Robert Schneider sees things clearly

Professor Robert Schneider sees things clearly:

Podcasts of university courses are not "every student's dream"; they're totally bogus, a thin surrogate for real instruction, a fig leaf for disengagement, an excuse for lack of commitment from professors and students alike. People who believe in the transformative value of higher education will resist podcastification with a passion.

I hope that he's right.

Professor Schneider is writing in response to a student-journalist's commentary on said "dream." He quotes from her description:

Wake up for school, stumble over to the computer, and download the day's class lectures . . . then crawl back into bed -- iPod in one hand, notebook in the other.

This scene reminds me in some way of the picture of intellectual and emotional isolation near the end of The Waste Land:

We think of the key, each in his prison
Thinking of the key, each confirms a prison

I remember being presented some years ago with the argument that a college course consisting of videotaped lectures was a good "alternative" for students, particularly students who did not seek much contact with professors. "Professor in a can," some of us were calling it (or was it "in a box"?). What would the person "administering" the class (who would not be the professor on tape) do? Give and grade exams two or three times a semester.

As I've written in a previous blog post (about wireless classrooms), technology makes it possible to do things, not necessary to do them. It's possible to be a professor in a can. It's possible to stay in bed and take notes on a voice coming to you through headphones. But there are better ways to teach and learn.

Follow the link for the rest of Schneider's passionate rebuttal of what he calls "dystopian nonsense."

The Attack of the Pod People (Chronicle of Higher Education)

Curiosity and its discontents

My son Ben just came in with some interesting news: he wants to write an article for the high-school page in our local newspaper comparing high-school life in 1956 and 2006. To write this piece, he proposes to study the 1956-57 yearbook (available in the school office).

His teacher told him that "No one would be interested" in reading such an article. He's going to write it anyway, and fight the power that be.

Go Ben!

Another word from the Greek

It's Merriam-Webster's word of the day:

symposium \sim-POH-zee-um\ noun
*1 : a social gathering at which there is free interchange of ideas
2 a : a formal meeting at which several specialists deliver short addresses on a topic or on related topics b : a collection of opinions on a subject; especially : one published by a periodical
3 : discussion

Example sentence: The symposium gave Eduardo and other writers the chance to listen to and share new ideas about literature.

Did you know? It was drinking more than thinking that drew people to the original symposia and that gave us the word "symposium." The ancient Greeks would often follow a banquet with a drinking party they called a "symposion." That name came from "sympinein," a verb that combines "pinein," meaning "to drink," with the prefix "syn-," meaning "together." Originally, English speakers only used "symposium" to refer to such an ancient Greek party, but in the 18th century British gentlemen's clubs started using the word for gatherings in which intellectual conversation was fueled by drinking. By the 19th century, "symposium" had gained the more sober sense we know today, describing meetings in which the focus is more on the exchange of ideas and less on imbibing.

*Indicates the sense illustrated in the example sentence.

I can remember as a (naïve) college freshman being baffled by the drinking in Plato's Symposium. This was philosophy? Huh?

Merriam-Webster's Word of the Day

"Analog geezer"

From the New York Times:

Variety recently published an obituary for the VHS format: "VHS, 30, dies of loneliness." If there's a format heaven, you'd expect VHS to be joining audiocassettes there. At age 42, cassettes predate VHS and have been pummeled by CDs and digital downloads.

But the cassette just won't seem to die.

The article goes on to explain why.

The Analog Geezer That Keeps Working (New York Times)

And a related link, with photographs showing "the amazing beauty and (sometimes) weirdness found in the designs of the common audio tape cassette":

tapedeck.org

Readers and writers

L. Lee Lowe went exploring in the NCSA glossary and came back with treasures: ghost icon, passive gateway, shadow widget.

Most interesting of all, Lee says, is the explanation of readers and writers. See what she found by following the link.

Ghost icon and the love of dictionaries (from lowebrow)

Britney Spears and Sophocles

Christie's auction house explains:

A page taken from Britney Spears' junior high school notebook containing her handwritten review of Rex Warner's translation of Sophocles' story Antigone, written in black ballpoint pen on either side of the page, Britney's review annotated by her teacher with corrections to her spelling and comments including Nice cover Organized Watch your spelling and Write more neatly and her grade: 88; and a corresponding piece of yellow card decorated with the book's title Antigone in black felt pen -- 12x9in. (30.5x20.8cm.)

This item was offered in an on-line auction to raise money for the Britney Spears Foundation.

I especially like "He get's scared to he lets her go. NO" "To where" is the horrendous idiom the writer is in search of. Note though that in addition to letting the apostrophe go, the teacher has no offered no suggestion as to how one might reconstruct this sentence. Perhaps the teacher was so tired of grading to where they just couldn't bother. (I can't believe I just wrote that sentence.)

And was it Britney or her teacher who appears to have added Rex Warner's name (not Sophocles') at the top? The ink seems to match the teacher's corrections, and the capital R looks pretty old-fashioned. We'll just have to wonder: the bidding is closed.

Britney Spears' Antigone (Christie's, via Gawker)

Tables for studying

Just in time for final examinations: Anastasia at Lawsagna took the idea of granularity and created tables with which students can plan out their studying by subject and by time available. These tables are quite nifty if you feel at home doing such planning on the computer. You can download the Excel file by following the link to her post.

Strategies and tools to plan your exam preparation (Lawsagna)

Hello, Boing Boing readers

Welcome to my blog. Enjoy your stay, and as the signs say, Please Come Again!

(If you're wondering what this post is about, I've been Boing Boinged.)

Invitation to a dance

One of the most moving passages in Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man (1952) is the narrator's careful inventory of the items being put into the street as an old couple are evicted from their Harlem apartment. Here's a sample:

Pots and pots of green plants were lined in the dirty snow, certain to die of the cold; ivy, canna, a tomato plant. And in a basket I saw a straightening comb, switches of false hair, a curling iron, a card with silvery letters against a background of dark red velvet, reading "God Bless Our Home"; and scattered across the top of a chiffonier were nuggets of High John the Conqueror, the lucky stone; and as I watched the white men put down a basket in which I saw a whiskey bottle filled with rock candy and camphor, a small Ethiopian flag, a faded tintype of Abraham Lincoln, and the smiling image of a Hollywood star torn from a magazine. And on a pillow several badly cracked pieces of delicate china, a commemorative plate celebrating the St. Louis World's Fair . . . I stood in a kind of daze, looking at an old folded lace fan studded with jet and mother-of-pearl.

Thinking about this passage made me remember the invitation I've scanned here, which I bought for fifty cents at a flea market a few years ago.

Who might have saved this card for so many years?

A husband and wife who met at this dance?

Their children?

A. Pellegrino?

One of the Syncopators?

A printer (note that it's a union printer) who liked to hold on to copies of his work?

One of the barbers?

Someone who liked the lyrics on the back?

I thought it appropriate to give this invitation a home.

The Lawndale Masonic Temple, I learned tonight, was located at 2300 Millard Avenue in Chicago. The webpage for the Chicago Public Library's Lawndale-Crawford Community Collection describes the neighborhood:

By 1900, Bohemian immigration into the Lawndale-Crawford area replaced the earlier settlers of Dutch, German, Irish, and Scotch extraction. Within a few years, the community was considered the largest Bohemian settlement, outside of Prague, Czechoslovakia. This ethnic group was very politically and socially active throughout the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s, which resulted in the formation of numerous civic and social organizations as well as a close-knit community.

As the area continued to develop, the population shifted, and the Bohemians began to move further west and northwest. They were replaced by various other ethnic groups such as the Poles, and finally the Hispanics, who still reside in the area today.

Google Maps shows a large building still standing at 2300 Millard Avenue. It seems to now be home to one or two churches: New Life Christian Church and/or La Villita Community Church.

The songs: "In a Little Spanish Town," music by Mabel Wayne, lyrics by Sam M. Lewis and Joe Young, appeared in 1926. "Thinking of You," music by Harry Ruby, lyrics by Bert Kalmar, was featured in the 1927 show The Five O'Clock Girl. ("'FIVE O'CLOCK GIRL' IS HIGHLY ENJOYABLE" said the New York Times on October 11, 1927. "Thinking of You" isn't mentioned in the review.) Were people dancing to one or both songs on January 15, 1927?

And about the barbers: The only Chicago "F. Carbone" listed in the Social Security Death Index is Frank Carbone (1910-1980), too young to be the man on the card. I wonder if "E. Popp" might be Edward (1879-1965), Ernest (1902-1971), or Edwin (1906-1973) (the last almost certainly too young).

The address where Messrs. Carbone and Popp had their shop seems to no longer exist.

Update, February 2012: Here is a 1925 photograph of Anthony Pellegrino and the Alabama Syncopators.

Lawndale-Crawford Community Collection (Chicago Public Library)

High John the Conqueror (Lucky Mojo Curio Company)

Found (On another bit of ephemera)

Granularity

People who think about hacking their lives and their work often speak of "granularity." It's a curious word. The online Oxford English Dictionary offers only “granular condition or quality” as a definition. A more helpful definition comes from the National Center for Supercomputing Applications: "The extent to which a larger entity is subdivided. For example, a yard broken into inches has finer granularity than a yard broken into feet." To think of tasks and challenges in terms of granularity is to think in terms of breaking them down into smaller and more manageable parts.

Granularity is a tremendously useful strategy for students. The typical spiral-bound student-planner doesn't encourage it; that tool is often little more than a place to store due dates: "research paper due." But no one can just write a research paper. That paper can only be the result of numerous small-scale tasks. It's not surprising that students who think of "write research paper" as one monolithic task are likely to put it off far longer than they ought to. Instead of "write research paper," one could think of these tasks: go to library to look up sources; organize them by call number; read first three sources and take notes; get article from JSTOR; read remaining three sources and take notes; organize notes on computer; check bibliography format; ask professor about endnote form; make rough outline; and so on. Each of these "granular" tasks is far more do-able than "write research paper." Thinking of work in terms of granularity can be one way to overcome the overwhelming dread of getting started. And keeping track of such tasks on paper and crossing them off one by one gives the satisfaction of making progress and getting closer to done.

A student might also apply the strategy of granularity to the work of writing itself. Instead of writing a draft and "looking it over," it's much smarter to break down the work of writing and editing by thinking about one thing at a time. Developing a strong thesis statement: that's one task. Working out a sequence of paragraphs to develop that thesis: another task. Figuring out how to make a transition from one paragraph to another: another task. If you tend to have patterns of errors in your writing, look for each kind of error, one at a time. Noun-pronoun agreement? Read a draft once through looking only for that. Comma splices? Read once through with your eyes on the commas. It might seem that approaching the work of writing and editing in terms of smaller, separate tasks is unnecessarily cumbersome, but breaking things down will likely make it far easier to work more effectively and come out with a stronger piece of writing. No writer can think about everything at once.

Granularity is also a useful strategy for making even a daunting reading project do-able. If you have eighty pages to read, finish twenty and take a short break; then repeat. If you're reading James Joyce or Marcel Proust, a handful of pages might be all that you can manage at one sitting, and sometimes you'll chart your progress by the sentence. But those sentences and pages add up. I just finished Proust’s In Search of Lost Time (À la recherche du temps perdu), averaging twenty pages a day over five months and two days of reading (total: 3,102 pages).

Try thinking of your next major (or even minor) assignment in terms of granularity. You might find that getting started and making progress come far more easily.

Not long after my wife Elaine and I met, we discovered that we each owned a postcard with the above image: "Making Slow Progress." I'm happy to see that this postcard is still available from Hold the Mustard Photo Cards.