Learning is Change

Question 206 of 365: Where is the open book?

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original title page of Jude the Obscure by Tho...
Image via Wikipedia

Every time I put my son down for bed, he sees fit to be totally uninterested without a good amount of singing of songs and reapplying blankets. In between each one of these tries at sleep during which he may or may not actually close his eyes, I head over to the bookshelf with all of my old novels on it. As my son considers sleep for the twelfth time, I open up The Great Gatsby or if I’m feeling slightly more ambitious, Plato’s Republic. I read through all of the passages that I have highlighted or notated, which is quite a bit.

Each of the stars next to a given paragraph is enough for me to jump right back in to the person that I was when I first read the book. And as my son wakes up and goes back down with severe regularity, I keep on coming back to the fact that I have absolutely no way to retrieve those moments of insight without opening up each one of those volumes and reading that exact underlining, with scribbles that only I would understand.

Every time I stumble upon something that meant a great deal to me in a book I haven’t read for years, I feel this pang of regret that I didn’t read it on a digital device with syncable notes and sharable annotations. I look at a lot of the works that I read as an english major and how many of them are in the public domain. Each one of those I could have downloaded as an ePub file and opened up on an iPad or Kindle, had they only existed.

I know the intimacy of books is desirable, but sometimes I just wish that I could export those intimate moments and savor them more regularly. I don’t want to have the parts of me that I left on those pages get left behind. I want them at my fingertips.

And I know I could use Evernote to scan in or take pictures of those notes, but I really think that misses the point. If I am only copying over the pages that mattered then, there is almost no hope that I will read the entire work again and discover new things about the author and myself. I want the whole context of these notations. I want the whole story of why I starred entire sections. I want to search through and find the threads that bind together all of my braces hanging in the margins like unfinished picture frames ready to be hung in my digital memory.

I believe that this kind of work will happen when I am not responsible for digitizing the content itself, but only the annotations. I mean that all of the books I read as a student must be available in Google Books or some other easily searchable format. Then I want q scanner that only looks in the margins and maps it to a page number and a paragraph.

It would look something like the formula that a good friend of mine wrote in high school for knowing what page number he should be on in his very different version of Jude the Obscure. The class set was larger print, but my friend’s copy was an antique. He used his graphing calculator to concoct a formula for going back and forth between his book and ours. It worked flawlessly. I want the same thing for my notes. I want a way to map the words I wrote with the ones that my famous counterparts penned. Only then will I be able to look at the little diagrams I made up in the 9th grade with anything but nostalgia and regret.

If I want my past to live into my ore went I need a way to map it to something living. All of the books on that bookshelf are dead. Without commenting and liking or metadata, those words are not going to assemble themselves into something of value. And I want to find that value again, if for no other reason than to see exacltly who I was and how all of that has changed now that I am reading exerpts wle my son sits in his room, screaming because the door is stuck on the inside.

Because, it has changed, believe me.

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Question 205 of 365: Why don't we clear the board more often?

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Small Price to Pay for the All Clear
Image by MarkyBon via Flickr

I have been to a few emergency rooms, mostly for highly nervous new parent reasons. Near each one is a board with names on it. Ussually this board has ailments, procedures, and where patients are at any given time. It tells of upcoming surgeries that require a certain level of expertise. This type of board has been highly popularized by shows like Grey’s Anatomy and other hospital dramas. It always struck me as a very public way for everyone to know what was going on in the hospital on any given day. No one can hide from the responsibilities that the board requires. The board dictates your schedule. Every day, new patients arrive and old patients are erased from the board. More than once a day, the entire slate is wiped clean and the whole process starts anew.

I wish this board existed for more than just hospitals.

Instead, we lower the stakes. We move the boards into more private areas like meeting spaces and classrooms. We let notices stay there for weeks or months with large “do not erase” signs around them. Or, we digitize the process and make it even more secretive in our email inbox or content management systems. There is no feeling that we must clear the board or people will die. There is no feeling that everyone will know exactly what we have been up to because our names are tied to the procedure to which we were assigned. In essence, the board is inconsequential in our working lives. It doesn’t dictqte order or urgency and we don’t feel the need to clear it nearly as often.

But what if we did put up such a board in our schools and workplaces? What if we put the things that we were doing up for everyone to see and then cleared them away with a medical efficiency? I would like to see the progress and the stories that get told then.

If I had to guess, most people wouldn’t spend their time on menial work. If their tasks were going up on the board, everything we did would become important. If we had to write up there what we were learning about or what we were about to tackle on any given day, we would see just how urgent our procedures can be.

And when we needed help for a given procedure, we could elicit help from one another simply by adding one another’s names to the board. We could focus on the collaborative spirit that is required in a hospital in order to keep patients alive. There would stop being a competition between who has harder or more important work because the task for each day is not to complete your own work, but to help clear the board. If you have a free moment, help someone else clear the board. If you have something that needs doing, write it up.

I don’t clear my email inbox as often as I should because there is nothing making me do it. It isn’t life or death and there isn’t any help if I get stuck. But if every one fo my job requirements were up on the board, waiting to be cleared by a team of highly skilled people, you had better believe that I wouldn’t still have an unreturned email from last December just with a draft that has been saved 5 different times and then abandoned because something more interesting came up.

I get that I am not saving lives by creating learning objects or by talking about social media or asking better questions through video. But hqt doesn’t mean that the ambition and pride that doctors feel for clearing the board is unavailable to me. I just have to make my system more open to people walking through my emergency room. I need to allow others to help me, too.

If I simply keep my work as public as possible and not try to own everything, I believe that more will get done and I will feel better about it as well. Or maybe I will jut better be able to put myself in the shoes of someone in ER or House.

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Question 204 of 365: When do we almost die?

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rhizoming the vanishing lines . .
Image by jef safi via Flickr

It strikes me that we almost die far more often than we actually do.

Most of the days that I drive to work I think about what it would be like if I made an enormous right turn into oncoming traffic or into the highway median. I don’t think that this is morbid or abnormal, rather I believe that it is a healthy part of me staying alive. If I can envision the crumpled minivan on the side of the road, I can avoid it . If I can see exactly how it would flip and wrap around a tree, I know that my family is safe. I can almost die in my head hundreds of times.

I live in a place that feels safe. The only people I see outside in the neighborhood are kids and parents, playing with toys and basketballs and bicycles. I see people walking and running, too. I see tended yards, except for mine. I see people wave. I’m sure that all of this seeming safety is an illusion, but I take it because it keeps me almost dead, rather than entirely dead much more often.

I am passive when it comes to confrontation. I would take pretty much any route there is to avoid a fight. I stay alive tyhrough this process. To put it another way: I almost die in every conversation, but somehow I manage to avoid it. It’s not to say that I deal with a lot of violent people, but anything can become a fight. Anything.

Whether by accident or intentional behavior, I have managed to stay alive since I was born. It is a streak that is unmatched by anyone younger than me. There are so many things that could kill me, but so far I have managed to escape each one. Sickness hasn’t done it, nor has being impaled on anything overly sharp. I don’t intend on being beaten to death or splattering to the grown after a wrongly orchestrated bungee jump. All of these things will be almost deaths for me and I will treasure them. For as long as they remain as such, I don’t have anything to worry about.

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Question 203 of 365: Should writing be harder?

The Semantic Web Stack.
Image via Wikipedia

Access to information never gets old.

I coveted it when all I could access was the universal search on AOL. I still covet it now that nearly every good piece of information comes directly to me through the various networks I take part in and blogs I read.

I will never get over having knowledge at my fingertips. It is intoxicating. I have to remember almost nothing on my own. All of the good things I read and experience are saved for later in online bookmarks. I rarely will input new people’s phone numbers into my phone if they have emailed it to me. I simply search from my phone for that email and then call when I need to. I don’t put things into folders or even download attachments anymore. They are always stored for me and I can go in a and grab them from any device. My search and browsing history is even a part of my record. And all of this makes it so I don’t have to even be aware of my accumulation of knowledge. Because it is all networked, I don’t even need to know where to find it.

This all means that the process of collecting and processing what is new is stupefyingly easy. It gets so that I rarely have to have any kind of original thought at all. The content just keeps on pushing further and further in.

Throughout all of this aggregation, the creative process is taking place. New works are being penned, but mostly about the same things. Because media consumption has become a type of art, our writing is becoming recycled.

It is af the trending topics are simply there to suggest what the trending topics should be. It has always been that momentum begets momentum, but it has never been so easy to make believe that the same story or idea is new through every retweet and “like.” If imitation is the most sincere form of flattery, we have stumbled headlong into the most sincere times yet.

And the semantic web is playing right into the sincere nature of recycled content. Our social interactions around ideas and objects will prove to be very lucrative and engaging places for businesses and users alike. The nearly ubiquitous share button is making it so that nothing is a solitary act, that nothing is unmonotized or at least measured in our social graph.

As the comment becomes our currency and the remix takes on new levels of respect, there is little doubt that the act of writing will become still easier. The question is, should it be easy?

Should the penning of one’s thoughts be a part of everything we read and interact with? If everything is just a reaction to something else, where is there room for branching out and finding your own voice? If our conversations are within shared links, then our level of discourse can never move beyond others’ words.

It is important to know that we all stand on the shoulders of giants and that we have a lot to learn from those who came before, but we have become complacent in our role for balancing out the old with the new. We have stopped caring about creating our own context for the ideas we find because it is easier just to share links.

That is why blogging and good writing in general will never die. No matter how few characters we are limited to on other platforms, there will always be room for some dissent and some context and some new ideas. So, retweet to your hearts content. I know that the stuff that is worthy of that retweet is only what is truly resonant.

And the things that resonate most are still the things that are hard. Struggle and hard fought success and failure are The stories we should all aspire to tell. Recycled content is here to stay, but those stories are our counterweight. They are what allows us to own our social graph and justify our appalling access to content.

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Question 202 of 365: What are the limits of a mobile office?

Image representing TeamViewer as depicted in C...
Image via CrunchBase

I have few requirements left for being connected.

It used to be that I needed a single computer, my computer, in order to catch up with all of the things that are most important. Then it was any computer connected to the internet. Then it was a cell phone for filtering information in twitter and in e-mail. Then it was any device that could pull up gmail and google docs.

Today, my mobile office looked like this:

  1. A usb internet connect card, plugged into a mobile wireless router.
  2. An iPad, running TeamViewer (free) which was connected to my laptop at my “real office” (it was actually displaying another screen via GoToMeeting for a webinar)
  3. A Cell Phone, conferencing in a call from California

I should also mention that I was sitting in my car while attending the webinar, conference call, and remote desktop session. I had no limitations on web applications (flash/ContentEditable issues were not a problem). I had no limitations on mobility. I could have been driving the car and attending (as it was, I was parked). I had no limitations on how many people could be a part of my communication. I was recording the call via Google Voice. I could have even had others logging in to either the webinar or my desktop in order to look over my shoulder as we talked over the ways in which safe social networking can work in schools. Had I thought about it, I could have had Google Voice ring through to my Whistle app on the iPad and not had to deal with the phone part.

As I got out of my car and went into my kids’ school to go pick them up, I realized that my office really is everywhere. I’m not sure what it means that I am truly no longer tethered in any way or limited by the devices I carry. At the very least I question what collaboration really looks like for me.

When I needed my own computer to function, collaboration meant that I had to find a time for people to come to me. As I moved out to any computer, I could seek out others in a small radius. As it moved to any device, I could do more asynchronous types of contribution and conversations. As it became cell phones, I found ways to archive things and bring my voice and video into the equation. Now… well, now I don’t see how my collaboration within any project or document is limited by proximity or time.  It means that I don’t have to wait to take part or process or reflect or create. No limitations means no missed opportunities. No prerequisites for connection. No officially sanctioned regrets.

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Question 201 of 365: How hard and how fast should we jump on the ice?

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Waterfall in the town of Chagrin Falls, Ohio
Image via Wikipedia

The Chagrin river never froze over completely. At least, not in my memory anyway. It was always halfway frozen in the winter, allowing for a few ducks to sit on the frigid water as it took them closer and closer to the falls beneath the Popcorn Shop in my hometown. Halfway out onto the river, the ice was thick enough to stand on. Or so I thought.

Two of my closest friends decided to venture out onto the river as far as they would dare. I followed with a lot of apprehension, but eventually I was able to join them a few feet away from the bank. At first they were only interested in stomping around in circles and hearing the faint cracking underfoot. Then as they saw the ice hold more and more of their weight, they began to jump . Up and down they went and I did my best to be uninterested. I knew what was coming next. I knew that it was only hubris that was standing between us and the freezing cold water. But I couldn’t help from joining in. I knew that at any moment we would become enormous popsicles, but right then we were dry and warming up from all of our jumping.

I can’t believe it took us more than 5 minutes to break through, but we spent the better part of half an hour trying to prove that we were as dumb as the people watching from the park were beginning to suspect. And as we fell through the ice, I remember thinking that we deserved it. We had tempted the gods of the river, and we were right to freeze to death.

Luckily, one of my friends lived just a few blocks away. So, we ran as fast as we could, the water freezing against our skin. Our clothes were stiff by the time we made it. As we dried off with some of the warmest and most comforting towels I have ever known, I knew that no amount of explaining would ever allow others to see why we had to jump on the ice together and feel it crack under our weight. I knew that it wouldn’t be possible for my parents or my friend’s parents to see why jumping was our only chance to make sure that we were alive in all of the ways we wanted to be.

And I put it to you that I still cannot explain it. I still cannot decipher our total lack of understanding for what it was we were attempting. What I can say is this: Every risk I have ever taken is some version of that day.

Every risk, so long as it is worthy of consideration, but be two things: a collective act and have the possibility of catastrophe. Solitary risk isn’t of interest to me. It doesn’t hold my imagination at all. Without friends around to watch me fail, there is little hope that I will ever be able to learn or have any kind of humor about that failure in the future. I also believe in total catastrophe as a kind of performance art. I often tell my wife that taking two trips from the car to the refrigerator to put away the produce is much more fulfilling than taking one. I say this because there is a much higher likelihood that I will stumble my way into something interesting if I can take my time with each bag. I am just clumsy enough that the practice of taking two trips doubles the possibility of me falling headlong into the refrigerator, or better yet, a good idea.

I am not interested in advocating for jumping on thin ice, however. What I am advocating for is a kind of free will that doesn’t disallow jumping on thin ice because it is a monumentally bad idea in the eyes of pretty much everyone. I am recommending that we all, from time to time, embark on some hideously bad ideas in the hopes that we can gain insight. Oh, and we should write about them and share stories, too. That way, anything so absurd as to cause each of us to thank our lucky stars that we weren’t involved will be the push we need to go out and try something truly insane, and perhaps spectacular.

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Question 200 of 365: Are we on a roll, taking roll, role models, rolling the dice or just rolls of toilet paper?

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Toilet paper
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We worry about being fathers. We worry about being sons. About being employees and entrepreneurs. We worry about the things that we are and what we will never be. But I don’t care abut the roles we are prescribed or the ones that we take on over time.

Perhaps it is more important to be on a roll. It so happens that I am on one so that makes sense that I would hold it in higher esteem. In 200 days, I have asked questions and sought guidance. I have commented and collected. Not being done is the best part about being on a roll, too.

Taking roll was never my favorite part of teaching, but I do find it convenient now to see exactly when all of the people I have become are present. Every once in a while, I just look around the room to see if I am still here. As it turns out, I am.

And the role models: The ones I actually look up to are the ones that surprise me. I want those that do not fit into any role at all, other than that of interesting and passionate. For in those two things, I find that we are all fodder for progress.

I’m betting on consistency winning everyone over. I’m putting my future on the line because I promised myself that nothing would be too sacred to not let it ride one more time. This roll of the dice is special, even beautiful.

It is okay that people wipe themselves with what I care about. So long as they find it useful, I have done much of my work well. Now, only if I could get people to see just how clean these ideas will get you.

I am most a roll of toilet paper because everything else is too removed from the truth. If we do nothing else except for wipe away the worst excrement, then we will have fulfilled our role perfectly. The other rolls and roles don’t matter.

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Question 199 of 365: When do we stop asking for medicine and band-aids?

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A Band-Aid bandage
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I had a favorite medicine growing up called Triaminic. It was the wonder cure-all. Pretty much anything that was wrong could be fixed with a little Triaminic. It had this syrupy sweet cherry flavor that wasn’t overly thick. It didn’t have the aftertaste of a Robitussin or the fleeting quality of a Tylenol. It was what I asked for by name whenever I stayed home from school. It was an elixir, a special potion which could give me back both health and confidence with a single spoonful.

I eschewed band-aids, though. They were for kids that couldn’t handle the wonderful sensation of picking at a scab. I don’t know if my kids will ever know how much I loved to pick at the places on my elbows and knees that the sidewalk had found and rubbed up against only days before. They won’t know because they love band-aids. Every time they get hurt (and many times when they do not), they ask for a new band-aid. Many times we go through several for every cut. It is almost as if they continue to get hurt just so that they can get me to put the sticker with medicine on them. Almost.

They too are magic. Band-aids for my kids instantly turn crying into thanks. They instantly cause the world to once again be in its right place. My children find the littlest wound or oldest scab and find it detrimental to their continued play, but as soon as the Band-Aid enters the equation, there is silence. The smiles return and off they are, bounding through to the play room. They are ready for the next adventure because they got patched up.

At some point I stopped asking for Triaminic and my parents stopped offering. At some point, my children will too stop begging for hello kitty Band-Aids. These wonderful fixes will lose their luster. They will no longer be good enough. But, what is that point? How long can I keep the quick fixes in circulation. How long can I keep the illusion going that anything can be solved with a simple capful of medicine or a few easily removed adhesive tabs?

And once that simple trust in these remedies is broken, it is all we can do to try and get it back. I think that our entire lives are spent in figuring out ways to make Band-Aids and Triaminic work again. We search for quick results and a simple answer to the most complex professional and personal problems. We try the same things over and over in the hopes that some of the magic will return. We “sleep on” our biggest decisions as if the mere act of sleeping will somehow provide insight. We have recurring meetings as if the fact that getting the same people together will produce innovation. We make budgets as if the fictional numbers will somehow keep our wants in check.

I know that there is no cure-all. That it is all snake water and workarounds. I know that time and working toward a better life is the only medicine at all for the present. I’ll take them, but they taste much more bitter than my Triaminic ever did.

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Question 198 of 365: When is sleep inappropriate?

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GDR "village teacher" (a teacher tea...
Image via Wikipedia

I observed classrooms for years before I became a teacher. Sometimes I would observe the interaction between students or the way in which a teacher would discipline others. I would watch the passing of notes and the distracted looks of those who longed to be outside. I could see the worst anger boil up within a student who received a bad grade.

There is only so much you can watch, though, without taking part. You can’t sit back and watch alliances form without becoming a part of the warring factions. It doesn’t do to stay aloof, waiting for the discussion to come around to what you are interested in. But there are times when observation is your job, so you must. For the sake of objectivity, I would watch the teacher drone on and the students sit and stare.

This was how I observed myself to sleep.

I watched a facilitated discussion on a book that i had never read, and i slowly laid my head down on the teachers desk at the back of the room, pretending to read on my lap. This is a move I had perfected in middle school, but I had never used it as an adult. At least, not until I was under the drug of observation. It was the constant lull of disinterested students who were forced to speak about a book that they hadn’t read either that relaxed my muscles and lowered my eye lids.

I woke up and realized what I had done as the classroom was staring at me. I apologized and everyone laughed. I never felt so much like a kid as I did in that moment of being caught in my disinterest. And feeling like a kid without your permission is awful.

I am not okay with observing myself to sleep anymore. I’m not okay with letting a situation be responsible for my stupor. I’m not okay with being disinterested in life to the point of losing conciousness.

I obsessively participate. I wring out experiences until there is nothing left. I pluck every moment and listen as my life screams with pain and pleasure and hope and failure.

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