The Cottage

2010-01-16T16:07:00.002Z

UPDATE FOLKS: I am now blogging, with the help of my good cousin Tom, with WordPress - and you can now find me here: http://www.willorrewing.com.

Many thanks,

Will

Impulse buying; impulse learning

2009-11-30T01:02:00.005Z

(courtesy of dalager - Flickr)

To keep myself company during my housemate's 10-day trip to Hong Kong...

- I splashed out on a table-tennis table. I plan to multi-use this as fun magnet AND dining room table: very hip.

- I eventually got round to creating a Couchsurfing profile. But now I'm worried that my table-tennis table might get pinched.

- I have reached CD 4 of Michel Thomas' Foundation Level French. It's jolly mouthing out assorted French phrases on my commute to work; it's effectiveness is very much in the balance. The broader idea is to re-learn the frustration of learning..

- I bought The Rough Guide to Classical Music (being a total ignoramus on the genre). I was a little disappointed that it was an A-Z - I was looking for more of an introductory companion - but I have had fun writing pithy descriptions for composers whose names are far more familiar than their tunes. But how to avoid sappy cliches? My first descriptions are phrases like "regal", "Christmas-y", "car advert-ish". Hmm...

James Paul Gee

2009-11-21T17:05:00.007Z

I recently came across James Paul Gee through David Smith. He is exactly what I was looking for: an eloquent champion of the beneficial role of computer games in learning.

You can see him in two great talks here and here. Wikipedia entry here.

Three points that resonated:

"School is all manual and no game." A Professor of linguistics before becoming interested in gaming, JPG argues for the existence of "situated meaning". Anything we read, he says, makes much more sense if we can relate it to an experience, image, idea, action or argument we've already had. (His comparison is with computer game manuals - they only become useful after you've played the game for a bit). Most children do not connect with textbooks not because they can't make sense of the phonics [aside: I had the enriching pleasure to see Margaret Snowling talk about phonics last week] but because the books' specialist language doesn't connect with anything out of which children can make meaning.
Assessment. As JPG says, you don't need to test a player who has completed the most difficult level of Halo on his Halo-playing skills: the assessment is built into the game. His argument is that there must be some means of mimicking this design when designing, for instance, algebra-learning courses. Would it not be possible for students to only qualify for a more challenging level once they defeated the last, in a way that was built into the whole learning process - and without the endless annual trauma of exams.
Problem-solving. In just a few comments, JPG brings a breath of fresh air to the turgid knowledge vs. skills debate currently boring the UK. Facts about Science/ French vocab items/ History dates are putting so many children off because, despite teachers' vigorous assertions to the contrary, they can't see them as tools. In well-designed games, knowledge is realized as tools. To quote JPG more fully:

"School is locked into content-fetish. It's all about facts. Biology is the 1200 facts somebody in Biology discovered. Memorise 1100 and get 'em on paper - you pass Biology. [But] Biology, Physics, Chemistry ARE NOT FACTS; they are problems to be solved. And Biologists, Chemists and Physicists use facts as tools to solve these problems, and once they've used them again and again, they can't be forgotten."

I have one criticism so far:

This is a little unfair, as I have only got about fifty pages through it, but I can't understand JPG's unbridled support for Marc Prensky's Don't Bother Me Mom I'm Learning. The splurge of exclamation marks (+15 per page in some parts) is off-putting; the lack of footnotes unsettling. The hysterically partisan style (chapters are titled with scammy phrases like "But Wait - What About All That Bad Stuff I Hear About In The Press") is what really put me off, though. Once I've finished the book, I hope to post more, but I get the feeling that this stuff is only going to convince the massively-sceptical wider population if its approach is cautious and substantiated with sound, academic arguments.

Tutoring: A fresh debate

2009-10-20T22:05:00.003+01:00

I've just finished an article on tuition, and am boldly looking for a publisher!

I thought I'd share it here:

Tutoring: a fresh debate.  

Private tuition has entered the national conversation. For long a rather mysterious operation, the media has woken up to its rapid growth - especially after the Sutton Trust showed that 43% of children nationally had received private tuition. This openness in the media is both symptom and cause of a similar openness amongst parents. No longer a whispered secret, recommendations and warnings about certain tutors and agencies are now regularly swapped outside the school gates.

  Regrettably, this openness has led to very little debate on the merits and demerits of tuition - or much analysis as to why parents are seeking it in such droves. Some commentators have seen in tuition a desire to recapture the cosy world of governesses and nurseries. Others have reached, inevitably, for the recession as a possible explanation - either that a place in a good school is even more essential in the long march to the furiously-competitive job market, or that tuition is parents' compensation for choosing state education. Where are the considerations of its impact on learning, or the larger questions posed by its rise?

  So: do children (or some children) learn better as a result of a one-on-one tutoring? What sort of learning goes on one-on-one? The answer is that you can regulate the learning in a very specific way: whether you're looking for focused troubleshooting (fractions, decimals) - or a deeper exploration ("why do we have cases in Latin?"), the form is flexible to the content. The former is the most popular, and areas of misunderstanding (sometimes layered up over years of confusion) can be quickly unblocked with a good tutor. For some subjects and topics in particular, such as Maths and Languages, this creates something of a delicious learning environment. There's no hiding in tuition, no slouching at the back of the class hoping that you wont be asked a question. Many parents talk about the benefits tuition delivers for self-esteem. It is not difficult to see why, when students are given the opportunity to learn in an environment where questions can be unlimited - and where it is okay to be wrong.
 
What is lost here? For one, certain subjects are assuredly enriched by class learning. Let us not be dewy-eyed: friends of mine who have taught for 40 years or more have described how rare it is to witness impassioned class debate and the clashing of young minds, even amongst the brightest. What classroom teaching does offer, though, especially in subjects like English, History and R.S are classes that arrive at richer or more correct answers together - building on each other's mistakes. That's lost in tuition. The classroom experience also develops other important skills: the ability to concentrate, for instance, WITHOUT someone constantly watching over you, the ability to wait one's turn.  

There are other dangers too. If they're not careful, tutors can become crutches for their charges/tutees so that students never learn the crucial experience of being baffled, and of working things out on their own. Of greater concern, a tutor who is not in touch with the class teachers can tie confused students up in knots with different methodologies or conflicting comments about the school. It is no wonder that there used to be something of an impasse between schools and tutors, when children would return to school with accusatory comments: "my tutor tells me that you shouldn't mark work like this!"  

The debate about schooling itself would be so enriched by some more examination of these issues. If there is a consensus, say, that basic numeracy is far better taught 1-on-1, let's be bold and say so. Then the debate can continue: we (as parents, schools, LEAs, governments) can't afford 1-on-1, it might be argued, in which case school learning should be understood as an economic compromise. Or it might be said that, regardless of the efficacy of 1-on-1, sheer learning is not as much of a priority as concentration, waiting one's turn, getting on with others - in which case, could we be more creative with school timetables, staffing, bringing in help from outside the school? One last one: what does it say about schooling that some tutors can repeat word-for-word the advice of teachers/parents but that something about the delivery, tone and atmosphere of a tutorial makes it sink in?  

Given the Conservatives have put at the centre of their education policy a return to "chalk-and-talk" traditional classroom teaching, these issues make fertile discussion indeed. Tutoring rarely provides all the answers, but the questions it poses feel particularly relevant, if not urgent, at the moment.

Repetition

2009-10-14T18:36:00.004+01:00

I've recently moved house, and for the first time have all my books in one place. This evening was one of the first chances I have had to actually make use of them. I re-read some dog-eared passages from Richard Sennett's amazing, rambling book The Craftsman.

I'm glad I re-discovered this passage - a defence of repetition:

We should be suspicious of claims for innate, untrained talent. "I could write a good novel if only I had the time" or "if only I could pull myself together" is usually a narcissist's fantasy. Going over an action again and again, by contrast, enables self-criticism. Modern education fears repetitive learning as mind-numbing. Afraid of boring children, avid to present ever-different stimulation, the enlightened teacher may avoid routine - but thus deprive children of the experience of studying their own ingrained practice and modulating it from within."

I particularly agree with reference to a subject like Latin - so much of the joy of what Mary Beard calls the "command and control" of Latin comes from the pencil-breaking frustration of all those mistakes - all that self-correcting - early on.

Role of Teacher in 21st Century?

2009-10-08T00:19:00.002+01:00

I quite like this from David Price's blog today, about the role of the teacher in the future:

Imparter of Knowledge, Guide and Personal Search Engine

The last most of all, though. It seems to have gone pretty unnoticed that teachers are strictly not gatekeepers of knowledge these days - rather, they are the sifters, the qualifiers, the challengers of that knowledge.

Jan Sramek and Racing Towards Excellence

2009-10-06T21:44:00.004+01:00

We've been having some very interesting meetings with the team from Racing Towards Excellence. They seem to share some of our concerns about the provision for quality, impartial careers advice in schools today.

For the purposes of this post, I wanted to quote a bit from Jan Sramek (the co-author's) introduction to the book - in which he discusses his own education. Those with especially good memories might remember the small ripples of controversy caused by his astonishing A-level results: 10 A's.

To Jan:

What was remarkable during those formative years of my life was my parents' ability to create an inspiring environment where outperformance was natural, rather than expected. The pressure was non-existent, replaced by an almost implicit understanding that I would go on to do great things...

...My parents' thinking on parenting and education [were] progressive for the time and place [the Czech Republic]..My chores as a child were very light to non-existent, as was any intervention from either of them into how I spent my free time. This allowed me to spend much of it studying what I wanted to study, rather than what others thought I should study.

The idea of naturalizing a habit of mind resonates very much with comments I've heard from Matthew Taylor about this. There is obviously cross-over with Outliers too on the role of upbringing for future "outperformance" status, even if Jan's 10,000 hours remains in doubt.

The Traveling School

2009-09-26T14:27:00.002+01:00

I came across a student of the Traveling School on holiday this summer. I had been initially struck by how much she enthused about her education, and was fascinated to hear about this project.

In their own words:

The Traveling School started in the Spring of 2000 with a revolutionary concept generated by a group of high school girls and their teacher, Gennifre Hartman.
“What if,” one asked. “What if there was a school that traveled around the world while we still kept up-to-date with our classes?”
“What if,” asked another. “What if it was all-girls so that we could just hang out and be ourselves?”
“What if,” asked a third. “What if it was for a single-semester so we could go back to school and still be able to go to prom and participate in a regular high school?”
As a teacher, Hartman thought, “What if all of the classes were about the areas where we are traveling to expose the girls to inspiring, authentic learning in a genuine setting?”

They described a school with an educational format that gives students an alternative to traditional education for a single semester during their high school careers. This group of confident, intelligent, inquisitive young women described a program for girls, a program with overseas exploration, a program with strong academics, a program with an emphasis on outdoor skills development, and a program that would offer scholarships.

It chimes nicely with some of the work we're doing on students talking about - and shaping - their own education. I ran an evening workshop last year for 11-14 year olds, and the suggestions were staggeringly creative: pupils to be assessed on how many questions they asked etc.

More evidence for the case that students respond better to work that is led by their own curiosity and therefore, above all, feels relevant.

Michael Gove and the return to 'chalk-and-talk'

2009-08-16T23:33:00.004+01:00

I would really urge watching Michael Gove above on 'What education is for'. There's quite some possibility that this talk will act as one of the first big salvos in what is shaping up to be an increasingly divisive debate between the parties on education ahead of the General Election.

It has galvanised certain bloggers into action, to be sure. This post was emailed to me: it packs some important and convincing punches, but it is the tone - unbridled concern - that is the most noteworthy.

This paragraph is good:

No, for the purposes of this diatribe, let's just focus on his spurious argument that not teaching history in chronological order, and depriving kids access to Cicero and Wagner is some social injustice, perpetrated through the 'tyranny of relevance'. First, it's a fallacy that 'relevance' automatically means hip-hop, Carol Ann Duffy, and pandering to what kids like, rather than 'the very best of what has been thought and written'.

Matthew Taylor could well become one of the forefront commentators in this education debate, and his plea (best expressed here) that the debate is an open one without recourse to knee-jerk reactions is surely one we should all support: and is why I have set up this blog. His open letter to Michael Gove, still unanswered to the best of my knowledge, raises such important questions, and is posted below. These are the inferences that Matthew Taylor draws from Michael Gove's talk - what education is for, in conservative eyes:

1. Curriculum content should contain the classical canon of history, literature and scientific knowledge and we should pull back from seeking to make content more relevant to the contemporary concerns and lives of young people. Young people should be discouraged from pursuing newer or non traditional subjects like media studies, which are not seen as credible by the best universities.

2. The curriculum should be delivered though traditional subject disciplines and not through approaches emphasising cross cutting themes and competencies, such as, for example, the RSA’s Opening Minds.

3. (Something I heard emphasised by your number two, Nick Gibb), the practice of the best schools shows traditional chalk and talk forms of pedagogy are superior to practical, project based, forms of learning.

4. Schools should focus much more on the core activity of imparting knowledge. Children’s wider development is best enhanced through extra curricular activities such as schools clubs and societies but not through ‘teaching’ life skills or well-being.

5. Schools should be institutions that are primarily or even exclusively about learning and should not be required to engage in the wider delivery of children’s or community services.

6. Rather than blurring the divide between academic and vocational learning we should assert it, with, for example, 14-19 Diplomas restricted to vocational content.

7. Implicitly, strategies to widen participation in learning should not include developing forms of content and levels of assessment which enable more children to succeed: more should rise to the bar, the bar shouldn’t be moved to allow more to jump it.

Video Games and Children: first salvo

2009-08-11T22:11:00.000+01:00

I'm going to start fondly at home: with dysTalk.

Last October, Tom Maher gave a talk for us on Video Games and Children. It was an elegant and convincing argument against their use from the perspective of a teacher, and shall form a perfect opening for our debate.

His allegations:

1. They take up children's time and make them exhausted.

2. They affect children's capacity to learn by encouraging in them a desire for "immediate response." The assumption is that because children can change screen when they're bored gaming - and can't when bored in class - they are less likely to have the resilience of attention needed to stick at trickier topics/subjects.

His suggestions are moderate - and surely sensible:

1. A more comprehensive debate with the industry, a la the film industry and the junk food industry.

2. More awareness for parents as to the issues; and that computer games be brought out of the bedroom and into a family room.

Benjamin Franklin's education

2009-08-04T00:35:00.002+01:00

I'm re-reading John Taylor Gatto's The Underground History of American Education, a rollicking read, and feel compelled to quote the passages on Benjamin Franklin's education. Frustratingly, JTG is quite footnote-shy so I'm going to have to take his word for it.

Indirectly, this provides early anecdotal evidence for the key role parents play in a child's upbringing. As Gatto says, "A major part of Franklin’s early education consisted of studying father Josiah, who turns out, himself, to be a pretty fair example of education without schooling".

This is on Franklin's pop:

He had an excellent constitution...very strong...ingenious...could draw prettily...skilled in music...a clear pleasing voice...played psalm tunes on his violin...a mechanical genius...sound understanding...solid judgment in prudential matters, both private and public affairs. In the latter, indeed, he was never employed, the numerous family he had to educate and the straitness of his circumstances keeping him close to his grade; but I remember well his being frequently visited by leading people, who consulted him for his opinion in affairs of the town or of the church...and showed a great deal of respect for his judgment and advice...frequently chosen an arbitrator between contending parties.

This bit is brilliant too; again about Franklin snr:

At his table he liked to have as often as he could some sensible friend or neighbor to converse with, and always took care to start some ingenious or useful topic for discourse, which might tend to improve the minds of his children. By this means he turned our attention to what was good, just, and prudent in the conduct of life; and little or no notice was ever taken of what related to the victuals on the table...I was brought up in such perfect inattention to those matters as to be quite indifferent what kind of food was set before me.

The rest of Gatto's chapter on Franklin is well worth reading; his conclusion will do for now:

Josiah drew, he sang, he played violin—this was a tallow chandler with sensitivity to those areas in which human beings are most human; he had an inventive nature ("ingenious") which must have provided a constant example to Franklin that a solution can be crafted ad hoc to a problem if a man kept his nerve and had proper self-respect. His good sense, recognized by neighbors who sought his judgment, was always within earshot of Ben. In this way the boy came to see the discovery process, various systems of judgment, the role of an active citizen who may become minister without portfolio simply by accepting responsibility for others and discharging that responsibility faithfully.

A Fresh Start

2009-08-02T01:00:00.001+01:00

With the optimism of the summer and a new academic year, this blog is going to see some changes.

4 posts a week,
A bit more direction

I've felt myself lurch ever closer to the 'club bore' on matters of education; this blog (rather than the ears of bored friends) shall become by receptacle instead. Education is shaping up to be one of the key battlegrounds ahead of the election next year. I intend this to be a personal archive for my own reference - and I hope a fertile resource for people coming at this stuff fresh.

I'm going to stick to FIVE broad threads to keep the focus even tighter.

Good Teaching and Curricula: to include the debate between subject-based "Chalk and Talk" teaching championed by the Conservative Party vs. competency/skills-based learning.
Discipline: taking in behavioural management, drug policy, corporal punishment debates etc.
Selectivity: grammar schools, streaming etc.
Motivation/self-esteem: how far are schools implicated in this?
Impact of computer games/internet use on children and their receptiveness to learning/ their outlook in life. This might be renamed, as I want it to take in the ADHD/Ritalin debate.

Though I am very ready to be persuaded, here is my pithy-as-possible starting position for each:

1. Good Teaching: Matthew Taylor seems spot on here: it's a false dichotomy. As Guy Claxton has shown, we shouldn't have to choose between The Tudors or Media Studies.

2. Discipline: the debate has a larger significance. Should schools should be run on utilitarian principles (prioritizing the experience of the many even if that means failing the few)? I want to learn more about Steve Heppell's Not School.

3. Selectivity seems part of the same debate. At the moment, I am very much pro-selectivity. As a classroom teacher, I didn't see my weaker students benefiting from the strongest - nor vice versa. I'm ready to be proved wrong.

4. I quote Prof. Claxton in complete agreement: "Too often children see school as posing another set of challenges, rather than as an opportunity to develop the sorts of resources needed to deal with those challenges."

5. Hmmmm.. a change of mind every day..

Matthew Parris vs. Clay Shirky

2008-12-07T14:55:00.000Z

A great piece in Saturday's Times from Matthew Parris on the speed and ease of communication - and its possible impact on liberty.

Discussing the publication of the list of BNP members - and what bloggers have done with it:

What has changed is not the principle of what may be done, but the effortlessness and speed with which it may be done.

He argues, seemingly perversely, that the sheer effort of digging up information in the pre-internet era gave it a sort of viability - and that our personal privacy was protected by precisely this amount of effort.

Now, in the information free-for-all we live in today, the construction and maintenance of a "good reputation" is much trickier, he says. I certainly know of more than one person at my university who trawled Facebook for debauched and shameful photos - all of which went in a special folder he assumed to be of tremendous value for journalists of the future.

It all goes to support something that Clay Shirky has been saying for the last five years or so: that the ease of group-formation (and other Web 2.0 community-building tools) may be remarkable - and a potential reason for optimism - but that no moral values should be ascribed to it. The web merely facilitates previous patterns of behaviour - or even encourages "worse" patterns (as the trends in cyber-bullying, blog-defamation etc. show). He uses ANNA (pro-anorexia) forums to make his point in an interview:

I used to be a cyber-utopian. That view broke for me. I was teaching a class at NYU on social software. One of my students was a community manager for a magazine for teenage girls. They were shutting down the health and beauty boards because we can’t get the pro-anorexia girls to shut up with tips about how to avoid eating. I was thinking this isn’t a side effect of the Net. It was an effect. Ridiculously easy group forming for anorexics. Now, we have to move to a publish-then-filter world. That pattern suggests we’re moving the media world from decision to reaction. We can’t stop the pro-anorexia groups from forming. All we can do is watch and act.

dysTalk - up and running

2008-10-05T13:18:00.000+01:00

dysTalk went live on September 2nd, 2008. If anyone has any feedback, we're all ears...

Re-living Memories

2008-10-05T13:12:00.000+01:00

Below provides some interesting empirical evidence for the elegant words of Ed Cooke, whose talk on using one's memory for great feats can be seen here.

For the Brain, Remembering Is Like Reliving
By BENEDICT CAREY
Excerpts from The New York Times September 4, 2008

Scientists have for the first time recorded individual brain cells in the act of summoning a spontaneous memory, …

The recordings, taken from the brains of epilepsy patients being prepared for surgery, demonstrate that these spontaneous memories reside in some of the same neurons that fired most furiously when the recalled event had been experienced. …

Experts said the study had all but closed the case: For the brain, remembering is a lot like doing (at least in the short term, as the research says nothing about more distant memories).

Read the rest of the article here.

A parisian station in London

2008-10-04T20:09:00.000+01:00

I went to St. John's Wood for the first time in ages today, and was taken aback by how magnificent it is:

2008-07-09T04:19:00.001+01:00

Very evocative passage in Justin Cartwright's The Promise of Happiness. Amidst the tired soul-searching on what defines Englishness, this'll do for me:

For Frances the church has very little to do with God; it's more a shrine to Englishness: flowers, history, familiar - if meaningless - hymns, your own kneeler and a sort of bracing draughtiness, long out of favour.

Girls and Intellectuals

2008-07-01T07:24:00.000+01:00

Geoff Dyer:

I spent my twenties labouring - more accurately, idling - under the misconception that women liked intellectuals. In Africa I am confronted by an elemental truth: they prefer rangers and pilots...

Web 2.0 Countries?

2008-07-01T06:28:00.000+01:00

I presume this observation is old-hat now, but I found the selection of countries that Feed Informer put as the 'likely guesses' on their registration form (before listing the rest alphabetically) pretty interesting. I wonder if it was compiled from data?

United States
United Kingdom
Australia
Canada
Spain
China
Sweden
Denmark
France
Germany
Italy
Russia

Where's India? - I thought,

x

Technorati Tags: Feed Informer, Web 2.0 Countries, India, Connectivity

Diary vs Blog

2008-07-01T04:59:00.000+01:00

Knowing that I was going to an experiment with a blog, I brought a few of my old diaries out with me to The Hamptons. They're a rag-bag and misleading look at my life - spiking each year in the summer (when I've tended to travel) as well as the obligatory January 1st - 3rd resolution season - but I was worried that my love affair with the blog might spell the end for those wistful diary-keeping days. Ah, me...

Not so, I've realised.

My diary was a two-headed beast, and the two sat awkwardly beside on another. On one neck was my deep introspection. (An example at random from my Peruvian journal: "I miss laughing with her, and watching her laugh with other people.") Whilst on the other was my monkish transcribing of extracts: from the books I had with me, from newspapers, or from the great ideas in my head that seemed to warrant a wider audience.

Now I can divide the two.

The fluff can stay behind closed covers, biding its time mischievously until the biographers arrive, whilst the larger musings can fight it out in the blogarena.

One caveat to this. Like the best non-fiction writers, the best bloggers seem to be alive to the sweet taste of allusion. A lot of columnists tell us just enough about their lives to hook us; again, Geoff Dyer is the master:

Desperately lonely in Peru, I came across this in a Geoff Dyer article on - was it statues?:

I see your face everywhere, wandering through it like rain and the drifting steam of streets. I wake at four in the morning and think of you doing ordinary things: hunting for your glasses that you can never find, taking the tube to work, buying wine at the supermarket.

But my favourite, recently discovered, is this. In his book on The Great War, GD spends a few pages discussing the letters to and from loved ones, before inserting this:

Propped against the bar of the Cafe de l'Industrie, I open an envelope with my name in your writing. The second paragraph wonders, in your latest flourish of colloquial English, how I am 'bearing up.'

Technorati Tags: Geoff Dyer, The Great War, Diary Keeping

Interactive learning: always a good thing?

2008-07-01T00:08:00.001+01:00

This is too good, not to post in full: from David Smith.

"There are 120 contributors [to a magazine feature that asked: 'what do you believe is true, even though you cannot prove it?]. From these, I have selected Esther Dyson. I have her dictum, 'Always make new mistakes', as a fridge magnet and her Edge contribution is something every teacher should ponder. Here's a substantial excerpt:"

We're living longer, and thinking shorter.

[Disclaimer: Since I'm not a scientist, I'm not even going to attempt to take on something scientific. Rather, I want to talk about something that can't easily be measured, let alone proved. And second, though what I'm saying may sound gloomy, I love the times we live in. There has never been a time more interesting, more full of things to explain, interesting people to meet, worthy causes to support, challenging problems to solve.]

It's all about time. I think modern life has fundamentally and paradoxically changed our sense of time. Even as we live longer, we seem to think shorter. Is it because we cram more into each hour? Or because the next person over seems to cram more into each hour? For a variety of reasons, everything is happening much faster and more things are happening. Change is a constant.

It used to be that machines automated work, giving us more time to do other things. But now machines automate the production of attention-consuming information, which takes our time. For example, if one person sends the same e-mail message to 10 people, then 10 people have to respond.

The physical friction of everyday life—the time it took Isaac Newton to travel by coach from London to Cambridge, the dead spots of walking to work (no iPod), the darkness that kept us from reading—has disappeared, making every minute not used productively into an opportunity cost.

And finally, we can measure more, over smaller chunks of time. From airline miles to calories (and carbs and fat grams), from friends on Friendster to steps on a pedometer, from realtime stock prices to millions of burgers consumed, we count things by the minute and the second.

Unfortunately, this carries over into how we think and plan: Businesses focus on short-term results; politicians focus on elections; school systems focus on test results; most of us focus on the weather rather than the climate. Everyone knows about the big problems, but their behavior focuses on the here and now. …

How can we reverse this? It's a social problem, but I think it may also herald a mental one—which I describe as mental diabetes. Whatever's happening to adults, most of us grew up reading books (at least occasionally) and playing with "uninteractive" toys that required us to make up our own stories, dialogue and behavior for them. Today's children are living in an information-rich, time-compressed environment that often seems to replace a child's imagination rather than stimulate it. I posit that being fed so much processed information—video, audio, images, flashing screens, talking toys, simulated action games—is akin to being fed too much processed, sugar-rich food. It may seriously mess up children's information metabolism and their ability to process information for themselves. In other words, will they be able to discern cause and effect, to put together a coherent story line, to think scientifically?

I don't know the answers, but these questions are worth thinking about, for the long term.

Technorati Tags: Esther Dyson, interactive learning

Carolyn Cassady interview

2008-06-30T08:03:00.000+01:00

This is an interview I conducted earlier in the year with Carolyn Cassady. You can listen to it here. The fantastic illustration (left) was done by the talented Tom Kingsley.

What a curse a cult novel seems to be . By connecting so acutely with the zeitgeist, books like On The Road tend to seduce their readers with such emotion that any sense of objectivity is lost. The myths begin; the readers own the book.

Carolyn Cassady seems to have spent most of her life negotiating that difficult terrain between fiction and truth. Fictionalised as Camille in On The Road , married to its hero Neal Cassady ('Dean Moriarty' in the novel) and a lover to its author Jack Kerouac ('Sal Paradise'), Carolyn is perhaps the most qualified person to clear up what she calls 'all that misunderstanding' in a subject so relentlessly stylized and distorted. 'I am not in On The Road actually. Camille? - she just lies there and cries. And I mean black lace? I don't think so,' she laughs, taking a graceful drag of her cigarette.

As expected, she denies that there was any such thing as 'The Beat Generation'. 'As far as I'm concerned, the Beat Generation was something made up by the media and Allen Ginsberg.' Generations, just like Sets and Movements, seem to be antiquated notions these days: they're just too easy to unravel. She brings a much more controversial corrective to the men's behaviour - traditionally seen as proto-rebellious. 'They included me in everything. Contrary to popular belief, Jack and Neal were very respectful of women, always gentlemen, never swore...' She also recovers the mindset of the times: 'what most people don't realise is the consciousness of the thirties and forties, which was very much influenced by Victorian values. Both of them were Catholics - Jack an immigrant . They were not wild. ' On multiple occasions during the interview, Allen Ginsberg - though remembered fondly - is blamed for encouraging this reputation of recklessness and abandon: as a conduit for his own literary and commercial success.

'Jack', she mourns, 'got dragged into it...' Jack Kerouac is a great example of what misrepresentation can do to a writer. He wanted to join the canon of great American writers - Jack London, Tom Wolfe, Ernest Hemingway-and the role he was cast in instead proved devastating, as Cassady explains. 'He was called the "King of the Beats" and the "Father of the Hippies", he told me that he was going to drink himself to death. He was so sensitive, so self-conscious, and so paranoid that he just couldn't stand the image that had been created of him. All the hippie stuff was just so alien to what his dreams had been...it destroyed him.' To what extent does an artist have control over how his work is perceived once it's in the public domain? It's a fascinating case study of an artist trying to escape his caricature. As every depth was plunged for commodity - 'his awful poems, his awful drunken doodles, his awful play' - Jack found the only means of escape in alcohol.

Neal Cassady faced much the same dilemma. According to Carolyn, he wished that people would not read On The Road as it undermined his desire for respectability. The problem for Neal - and, now, for his family - is that despite being the focal point for Kerouac and Ginsberg's writing, as Carolyn puts it, 'Jack was the recorder; Neal was the do-er'. Besides his letters, there's very little creative output: he was doomed to always being a character, in some ways to always being fictional. It's much easier to squabble over the legacy of someone's words than their character. Carolyn finds herself constantly having to rectify or absolve Neal's reputation: whether it's the 1980 film Heart Beat starring Nick Nolte as Neal or the final images of Neal, after their divorce in 1963, driving the Merry Prankster Bus - and accelerating his drug intake. He had written to Carolyn to tell her how much he disliked this image too. Even Neal's death is much disputed - as befits his status as a cult icon. The myth is that he died from exposure after deciding to walk back home along the railroad tracks in San Jose - a hopelessly romantic image. Carolyn says it was none of these: under 'cause' on the death certificate, the doctor writes only 'all systems congested.' Carolyn is a fastiduous historian, a self-confessed 'stickler for facts' - a great difficulty in light of the nebulous legacy of her husband. Not just nebulous but polyvalent: Neal might well have desired to be an upstanding citizen but his wilder urges are indisputable. Carolyn does acknowledge this: she didn't want to read On The Road because she didn't want to know what her boys got up to when they weren't with her. A website (nealcassady estate.com) has been set up by the family, 'dedicated to bringing you the real Neal' but one gets the sad sense that the Cassady family's will continue to be a lone voice in the wind. 'I realise now that it is the utter inadequacy of human contacts that makes us turn to art,' wrote William Boyd in The View from Yves Hill , 'only in fiction is everything explained.'

Technorati Tags: Beat Generation, Allen Ginsberg, Carolyn Cassady, On The Road, Neal Cassady, William Boyd

Interview with Sarah Hall

2008-06-30T07:55:00.000+01:00

This is an interview I conducted earlier this year for Notes from the Underground:

In an interview after one particularly majestic display, Billie Jean King's only explanation was a shrug: 'I don't know...sometimes you just...see the ball like a football.' It's an attractive notion - professionals unaccountably hitting form on certain days - and it turns out that writers have them too. 'It is like exercise,' Sarah Hall says, 'you get that burst of adrenalin... you feel strong . The words come easily.'

It helps if you've got focus - if, in Hall's words, you're 'fired up.' In her latest work, The Carhullan Army , one gets the sense that Hall didn't have too many days staring at the ceiling or re-checking the word count: there's a real sense of purpose here. Set in a Britain crippled by environmental catastrophe, the novel follows Sister, a woman who defies the State's bleak regime by fleeing her hometown in search of an all-female commune of kindred spirits. With her fictional Britain partially underwater, Hall sees this work as a critique of 'reactive', wait-and-see politics. Worthy campaign novels are often short on panache but Hall's mindful of her priorities: as she commented on her receipt of the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize in November last year, 'the duty of a writer is to write a story.'

Do writers have a duty to address the big issues too? Hall calls it 'not so much a duty as a high note'. A victim of the Cumbrian floods in 2005, ' the implications of an altered climate became no longer merely imaginable, but visible .' It's not that she felt a duty to write about it; more that she couldn't have written about anything else. 'What's happening to the planet is desperately frightening', she says, 'but so much so that most people don't know how to process it.' The Carhullan Army forces both her and her readers to meditate on the potential consequences. Hall never pontificates; she actualizes, and this accumulation of images and interactions - societal disintegration, rationing (both of food and children), overcrowding, disease and the proximity of violence - is far more admonishing as a result.

Her prophesy is both broad-brush and local. We have the 28 Days Later passages - the deserted streets, the derelict shopping centres etc. - but the main focus is on the small-scale, the decentralised. Not 'what would happen to Britain?' but 'what would happen to your town, your village, your family?' Hall grew up on the Eastern side of the Lake District in a sheep farming community: her inclination is towards the rural and local. If she's grinding her climate change axe in her right hand, her left is busy working the axe of community breakdown and social atomisation. Her description of the self-sustaining commune of farming women might be read as a critique of the Tesco-ification of rural Britain and the devastation of its farming communities. 'It's great to have a South African grapefruit for breakfast every morning but it's just not...sensible. We're a great farming country...' she tails off poignantly. Is Carhulla's 'brave new world' (as Sister describes it) not an exercise in nostalgia? 'I'm not nostalgic, I'm just cross. When I was growing up, we had bottles of milk delivered to our door every morning, which we knew came from two farms down the road...The milk was a reasonable price and the farmers made a reasonable living. But yes, what we see in Carhulla we could have seen in Britain a hundred or even two hundred years ago.'

Nostalgic or not, Hall's familiarity with the local geography infuses the novel's language. She talks about the register of her characters. The women speak as their survivalist circumstances dictate - with parade-ground precision - but also as befits their lives as Northern female farmers. Hall grew up with these women: 'if you saw two women farmers leaning on a gate, you probably wouldn't understand what they were saying.' (I felt the you rather assertively.) Her women have a muscular, no-nonsense familiarity with agricultural technique, buttressed by a liberal sprinkle of Northern idiom ('tuss', 'corbie', 'bothie') and cursing. Hall loves to resuscitate the impact of words: 'swear words generally fail to shock...but somehow used by a woman they retain some of their original power.'

Hall used the authenticity of these characters to separate her novel from its literary predecessors. There's something so daunting about Dystopia for a writer - it seems even harder to wriggle free from cliché. So in The Carhullan Army , we do have the spectre of state control ( Nineteen Eighty-Four ), the establishment of a utopia ( Brave New World ), the rurification of cities ( The Tripods ), enforced sterilization ( Children of Men ) etc. But we also have some wonderfully original images and conceits: as Sister flees her hometown, she sees a church with no doors, and the 'grey arched hole' retreating inwards. In another, a rotting dog comes to symbolise the degradation of the world. Did she feel at all burdened by previously conceived dystopiae? 'Not really, because there's a real dialogue going on between writers of Dystopia. Brave New World is a satirical response to the progressive ideas put forward by Freud, Ford and the early behaviourists, and to the work of H.G.Wells, for instance.' Hall sees dystopian fiction as 'the wringing of present jeopardy for future disaster'; what she wants to introduce into the broader conversation is a pro-active role for women. 'In any discussion of apocalypse, reproduction is obviously going to be key.' And not just reproduction: one of the The Carhullan Army's controversial decisions is to have women as 'front-line resistance and rebel-force' rather than as just the victims.

It was Hall's willingness to engage in discussion - whether climatic, societal or gender - that convinced the John Llewellyn Rhys panel to award her the £5,000 prize. Suzi Feay, chair of judges, praised Hall for " tackl[ing] the most urgent and alarming questions of today," adding that "we need writers with Hall's humanity and insight."

Technorati Tags: Notes from the Underground, Sarah Hall, Dystopia

The 'slide'?

2008-06-30T02:19:00.000+01:00

I'm coining a neologism, not being able to find the anatomical term on Google.

The slide: that region of a man's body between the bottom of his gut and the top of his pubis.

In New York (from where I write), it seems to be the gold standard in male physique, stretching itself grandly over advertising boards across Manhattan. Its loudest celebrant is Abercrombie and Fitch (see above). Theirs runs on and on - ever southward - into a fine, sultry mist. The shop itself - a dimly-lit grotto on 5th Ave with topless male assistants - dresses its mannequins accordingly: a plaster-white crescent separates the top of their shorts from the bottom of the shirts.

Is there an attraction over and above the generic ideal of the Grecian torso? In the promo surrounding The Dreamers, Bertolucci described the area (citation needed) as the localisation of male youth; the focal point of male eroticism - and maligned that his own had turned to flub.

Technorati Tags: New York, Abercrombie and Fitch

Marginalia

2008-06-29T19:22:00.000+01:00

... one of the brilliant inventions of the paper bureaucracy was the idea of the margin. The margin is a place on a paper form, which is designed for writing things down that are outside, both physically and conceptually, the form that “the system” expects. The thing about the margin is that it is connected to the form in such a way that the form carries the stuff that goes beyond the form along with the form.

Austin Henderson, quoted in chapter 4 of Software Design & Usability (Klaus Kaasgaard): 'Beyond Formalisms: The Art and Science of Designing Pliant Systems'.

Link via David Smith

Literary historians get excited about the margins from writers' own book collections - and rightly so. Geoff Dyer is surely right that the most interesting critics are writers themselves:

On the other hand, it's really, really exciting reading what other writers have said about Lawrence. It seems to me as well, that is the kind of thing which would encourage people when they have left university to go on to be writers as opposed to going on to be academics.

It's part of GD's wider criticisms of academia, which reach a frothy rant in Out of Sheer Rage:

Walk around a university campus and there is an almost palpable smell of death about the place because academics are busy killing everything they touch.

Some of the most poignant (and famous) marginalia are Sylvia Plath's on her copy of The Great Gatsby. They range from the banal ('good') to the majestic. When Nick leaves the Buchanan house, passing Gatsby in the driveway, Plath underlined the final sentence in the chapter ("So I walked away and left him standing there in the moonlight watching over nothing"), and wrote in the margin:

knight waiting outside dragon goes to bed with princess

A melancholy comment.

Technorati Tags: Geoff Dyer, margins, The Great Gatsby, Sylvia Plath,

Things that make the hairs stand up...

2008-06-27T06:12:00.000+01:00

To be updated...

After Hours

Ikea ad: Home

Technorati Tags: After Hours, Ikea, Martin Scorsese

A boon for Tory educational policy

2008-06-27T06:09:00.000+01:00

Is this the sort of thing the Conservatives want to include in their 'Swedish-school' education plan?

Ex-comprehensive teacher praises his new independent school

Technorati Tags: David Miliband,

Smart guy

2008-06-26T00:59:00.000+01:00

David Miliband grows and grows in my estimation. First there was the interview with the FT; now, I've just come across this speech thanks to David Smith's blog:

To quote David Smith's post in full:

In two recent speeches, UK politicians are beginning to show they understand the web. First, George Osborne. And now, David Miliband:

When we think of education, we tend to think of formal teaching in classrooms by teachers. This remains important. But the range of resources to support learning is far wider than that - from workplaces and museums to individuals with skills to contribute, and passions to share. They lie beyond the school gates and they are 24/7. And the key to genuine educational transformation is inspiring children and adults to learn more for themselves – what Yeats called ‘lighting a fire’ as opposed to ‘filling a pail’. So the challenge is to connect people with skills and time to give, from university students, part-time employees and people in retirement, to others with similar passions and interests. ‘Every citizen a teacher’ may be a bit of a stretch, but it is not impossible to imagine an educational world where a large minority of citizens play an active role, either on a voluntary or paid basis in supporting learners as personal tutors, running after-school clubs, or integrated into the curriculum and the classroom. The web can create the potential to aggregate the dispersed supply of citizen-teachers and connect them to learners with particular interests. It can also help learners filter the good from the bad through peer to peer recommendations and make sense of a world where educational resources are much more diverse.

And much more besides: 'I believe the businesses and government that succeed in the future will be those that give people greater power to shape the future of their individual lives and greater capacity to collaborate. A sense of I can and we can.'

Exciting stuff

Technorati Tags: David Miliband

The awakening of my e-consciousness

2008-06-26T00:51:00.000+01:00

I have just come across the phenomenal blog belonging to David Smith, a teacher at St. Paul's. Found here. Just the notion of a Head of English at one school, re-launching himself as Director of ICT at another is a wicked one - especially in the English private school sector. But, more than that, he seems to have a real passion for pushing the - for want of a better word - Web 2.0 agenda into his kids' line-of-sight.

He's also ex-tutor to friend and all-round hero, Ed Cooke.

Technorati Tags: David Smith, Ed Cooke

The future

2007-10-09T16:38:00.000+01:00

http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=NLlGopyXT_g