Challenging prose to work through (examples below). BTW, the library now has An Infinite Jest, but OMG!!!! it’s 1,104 pages long! Perhaps I’ll recover enough from supposedly to tackle it.

Anyway, here are some of my favorite passages in all their resplendent density.

On television and U.S. fiction:
“For those U.S. writers whose ganglia were formed pre-TV, those who are big on neither Duchamp nor Paz and who lack the oracular foresight of a DeLillo, the mimetic deployment of pop-culture icons seems at best an annoying tic and at worst a dangerous vapidity that compromises fiction’s seriousness by dating it out of the Platonic Always where it ought to reside.” p. 43
Huh? wtf?
“Parodic meditations on the boundaryless flux of televisual monoculture?” p. 78
woof. 3 new words in one quick phrase?

On Mark Leyner’s “My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist”:
“[I]n the absence of any credible, noncommercial guides for living, the freedom to chose is about as “liberating” as a bad acid trip: each quantum is as good as the next, and the only standard of a particular construct’s quality is its weirdness, incongruity, its ability to stand out from a crowd of other image-constructs and wow some Audience.” p. 79
Sure.

On taking a cruise – 7 nights, 8 days in the Caribbean (7NC in travel agent parlance):
“What I myself observed was that the Nadir was one very tight ship, run by an elite cadre of very hard-ass Greek officers and supervisors, and that the preterite staff lived in mortal terror of these Greek bosses who watched them with enormous beadiness at all times, and that the crew worked almost Dickensianly hard, too hard to feel truly cheery about it. My sense was that Cheeriness was up there with Celerity and Servility on the clipboarded evaluation sheets the Greek bosses were constantly filling out on them: when they didn’t know any guests were looking, a lot of the workers had the kind of pinched weariness about them that one associates with low-paid service employees in general, plus fear. My sense was that a crewman could get fired for a pretty small lapse, and that getting fired by these Greek officers might well involve a spotlessly shined shoe in the ass and then a really long swim.” p. 266
Now THAT’S good writing! “enormous beadiness” – sweet!

Also very important was F.W. Murnau’s use of shadow and contrast in Faust (1926). Murnau shot scenes with two cameras and shot them more than once and then chose the version that made the greatest contrast:

But The Third Man is the best. The scenes of Vienna still show some of the damage of the war. The streets are always wet. The play of light is magical:

For me the film evokes special emotion because my visits to Vienna in the early 1980s. Memories return of walking the steps below St. Ruprecht’s Church or the paths and roads of the Zentralfriedhof:

In the age of Avatar, what might the equivalent of such black and white contrasts be?

This project appears still to be in its early stages. When I do searches, I am surprised at the uneven distribution of items. For some there was much. For others there was less than I would have expected. Still, I think this is a promising innovation.

First, some of the scandals. He has a peculiar relationship with a teenage girl from Naples, Noemi Letzia, who calls him “Papi.” Is she his illegitimate daughter or one of his lovers? Says his wife, Veronica Letizia: “I wish she was his daughter.”  The wife has publically asked for a divorce. Then there were the photographs of a party with topless women and pantless male politicians at his pleasure palace on Sardinia. And call girls show up at parties in the presidential palace in Rome. For sixteen years he has been fighting legal charges of corruption, bribery, and ties to organized crime. He had gotten Senate and Chamber of Deputies to pass a law giving him immunity while he was still in office, but last October Italy’s highest court threw the law out.

Now comes the role of media. On December 5, 350,000 Italians attended a “No to Berlusconi Day in Rome. The defenders of Berlusconi said the few newspapers and magazines that dared criticize Berlusconi had created “a climate of hate.” Berlusconi owned television stations, radio stations, and newspapers launched character attacks on his critics. In response parliament passed another law to protect him from prosecution. His poll numbers remains high even as he appoints attractive showgirls to government positions. Probably the most important thing that Berlusconi media do is to make sure that many Italians never hear about the scandals. He has bragged, “Don’t you realize that something does not exist—not an idea, a politician or a product—unless it is on television.” The one area of media that Berlusconi does not control is new media, but so far his critics have not been able to use these effectively. Meanwhile Italian-Swedish director Erik Gandini has made a documentary about all this called “Videocracy.” AP has written of it: “Take a sex scandal, add scantily clad women in a culture where television lies at the nexus of power and politics, and the result is SEX, THIGHS AND VIDEOCRACY.” I’ve got to see it.

On a personal note I have to say that I still feel like an alien in the new world. I was not born in it. I have spent over fifty years in a book (Gutenbreg) world. I cannot and do not want to leave it entirely. I take some encouragement from the model of Homer and the Bible. There oral tradition became written tradition. Maybe something analogous can happen as we move forward. I would buy a Kindl if I had a few extra bucks.

Thank you, guys. When I was… I was nine and I asked my dad, “Can I have your movie camera? That old, wind-up 8 millimeter camera that was in your drawer?” And he goes, “Sure, take it.” And I took it and I started making movies with it and I started being as creative as I could, and never once in my life did my parents ever say, “What you’re doing is a waste of time.” Never. And I grew up, I had teachers, I had colleagues, I had people that I worked with all through my life who always told me what you’re doing is not a waste of time. So that was normal to me that it was OK to do that. I know there are kids out there that don’t have that support system so if you’re out there and you’re listening, listen to me: If you want to be creative, get out there and do it. It’s not a waste of time. Do it. OK? Thank you. Thank you.
Michael Giacchino (“Up”), Achievement in Music Written for Motion Pictures (Original Score)

First off – kudos to Gardner for being the major contributor to a nice little article about technology at Baylor and TSTC in today’s (3/8/10) Waco Tribune-Herald, found here. Great comments, and a superb plug for the Educational Technology Showcase coming up the first week of April. I hope everyone is signing up for a presentation or poster session (here’s the call for proposals). WTG, Gardner!

Here’s a nice little story that begins to illuminate the power of blogging for me. A few weeks ago, I mentioned the lipdub genre, noting in particular the work of Lawrence High School.

A few days later, I received this email:

Hi Tim,
My name is Jeff Kuhr and I’m the film/media teacher at Lawrence High School in Lawrence, Kansas. I just wanted to write and thank you for posting our lip dub of Kim Wilde’s “Kids in America” and for your wonderful description of it. The students, as I’m sure you can guess, worked extremely hard on it and beyond words proud of it–and the response it’s received from across the country. It is because of all this that it makes me sad to have to write and let you know that yesterday our amazing video was horrifically hacked by some students from the other high school here in Lawrence.

Obviously, my students (and myself) were/are devestated–particularly because the video was so joyous and showed a side of high school I think we all want to believe is still possible. Anyway, we had to reupload our video with a new url (meaning, we lost all our comments and views–130,000 before the hack). I’m hoping, I guess, that you can repost the video with the new url, so that at the very least people have an opportunity to see the video (again) and even if it’s just for 31/2 minutes, have a moment of happiness.

Anyway, here’s the new link.

Let’s see if we can’t surpass our original view count…
Thank you, Tim–from all of us.

Jeff Kuhr
Lawrence High School Film/Media Teacher

Oh my gosh!!!! The teacher found my blog and wrote me! WTF??? I’m amazed, and touched. I start to get it – this (blogging, or more generally – public commentary) is read, searched, and noticed. Holy Cow!!!

So I write back:

Jeff –

Thank you very much for writing. I’ve made the change to the URL to point to the proper version. Shame on those who hacked the first one!

I was thrilled to find your video. It was fun and enormously affirming. The skill, cooperation, and joy of making it were all wonderfully evident. I was so glad to see that disparate groups in a high school could come together to do something so creative and positive. Made me smile and cry at the same time.

Thanks to you, I’ve caught the interest of the faculty new media seminar that I’m in. We’re enjoying the meaning of students as creators of content, and the power of social media to spread opportunity for participation to the world. VERY cool stuff!!!

Congratulations to you and the students of Lawrence High School for creating something so wonderful, enjoyable, and meaningful. Keep up the good work! You’re inspiring more people than you know.

Sincerely,
Tim Logan
Assistant Vice President
Electronic Library
Baylor University
Tim_Logan@baylor.edu

P.S. I’ll watch the video multiple times to make sure the hit count gets back up to where it should be!
P.P.S. Here’s the link that I found your video from: http://www.parentdish.com/2010/02/19/lipdub-videos-show-high-schoolers-directorial-chops/

And then receive this in response:

Thanks so much for your kind words and reposting the link. As I said in my note to you, my students are extremely proud of the work they did and I’m sure when I pass on your comments to them, they’ll be extremely pleased–and honored.
Best from Lawrence,
Jeff

Jeff Kuhr
Lawrence High School
Film/Media

How astonishing.

I hope the kids at Lawrence High School continue to get it. They’re already leading the way.

I agree in principle that we who work in education should be able to describe what we intend to do, and that it is important that we find a way to demonstrate to what extent we have met those goals.

But that principle is a principle of almost unimaginable complexity.

Rather than proliferate crude measures of recall or reductive “normed” evaluations of various templated essays, we should think much more deeply and comprehensively about assessment. To do this, we’ll have to start with what it means not only to learn something in the sense of committing it to memory, vital as that is, but also to understand it, to be able to sense and articulate and share the structure of that knowledge as well as the conjectures and dilemmas that surround it and propel it into new areas of inquiry. We need to think about domain transfer, and ask what kind of learning fosters the analogical and metaphorical thinking that leads to conceptual breakthroughs. We need to think about the teacher’s theory of other minds, as well as the students’. We need to master strategies of indirection that empower each other to imagine and perform what Douglas Hofstadter calls “perceptual regrouping,” that trick of the mind that can perform figure-ground reversals, separate sequences into smaller groups to yield new possibilities, and adapt Polya-esque heuristics to apparently novel situations to reveal surprising connections with apparently far-flung domains.

I have colleagues working as hard as they can to answer the need for complexity. I just hope their work can stem the tide of unthinking “learning outcomes assessment” that Jonathan Kozol pillories in Letters to a Young Teacher.

I really, truly do not think that Likert scales or uniform tests or other simplistic measures are up to the task of helping us map or understand this most profound practice we call “education,” by which I take it we mean a deliberate approach to learning, part of which must include learning about one’s own learning. In other words, the deliberate practice of leading another’s cognition into a richer and more effective relationship with itself.

Of empowering and advancing the brain’s self-shaping capabilities.

I don’t have answers, but I do have a deep intuition that we can best think about this kind of complexity by thinking about similar networks of complexity that have emerged in human experience. (Here’s where I wish I’d majored in anthropology.) There are two such networks I think about a lot these days: language, particularly written language, and the Internet. In this podcast, which records a presentation I did over a year ago at an EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative annual meeting at the invitation of my hero, friend, and colleague Chuck Dziuban, I try to think about assessment by thinking about the emergent properties of the World Wide Web. It seems to me very interesting that a big part of Web 2.0 has to do with assessment, evaluation, reviews, and so forth. Is there a way these emergent phenomena could suggest more comprehensive, inclusive, and meaningful modes of assessing learning? I don’t know, but I do think it’s a question worth asking.

Longtime listeners will hear some familiar themes in this podcast, but cast in a different light. The Shakespeare bits develop some ideas I first began to work on in the “Proof That Matters” talk I did for a K-12 Online Conference a few months before I did this talk. All the ideas here need a great deal more development. I do hope, however, that they’re moving in a more answerable direction than most of the assessment talk I’ve encountered during the last few years.

EDIT: Janet Hawkins alerts me to some parallel thoughts:

http://doyle-scienceteach.blogspot.com/2010/03/rttt-antithetical-to-public-education.html
https://www.blogger.com/comment.g?blogID=4956989639073843954&postID=3538222791054286821