A diploma is the final step in a traditional education, but in the DIY world, credit comes from the reputation you build by doing good work and demonstrating it to others in a community. The rules of this world are informal and evolving, but joining and demonstrating value to a network is not optional for…
It’s sometimes said that schools are where young people go to see older people work. Too often, we fall into the trap of seeing our students as vessels that need to be filled up. Instead, we should remember this quote attributed to Confucius: “I hear and I forget. I see and I remember. I do…
The industrial age worked hard to separate “work” from “home.” Everything about the common or public schools started in the mid-nineteenth century reinforced that division: from the school bell ringing for each child at the same time of day, of each child entering school at age 6 whether they were ready or not, about sitting…
Mike Arnzen posted his weird and wonderful address to graduation seniors. “Scary Things”: An Address to the Class of 2011 — The Goreletter — Michael Arnzen.
The whole “reality is an illusion” idea has been kicked around by everyone from Siddhartha to the existentialists. It is Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom who is most often associated with the idea that we are living in a computer simulation. His premise is based on a series of assumptions: 1). A technological society could eventually…
The essential problem of man in a computerized age remains the same as it has always been. That problem is not solely how to be more productive, more comfortable, more content, but how to be more sensitive, more sensible, more proportionate, more alive. The computer makes possible a phenomenal leap in human proficiency; it demolishes…
When my son was young, I noticed that videgames had taught him that problems are surmountable, so long as you have enough tries. That’s not always true, of course, or practical. We had a chat about things dying, and as I struggled to lightly broach the subject with him I ended up talking about the…
Yesterday, my eight-year-old said, “I don’t like math, but I’m good at it.” This is a huge improvement from the math-related tug-of-wars we’ve encountered almost daily for the past year and a half. Yesterday, she also finished a “Star Wars Math” game, where the idea is to play a Trivial Pursuits style game, spaced-out versions…
What Chinese parents understand is that nothing is fun until you’re good at it. To get good at anything you have to work, and children on their own never want to work, which is why it is crucial to override their preferences. This often requires fortitude on the part of the parents because the child…
Fascinating discussion of the evolution (and violation) of the emerging blogosphere convention for citing links, in the late 90s. A few years ago, I was exploring what happened to the canonical first blogs, a short list of frequently updated web pages that Jesse James Garret identified as weblogs, and I mentioned in passing that I…
Emerson burst onto the American intellectual scene by more or less inventing that American intellectual scene. Emerson collected around him a group of like-minded intellectuals who played out, in their own careers, this same search for American identity. His first publication, Nature, calls for a distinctly American way of looking at the enduring questions of human existence. You…
No, the awesome mascot-based space platformer you cheerily sketched on graph paper when you were supposed to be focused on math homework is not going straight to production. No, in fact, there are not a million page views at the ready for your exhaustive essay on the themes of Silent Hill 2. You will probably…
I haven’t visited Aint It Cool News in a long time. I give Harry Knowles kudos for being who he is and not hiding behind any kind of mask, and I also recognize he’s not writing for the minivan-and-mortgage demographic. Still… I wasn’t prepared for this. (Spoilers!) I fall out of love with ANDY because…
I am the opposite of a foodie. As I’ve aged, I have had to discipline myself to fill up with a plate of salad before I go through the buffet line, but if it stops me from being hungry, it’s good. Nevertheless, I did stop and look twice at this story. “The table is very…
Doctorow is a do-it-yourself tech maven who hates the iPad, specifically because it makes it so easy to access online content on Apple’s terms. We don’t own the content we pay for on the iPad, and we aren’t trusted with owning the insides. The way you improve your iPad isn’t to figure out how it…
I’ve never played this game, but in the last week or so, my attempts to play multiplayer games with my kids (Uru and Dungeons and Dragons Online) have been thwarted by the fact that my modem blips out for a few minutes every couple hours, which freezes up games that exchange information over the internet. …
For the one-credit journalism class that I teach every semester, I’m teaching a unit on editorial writing. Students will take a leisurely 10-chapter journey through Style: The Basics of Clarity and Grace. It’s the first time I’ve taught a whole unit focusing on sentence-level phrasing. The class meets once a week, for just one hour,…
X-altruists are compelled to good, even when doing so makes no sense and brings harm upon them. The cannot tolerate injustice, and go to extreme lengths to help those who have been wronged, regardless of their personal relationship to them. Now, I am not speaking of the guy who helps an old lady cross the…
During a scheduled internet outage at work, I took a stack of papers from my “I’ll probably never need this stuff but I need to go through it one more time before I chuck it” stack, and headed to the copy room, where there’s a big recycling bin. A colleague did a double-take as he…
A few years ago, my daughter was thrilled to receive a hand-me-down fanny pack. (See the price tag hanging on my spiffy new one?)Earlier this month, when my wife took the kids on a family visit for about 10 days, my daughter cried for me at night.