Lightning in a Bottle

I just received another heart-warming story forwarded to me through email. I’m always kind of skeptical about anything like this, so I go to a website called Snopes (I have no idea where the name comes from) to see if they’re real. They have a huge, well-researched and constantly-updated database of emailed stories, the vast majority of which are either hoaxes, misunderstandings, or just confused. I strongly recommend visiting the site before forwarding any message, picture, or alert that you receive in email. (By the way, if an email starts off with “This is not a hoax!!”, you can be 99.99% sure that it is.)

This story was in the database, and interestingly enough, it’s true. Sort of. The version I was sent had been edited from the original. In the actual story, the setting of the story is a Jewish school, and the boy profiled is named Shaya. In the version I received, all references to the nature of the school have been removed, and the boy’s name has been changed to Shay. There are a variety of other subtle changes as well. Apparently, somebody in the email chain somewhere decided to edit out all the “Jewishness” from the story. Oh, and they had the boy die in the end, which didn’t happen in real life, either.

Why was the story altered? Was it an innocent attempt to broaden the appeal of the story, or was it an anti-semitic alteration to avoid anything that smacked of Jews? Nobody knows, but it’s kind of disturbing, nonetheless.

I feel like our weblog here is sort of a second-class effort because we don’t have a comments function. Sadly, we turned it off last year because we had an absolute flood of spam comments. Even more sadly, the ratio of real comments to spam was about 1 to 3,000. (I am not making this up!)

So, does it really matter for this weblog? If anyone reading these thinks it would be helpful to get comments up and running again, send me an email at cmcquinn (at) psesd.org. If I don’t hear anything from anyone, I won’t worry about it. Of course, I’ll also begin to worry that I’m talking to myself, and that my life is reflected in this delightful cartoon!

John Cleese (yes, that John Cleese) wrote an interesting column for the December issue of Edutopia magazine from the George Lucas Foundation. Called Hare Brain, Tortoise Mind, he talks about how creative thinking not only isn’t a quick process, it is almost necessarily a slow process. The conditions for it seem to run counter to our current business and educational models.

I worry about the role that technology plays in this as well. How many of us keep our mental time chock full of email, web pages, music, television, and other easy media distractions? Our brains really do need some down time, and not just when we’re asleep. I’ve made a habit over the last year of not reading or listening to any news stories in the morning getting ready or going to work. (I have been reading webcomics, but I’m trying to stop that, too.) I’m trying to have at least one period during the day when I cut down the too-available distractions and just let my mind have a chance to process.

Even my tech-savvy daughter mentioned the idea of buying a desktop next time she bought a computer, because she felt like the laptop’s portability was giving it too much control over her life. At least she’s thinking about it.

Hmmm. When the kids were little, we used to do something called “old-fashioned night.” Everything electrical but the refrigerator was shut off, and we built a fire in the fireplace and lit candles and kerosene lamps for light. We either read books or played board games. I think I’m going to try to do that again, even if just for myself. I need to let my tortoise mind out of the cage for awhile.

We lost both of my in-laws in the last three months, and have started the difficult process of sorting through their belongings. My mother-in-law was a natural archivist, and there is a huge trove of family memorabilia that we have been slowly working through. It’s both comforting and sad as we look through years of photographs, letters, clippings, and other treasures.

It also reinforces my disquiet with our increasingly digital world. Here in these folders are letters, cards, and notes from friends and family members, many long since gone. Where will the cell phone calls, emails, and instant messages be for future generations to look through?

There is a deeper connection with the materials as well. There are photo albums put together by my wife’s grandfather, going back to his college days one hundred years ago. They have his hand-written notes by each image. When I hold that book in my hands, I touch the pages that he touched. It’s somehow not the same looking at an image on the screen of the computer.

My father-in-law was captured in the fall of the Philippines in World War II, and survived the Bataan Death March. His father kept a spare daily journal, and we have the 1945 volume. Every day after the end of the war in early August he wrote a brief comment, often about waiting for some word about whether his son was still alive. The tone of the comments grew increasingly frustrated as the weeks dragged on with no word. Finally, in late September (six weeks after the end of the war!) he received a telegram from his son in Manila, telling the family he was ok and on the way home.

As I read his joyous words in the journal, I am keenly aware that I hold the very book that he held as he wrote them. Even though he died before my wife was even born, I feel a sense of connection to her grandfather. I will never get that same sense of connection from reading an email.

This isn’t to say that I will stop using email, or weblogging, or instant messaging. I haven’t the will power to stop! What I am going to try to do is more “analog” stuff - cards, notes, and letters. I want to keep clear on the choices I make for communicating, and what I gain or lose through my choices. And I want to make my kids aware of it as well.

There’s so much I love about this story at so many levels! (Warning, though - very slow loading page.)

Amesbury High School has a 3-D computer animation program. Cool! The students work together to create their movie. Very cool! The topic of the movie is suggested by a local elementary school librarian to target their students. Cooler still! The world premiere is held at the elementary school, for kindergarten kids with their 4th-grade buddy classroom, which is, of course, is totally cool.

Cooperation, teamwork, project-based, real audience, cross-age working with cross-age, the list just goes on. All wrapped around a use of technology that allows creativity and storytelling in a way that can’t be done without technology.

I want to go work there. I guess I’d better Google “Amesbury” and find out where that is.

One of the technologies I’ve grown very fond of this fall is del.icio.us. Once you set up an account on this site (that name is pretty cute, huh?), you can store your bookmarks there. Since they’re stored on a website, you can access them from anywhere. As a person that uses multiple computers, I find this a pretty keen thing. Even better, you can “tag” your bookmarks with key terms and they are sorted by those terms.

But what really makes it powerful is that the bookmarks are open to other people. So, if I wanted to share with someone all of the web pages that I have referred to in my weblog, I could give them one url: del.icio.us/cmcquinn/weblog (no www at the beginning).

Now if you follow the link, you’ll find over thirty web pages I’ve stored with the intent of writing about them here. If you read this blog with the spotty regularity it is published, you’ll also notice you don’t recognize some of the articles. Ok, I meant to write about them.

I will be using this for all my presentations from now on as well. I can group all of my references into one spot (say, del.icio.us/cmcquinn/ncce06) and give participants one simple url to find everything. Sweet!

There’s only one fly in the ointment. Twice now in the last week, del.icio.us has been offline. And when it’s offline, the bookmarks simply don’t exist. I have a lot of bookmarks I’ve stored in there over the last few months, and it gets kind of scary when they suddenly aren’t there. (I just learned how to export those bookmarks as a standalone file, just in case.)

Still, the functionality of this service (and similar ones, such as furl) is worth the potential hassle. I love being freed from being tied to just the one computer, or not knowing which computer has the bookmark you’re searching for.

Every once in awhile, I have an experience that illustrates why some people shouldn’t be involved in designing technology. One of the latest involved a camcorder. My son has taken an interest in creating videos of his online videogame exploits to share with his friends. Being the techie sort of guy that I am, I knew how to hook up the digital camcorder to accept analog video and audio, and how to navigate down into the obscure menus to enable the camera to actually receive the analog input. After a couple of minutes of cabling and camera tweaking, my son and I can see and hear Halo 2 on the camcorder screen. Success!

Oops, not quite. The camera will display the signal, but it won’t record. Hmm. Maybe it’s because we’re in “VCR” mode. So we flip the switch to “Camera” mode, and yes indeed, recording works. But the analog signal won’t display. No problem, I think, and again visit the obscure menus to enable the analog input. The menus are identical to the VCR mode with one single exception - the option to turn on the analog input.

I spent a good ten minutes switching back and forth between the two modes, exploring every menu option and pressing every conceivable button on the camera. No matter what I do, I can’t record the analog signal. This is particularly maddening because I’ve done it before. What am I missing?

Finally, I resort to the most unthinkable of options. I get out the manual. And there it is, on page 89 - to enable recording of an analog signal, I have to use the remote. The little, stinking credit-card size remote which I have no other use for and (of course) can’t find. Finally, after much hunting, we find that my daughter has it in her camera bag at school. The next day she comes home for a visit, and brings the remote.

So what do we need the remote for? To push the “pause” button. Once the “pause” button is pressed on the remote, then you press the “play” button on the camcorder to start recording. That’s it - you only need the stupid remote to press one button to enable a function that has every other control built into the camera itself.

I have to believe that some engineer somewhere had an actual reason to do this. Maybe it’s to prevent accidentally recording onto a tape while playing back in VCR mode. Still, it reminds me of many frustrating experiences trying to help teachers hook up VGA converters to VCRs or televisions, only to find that to enable the video-in function on the TV or VCR required the use of the remote, which either a) was lost long ago, or b) is locked away somewhere for safekeeping, or c) has dead batteries and there are no batteries to be found in the school.

So, when you’re shopping for video-related equipment , add one more thing to your list of criteria. Whether it’s a television, VCR, DVD-player or videocamera, make certain that there are no important functions that can’t be controlled from the device itself without using a remote. Believe me, you’ll be glad you did.