the word. If we can get past the idea that all books are sacred objects, we might be able to convince non-book people that reading is a pretty great thing.

Why Mobile Matters: Take 2

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The iPad is not a disruptive influence on our current system of education. The iPad is really only a symptom of the actual disruption, which happened several years ago while no one was paying attention. The Web matured, and that changed everything. The iPad and other touch screen tablets are more or less natural outcomes of a simple, powerful truth: information is no longer scarce.

I have been thinking a lot about mobile internet technologies, like tablets and smartphones, and imagining how they might best be used in our libraries, classrooms and personal lives to facilitate communication, idea sharing and learning.

I took a pass at a Mobile Learning manifesto several months ago (see Why Mobile Matters: Take 1). Here I go again.

I don’t necessarily believe or grasp everything I say here. I am testing ideas to see how they fit. Please improve these ideas with your comments.

Information is no longer scarce. Information is easy, sometimes almost effortless, to get. People don’t have to visit libraries to begin finding out things they are curious to learn. People don’t have to visit classrooms in order to hear lectures and be told things by content experts. People can Google, Wikipedia, and Bing. People can use Facebook and Twitter to crowd source answers to basic questions. You Tube and eHow offer a rich trove of “how to” videos on most any topic that are much more useful than any product manual.

More and more books (though certainly not all) are available either in part or in whole online through Google Books, Project Gutenberg and various eBook sellers. Many of the most useful of these books are not free and are not easy to get unless you buy them, but they are increasingly out there in some form or fashion.

People don’t read magazines and journals. They read collections of magazine and journal articles filtered, curated and reassembled into interest packets by RSS feeds, blog posts, Tweets and article aggregators.

We don’t go to information anymore. Information comes to us.

Information isn’t scarce but context and authority are. We are  buried alive by our personal media collections and information sources. We can instantly access terabytes of saved data, articles, opinions, document and other artifacts but often have difficulty seeing how these interrelate. We know everything yet understand nothing. Learning is the process of making sense out of nonsense (or not sense), like Rumpelstilskin spinning gold out of straw. Making sense from not sense is not an easy skill. It takes practice and patience. Making sense from not sense requires mindful attention and focus.

Information is common but context and authority are uncommon.  Just because information is easy to discover does not make it useful. Just because information is factual does not necessarily make it true. We need authorities to help establish facts we can trust and turn into knowledge. We need authorities who can help us see how ideas interrelate and how we can use information to create useful knowledge.

Okay, enough of that for now.

Here’s the short take:

We live in a world where information is easy to find. A person no longer needs to be an expert to find things out. The 19th century schoolhouse, or “factory”, model of teaching is over. We don’t always need to spend time sitting in a classroom and listening to a lecture to find things out. We can now listen to the lecture on our own time, where we want and when we want through video, podcast or other Web-mediated information transfer. Sitting in a seat and receiving information is not always the best use of our time.

We do need the help of experts to teach us how to use this information, how to assimilate and make sense of the information we have found.

That’s why some teachers are experimenting with flipping their class — lecture at home and activity-based learning in the classroom.

People learn best by doing things. People learn by making things. People learn by synthesizing and connecting ideas. People learn by sharing ideas and having those ideas explored, critiqued and improved. People learn by exploring on their own and by exploring together.

Tablet computers can be useful in the classroom to help accelerate this process. iPads can let students search for relevant information and report. iPads can help students share their ideas easily and have those ideas critiqued and improved. iPads can help students offer feedback on how well they have understood key concepts and synthesized new ideas. iPads can help students gather textbooks, lectures, notes and other resources together in one place to be used and understood.

The iPad hasn’t changed the world. The world changed and made the iPad necessary.

Do the thing that scares you

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My daughter started kindergarten today. She has been looking forward to this for months. She is ready. She can count to 1oo plus. She reads a little. She writes her name, my name and her mom’s name. She knows her address and phone number. She can dress herself, get her own breakfast and operate the TV remote.

Still, she had a moment of doubt. When entering the school this morning, she told her mom, “Let’s just wait and start kindergarten tomorrow.”

Michelle is terrific in moments like these and encouraged Emersey, reminding her that she was ready and, besides, they were already there.

Kindergarten is a huge rite of passage. I don’t remember what it was like for me when I started kindergarten. Maybe Emersey won’t remember, either.

But I will remember today. Kindergarten is a huge rite of passage for parents and an important reminder for me. Keep moving forward. Do the thing that scares you even if you aren’t sure you are ready. Do the thing that scares you especially if you aren’t sure you are ready. Keep moving forward. You are probably there already.

Facebook is failing me

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I don’t Facebook as much as I used to. My apologies to my Facebook friends. I still love you. I just don’t love the Facebook experience as much as I once did. I still check in many times throughout the day. I still post status updates, share pictures and video of my daughter and links to interesting articles. I check-in at places and share new blog posts, books I’m reading and, occassionally, the music I’m listening to. I still enjoy that part of everything.

But I am finding it very difficult to keep up with other people. The people I most want to see are getting buried beneath the Other Stuff. At the moment, I use Facebook much like a publishing platform. I’d like to use it as a way to keep in touch with friends.

I think there are two main reasons this is happening: 1) Facebook isn’t mobile friendly and 2) I forget to use the curated feeds.

Facebook isn’t mobile friendly. Both the iPhone and iPad apps are wretched. This is a problem since I do most of my Facebooking on my phone and tablet. To be fair, both are actually great in allowing me to post statuses, share pictures and video directly from my phone’s camera roll and check-in places. I get real-time notifications when people like, comment, message or post to my Wall. This is all terrific, which is why I do these things a lot. What I don’t do a lot is visit other people’s news feeds. They don’t render well on either the iPhone or iPad. The feeds are cumbersome to explore and can be difficult to comment on. I usually scroll a few screens, hit “like” a dozen times and move on to something else. Not good friend behavior.

I have tried using Facebook in Safari, which is somewhat better than the app interface but still isn’t fully functional. The Timeline UI renders rather poorly and it takes  a while for things down the page to load. Not good.

From time to time, I try to adjust to these problems by using a third party platform like HootSuite or Flipboard. Both help me see posts I would otherwise miss but neither feel like real Facebook experiences. I am open to suggestions here.

The problem with other people’s feeds became most pronounced about a year ago when Facebook changed the way they ranked news feeds. I started getting a lot more random posts than posts from the friends with whom I was most engaged. Not sure what they changed in the news feed algorithm, but it made my Facebook experience less coherent, not more. At the same time, they made Facebook less friendly by adding the javascript real-time crawler in the upper right-hand corner. This does not display at all on the mobile browser versions. Confusing.

Tonight, I rediscovered the smart lists on the left that allow me to customize feeds to lift friends into focused group categories that hopefully make them more manageable. Not sure how I missed that fact. I’m going to give list making another try. Hopefully, I will begin seeing more posts and engaging with friends more meaningfully. Until then, Facebook peeps, know that I love you and wish you the best, even if I haven’t liked your posts in a while.

How do you use Facebook? Do you curate lists? Visit specific friends’ Walls directly? Visit all friends’ Walls regularly? I’m looking for practical advice here. I’m not sure how Facebook became strange to me. I need help becoming a better friend.

 

 

The truth about profanity

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I got stung by a yellow-jacket about an hour ago. It hurt. I cursed. I used a few of those words you want people to believe you only keep for really awful special occasions. I used them loudly. I used them repeatedly.

This is not a new thing for my neighbors to hear. I curse when I build things. I curse when I get impatient. I curse when I lose things.

I don’t curse a lot but when I curse, I curse with gusto.

I was raised to believe in the forbidden power of Bad Words. I grew up carrying around the vague notion that Bad Words had magic powers and could send you directly to heck. I had a terrible time keeping up with which words were Bad. All the usual culprits were on the list (for the complete list see George Carlin). Words like crap, dang and hell occupied an undefined status. They could get me in trouble but definitely weren’t as bad as the baddest Bad Words. I once got in trouble with my Sunday School teacher for saying “holy cow”. She asked if I had ever actually seen a cow that was holy. At the time, I wasn’t versed enough in world religions to offer the Hindu perspective.

As a lover of words, the idea that some words are forbidden for no specific reason was frustrating. I was baffled by the general confusion surrounding which specific words I was being protected from.

Shit and crap is bad. Doo-doo, poop and feces are fine. I don’t know about you, but, to me, the later are more embarrassing than the former.

I’m thinking about this because I have a five year old daughter who listens to everything I say and likes to try out novel expressions in various situations. My wife and I are intentionally raising a child who loves language. We rarely use the same adjective twice. We play rhyming games. Emersey invents elaborate song lyrics with complex internal rhyme schemes. She starts kindergarten in August and already routinely uses words like “extraordinary”, “magnificent” and “inconvenient”. We talk about feelings a lot. She knows the difference between sad, irritated, agitated and gloomy.

All of this is to say I hate the idea of forbidden Bad Words. I can’t bring myself to chastise her for an occasional dammit or hell in the appropriate context. This is going to be a major problem for me because we are not just raising a kid to value the wonder of language. We are raising a kid who has to function well in polite society. I don’t want to raise a vulgar potty mouth. Not because I believe Those Words are bad but because I believe that the indiscrete overuse of Those Words reflects poor command of language and shows an inability to reach for richer, more effective words when the situation requires.

In short, I hope to raise a daughter who understands that there are no Bad Words but there are certainly Bad Uses. A word in itself cannot be bad, but it can be unwisely used and carry unintended side effects along with it. The purpose of words is to be understood. People judge us by the words we use. If they are well-impressed with our verbal toolkit, they are more willing to believe we are intelligent and treat us accordingly. If they find our toolkit lacking, they expect the opposite.

I’m not yet sure how I will handle this explanation when a kindergarten teacher wants to have a conversation about my daughter’s occasional use of the word “damn”. Did she use it appropriately? Did the word suite the context in which it was used? Would another word have more effectively conveyed her intended message? These are questions I suspect most kindergarten teachers will not enjoy. After a year of this, I may find myself resorting to the Bad Words list out of a sense of convenience more than anything else.

Until then, I feel completely justified polluting the neighborhood a bit with a few expletives when stung by a yellow-jacket, building a swing set or looking for my car keys. But I really must remember to be more creative and precise in my cursing. Good parenting is modeling desired behaviors. I want my daughter to invent new swear words that dig at the meat of the moment and get underneath the skin of the situation in a way that the typical everyday Bad Words just can’t.

What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains (a mid-book review)

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I am halfway through Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains. Carr is the guy who wrote the excellent Atlantic essay “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” several years ago in which he documented his personal sense that reading online was somehow ruining his familiar mental habits — namely, concentration and focus. “Ruining”, I thought at the time, was an unfairly harsh term. He takes a more nuanced, thoughtful approach to his own experience of reading in the book-length study.

Page 125 of a 224 page book is not the ideal place from which to write a review. That said, I am ready to recommend this book to anyone who wants to understand what is probably happening to us in the age of ubiquitous internet access. Carr’s argument expands on the theme established in his Atlantic essay: the internet is destroying our ability to read deeply and engage with text-based narrative in a linear, hierarchical, rational fashion. Hypertext and multimedia “enhanced” text is changing the experience of reading and rewiring the way our minds are able to read.

The Atlantic essay struck me as alarmist, reactionary even. The Shallows places the new ways of thinking engendered by the internet into the context of other mind-altering technologies that actually changed the way our brains worked: the alphabet, numbers, the map, the clock, the codex. Carr examines how these new technologies of intellect have made entirely new thought processes possible and, thus, altered physical structures in the human mind. These changes play out over the course of millennia but they also play out in the course of a human lifetime. In the case of the internet, these changes may play out in a matter of days or weeks.

There’s a lot of strong scholarship in this book. I will come back for a better review 100 pages from now. For now, I just want to share how impressed I am with Carr’s ability to summarize the history of technological innovation, describe how it works and create a meaningful context that is value-neutral and does not necessarily crown contemporary humans as the apotheosis of what we will become. We are not necessarily destined to remain as we are. We are most likely destined to continue our process of becoming something else. This has happened before. It is going to happen again.

Carr says it better. Here’s a great passage from his chapter on the history of reading aloud vs. reading alone:

Like our forebears during the later years of the Middle Ages, we find ourselves today between two technological worlds. After 550 years, the printing press and its products are being pushed from the center of our intellectual life to its edges. The shift began during the middle years of the twentieth century, when we started devoting more and more of our time and attention to the cheap, copious, and endlessly entertaining products of the first wave of electric and electronic media: radio, cinema, phonograph, television. But those technologies were always limited by their inability to transmit the written word. They could displace but not replace the book. Culture’s mainstream still ran through the printing press.

Now the mainstream is being diverted, quickly and decisively, into a new channel. The electronic revolution is approaching its culmination as the computer — desktop, laptop, handheld — becomes our constant companion and the Internet becomes our medium of choice for storing, processing, and sharing information in all forms, including text. The new world will remain, of course, a literate world, packed with the familiar symbols of the alphabet. We cannot go back to the lost oral world, any more than we can turn the clock back to a time before the clock existed. “Writing and printing and the computer,” writes Walter Ong, “are all ways of technologizing the word”; and once technologized, the word cannot be de-technologized. But the world of the screen, as we’re already coming to understand, is a much different place from the world of the page. A new intellectual ethic is taking hold. The pathways in our brains are once again being rerouted. (77)

This is a very enjoyable, well-researched, well-built study. I just hope there are still people out there able to sit still long enough to enjoy it.

Jonah Lehrer is still okay with me

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Jonah Lehrer may or may not be a dirty, low down self-plagiarist. I don’t care. I’m not feeling the kind of outrage that is circling the blogosphere. It is probably unwise to cut and paste choice quotes, even your own, from one online publication to another. It certainly seems a lazy thing to do and hurts the credibility of a brand that depends entirely on credibility  (Lehrer as “idea man”).

I still like Jonah Lehrer. I was reading Imagine: How Creativity Works when all of this blew up. The book is insightful and offers inspiring thoughts on how creativity works and can be made to work better. Here are a few things I carried away:

  • Creators don’t always have to understand the meaning of what they create. Sometimes the work is better when they don’t. See Bob Dylan.
  • The mind only creates new things when it is able to idle and assimilate ideas, thoughts and experiences.
  • We learn best through play.
  • Social networks, particularly weak ties, are essential for generating and executing new ideas.
  • Humans are social. We create more effectively when we interact with other people.
  • Criticism is good. Brainstorming is bad.
  • Our history is punctuated with periods of excess genius. These periods can be studied, understood and, possibly replicated.
  • Shakespeare wasn’t a fluke but he might not happen again.

I plan to read How We Decide soon. I will reserve judgment until I find out if that is the same book with a different cover. If so, no mercy. Until then, Jonah Lehrer is okay with me.

Eradicate email!

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So I’ve written a bit already about my personal war with email. Managing email happens to be my personal Achilles heel and is emblematic of the larger problems of information overload that challenge all of us.

Edudemic posted a helpful article about Chris Anderson’s very practical campaign to get email under control. The article quotes Anderson:

an email inbox has been aptly described as the to-do list that anyone in the world can add an item to. If you’re not careful, it can gobble up most of your working week. Then you’ve become a reactive robot responding to other people’s requests, instead of a proactive agent addressing your own true priorities.

Anderson’s image of email as the world’s open to-do list for me is pretty apt and gets right to the root of my problem with email. I can’t respond to it all, I can’t answer it all, and I can’t use it all. It piles in and there’s never any getting to the end of it. I have never witnessed Inbox Zero is my personal or professional life but know that, if I ever did, the relief would be short-lived. You have to sleep sometime.

I am prepared to declare war on email. If you are ready to join me, you may find Chris Anderson’s “Save Our Inboxes!” to be a useful manifesto to lay the battle lines. Take a look. Share it if you find it helpful. I am considering adding the link to my work email as a gift to my c0lleagues. Celebrate clarity. Attach attachments. Respect recipient’s time.

Did you like the Email Charter? Let me know. I need to know I’m not the only one ready for battle.