Elisabeth shows she is a Geeks Gone Wild Girl, playing with a notebook from Gnomedex 4.0 (picked up at a blogger meetup last fall).
To create the presentation I will be giving at Gnomedex 5.0 in Seattle seven weeks from Friday, I am starting with the talk I gave at Northern Voice titled Making Masks: Blogging as Social Tool and Family Lifestyle (partial list of reviews in this post) and adding two sets of changes.
First, I am compiling the critiques I received after Northern Voice and attempting to incorporate the recommendations that were made (for example here and here). If you have feedback for me, please comment below or email me harrowme AT yahoo.com – I would like to hear from anyone who can help me improve!
At Gnomedex I have thirty minutes for my presentation, so I will need to change my talk to fit the time. Probably the last third of the Northern Voice version will be shortened in order to accommodate my allotment.
I’m looking forward to speaking at Gnomedex. Writing my talk is a fun exercise in creativity. My presentation is a representation of me, with pictures and examples from our family life. I share how each of us, including our children, started blogging, and how I determine which aspects of our private life to make public. It’s a story made of stories.
What other bloggers have shared on their journey has played a part in my own story and in my talk. I’ve assembled a collection of quotes and I try to bookmark and tag them in del.icio.us. At Gnomedex I may not be able to share as many quotes or as lengthy quotes as I did at Northern Voice but I have still been influenced and encouraged by many bloggers as I’ve studied issues and examples of identity, community and privacy.
Here are a few examples:
We are aching for the real. – Evelyn Rodriguez.l
Nyakehu
As an African woman, who happens to be Kenyan too as an added bonus I know that this is a place where I can talk until the cows come home and will continue when even they are brought out for milking at dawn. You know that thing of where as a woman you are not supposed to talk much and the nice woman is one who defers to the man and let him talk you to death…. Well as a blogger the opinionated woman is capable of holding her own…
Nancy White’s How Some Folks Have Tried to Describe Community – Update 2005 contained a number of insightful quotes including this one
And again from M. Scott Peck, “If we are going to use the word meaningfully [community] we must restrict it to a group of individuals who have learned how to communicate honestly with each other, whose relationships go deeper than their masks of composure, and who have developed some significant commitment to “rejoice together, mourn together,” and to “delight in each other, make others’ conditions our own.” (The Different Drum: Community Making and Peace by M. Scott Peck M.D.)
Dan Pacheco:
I eventually came to the conclusion that a community is not defined by its focus or features, but rather by the people who participate and how they use it. I now believe that anything — whether it be online, in print, on a cell phone, or in some other medium — that connects people with each other is a community tool, and if the people who use it meet each other through it, they are by virtue of that fact “a community.”
In the post Blog: Geek Clique or Soapbox Confessional? amba pondered the line between public and private:
This makes me think about how I feel guilty and embarrassed in one way when I blog about personal stuff, and in another way when I don’t. [snip] …It’s a no-win situation, or maybe I just haven’t quite struck the balance that feels right to me yet. I tend to lurch from one extreme to the other. One way, I feel faintly exhibitionistic (and like I am exhibiting others, such as my husband, without their consent). The other way I feel masked and faintly phony.
Danny Miller’s post on five realizations of blogging is a favorite of mine:
You Can Find the Family That Abandoned You at Birth. What I love most about the blogosphere is its far-reaching tentacles and how you can hook up with like-minded or at least similarly obsessed people. I have become addicted to a bunch of blogs (see list at right) that I simply must read every day and I have to keep reminding myself that I never met most of these people.
I also appreciated his comments describing the effect blogging has had on his marriage:The first time she asked me to delete something I flew into a self-righteous fit. “How dare you censor me! What’s the point of having a blog if I can’t freely write about my life without worrying that you’re going to be upset? You are stifling my creativity, why don’t I just delete the whole blog?â€.
Reynolds detailed How To Blog And Not Lose Your Job:
A lot of people won’t like being written about – I mean, the Internet is full of freaks and weirdos right? Who’d want any details of their life on the ‘inter-web super-info-highway’ so just about anyone can read intimate details about them? If you are going to write about other people, then anonymise them. How you do this depends on the style of your blog, do you give them all nicknames, refer to them as initials or call them ‘one of my workmates’? If you do give people nicknames, remember – they may well find out about it, and while calling your boss ‘SmellyGit’ may not be a sack-able offence, it may well have a negative effect on your chances of a future promotion.
Through Susan Mernit, I discovered Anastasia Goodstein’s YPulse with many insights into teens such as these statistics:
“…Half of the country’s teenagers would rather open up and discuss their feelings with a blog than with their parents.
Mary at Be lazy, go crazy ended her post with a quote on how we create and define our own identity:
A person’s identity is not to be found in behaviour, nor – important though this is – in the reactions of others, but in the capacity to keep a particular narrative going. The individual’s biography, if she is to maintain regular interaction with others in the day-to-day world, cannot be wholly fictive. It must continually integrate events which occur in the external world, and sort them into the ongoing ‘story’ about the self.’ (Giddens 1991: 54)
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Perhaps I’ll write a bibliography containing links to blog posts that were integrated and influential to my talk. At the moment though I wanted to give a glimpse into my Gnomedex presentation process. Hope to see you there!
The box has been in the house for months and yesterday I encouraged the girls to try making something with Snap Circuits. When the light bulb turned on, Abigail’s face lit up too. I didn’t think it would happen! She stared at it for a while, amazed. Soon the girls were all addicted to circuits. Abigail, with help of Michaela, assembled the next two examples in the book. Elisabeth didn’t want to take a nap and miss the rest. The motor spinning a fan was fun. When the switch was turned off, the red circle of fan sometimes decided to fly on its own, whirling a foot or two into the air once in Ted’s office. We all laughed. The girls, proud of their creations, wanted to show Ted, marching into his office, circuit board in hand. Abigail also made a circuit that played Happy Birthday with a whistle chip controlled by clapping or touch. Then Michaela wanted to make one by herself so I helped her. She did a short cut from her sister’s but it wasn’t a short circuit.
The Snap Circuit kit is great. We have another 98 experments to try. If I remember correctly, I have to thank Katherine for her recommendation. I wish the diagram book had more explanations describing the way electricity and circuits work. It’s been a while since I’ve studied them and I don’t remember making physical representations with light bulbs and sound, although I’m sure I did at least once or twice in my education. In a sense, these are my first circuits too. I’m enjoying learning along with my girls as we put the pieces together and make connections outside and inside ourselves. Soon we’ll have a veritable circuit city….
I believe in taking responsibility for my own actions. So I know it is not truly Doc Searls’ fault that our spicy soup for dinner last (Monday) night developed another burned flavor, bits of black mixed among the vegetables. Just large pieces of wild rice, yeah, that’s what I told the family: Add some Tabasco.
the blame game
No, if I blame anyone I should blame blogger Chris O’Donnell. I was playing the dangerous game of browse-the-aggregator-for-a-moment-while-dinner-is-warming when I spied his post from yesterday. The partial feed was too tantalizing to ignore:Doc Searls connects open source, Microsoft, home education and Gatto I couldn’t wait to read what Doc had written. While the aggregator retrieved, the soup burned…
Later last night, while the pan was soaking and the kids were sleeping, I returned to read Getting Flat, Part 2 from Linux Journal. Doc’s piece, with references to works by Thomas Friedman and John Taylor Gatto hit me with its truth immediately, in a way that soaks into the soul. Although I had other duties that needed to get done last night, I wanted to post on it ASAP. While I sorted through piles of papers and evaluated bills, Doc’s words continued to cook in my mind (maybe even burn?!).
I have to say it now
Doc’s piece impacted me enough that I am willing to reveal something I’ve been reluctant to write on this blog in the past. He begins with a critique of Microsoft’s belief in the bell curve.
What’s wrong here isn’t simply the focus on Microsoft in a country where open source is a huge phenomenon. It’s that both Tom and Microsoft continue to believe IQ tests are important ways to measure citizens in a flat world. Because if there’s one thing the world is flattening fast, it’s the old caste system we call The Bell Curve.
Although I’ve never worked at Microsoft, I may be able to understand part of the company’s culture and values. Why? I attended the same high school founders Bill Gates and Paul Allen did. Lakeside was the only school where Bill G received a diploma, dropping out of Harvard after a year. It’s been called the Ivy League high school of the west coast, or something similiar, and the brick-and-ivy campus in north Seattle as well as the tuition of close to $30k a year, only encourage the comparison. To survive the competitive admission process, kids must score well on exams and demonstrate talents.
a reputation and an identity
School shapes us. The reason I haven’t mentioned Lakeside by name on this blog is because it has a reputation. My mom sent me there after years of frustration with public education, thinking it would be best for me. I wasn’t a typical student: I commuted miles across towns each morning on metro buses and received loads of financial aid. Although I’m biased as an alum, I’d guess that Lakeside School has two prominent associations in people’s minds: if you went to Lakeside, you must be wealthy and smart, in an elite way.
So Microsoft’s use of IQ tests or emphasis on the word “smart” doesn’t surprise me. Lakeside kids, which Gates and Allen still are somewhere inside, as we all are still children – can start attending the school in fifth grade, at age 10, and grow up in a culture where intelligence becomes identity. Why are we all at this school? Because we’re smart. It’s an identity that requires significant investment, both financial and otherwise, so it reinforces itself out of necessity.
I am thankful
Lakeside did provide me with a challenging academic education. Teachers at the school played important support roles in my life when I needed other adults to care for me. For those two factors I am grateful. The private school helped me survive adolescence, mentally and emotionally. I also became active as a runner on sports teams, developing physical abilities I wouldn’t have discovered if had I stayed in a larger school.
But Lakeside is also a culture – or at least it was a culture – that emphasized the belief in the elite, rather than belief in everyone. With words the school may say otherwise, but de facto, by definition, it values intelligence that can be measured on tests, prizing and thereby preserving belief in the tip of the bell curve. Doc described how he hated being judged as a child in school:
I hated being judged in school, right from the start. In fact, I hated being in school at all. In kindergarten I’d stare at the window and wish I could leave. The teacher sent me to the “thinking chair” repeatedly for not paying attention. I remember wondering what I was supposed to be thinking about. In first grade they put me in the slow reading group, because I was uncomfortable reading out loud. I could read; but for me reading Dick and Jane out loud was torture. And the sweet suburban sentiments of the books only made me wish I was out playing rather than cooped up in a classroom.
A school like Lakeside requires judgment – how else to determine who can be admitted? How else to prepare kids to excel at further judgments that happen in the system from SATs to MCATs?
A school that requires significant investment, financial and otherwise, can not help but become incorporated into family values, values the children absorb easily during their early years of education, values they will promote and pass on later in adult life as they create corporations.
what is IQ?
In his critique of Microsoft, Doc then quoted classic Gatto …genius is as common as dirt… and wrote
Here’s an undeniable fact: nobody has an IQ. Tests that measure IQ aren’t thermometers or dipsticks, despite the quantitative implications of “quotient”. They’re merely bunches of questions. You might answer them well on one day and poorly on another, without being smarter or dumber at either point in time.
Ted and I have been arguing over our children’s education recently. I wonder whether someday they might return to the school system and I worry whether I should prepare them for exams. I’m concerned that they wouldn’t be able to pass the right tests and swim in the system. When I give our kids a workbook, sometimes they don’t know what to do. They can draw in their journals, plan experiments, shape paper into three-dimensions, analyze stories and write their own tales. They can invent and create but they don’t know much about multiple choice and playing the testing games. Yet if Ted and I trained our children how to take a test and excel at it, would they be intelligent? What is intelligence? Although I’m concerned for my kids, wanting them to thrive in the world, I don’t believe tests measure much. My arguments with my husband however reveal that somewhere inside I still believe in the system, or that surviving it is important.
no need to fit in the new flat world
Doc continued
I say all this because it’s clear to me–and probably to Tom Friedman, too–that the flat new world isn’t big on fitting. Here we reward differences. We value uniqueness, creativity, innovation, initiative, resourcefulness. Every patch to the software in the server that brings you this essay was created by somebody different, with something different to contribute. Yes, a meritocracy is involved. But I can assure you it has nothing to do with grades or IQ tests. It has to do with quality of code and with the virtues that produce it, only some of which are fostered in school.
Despite being married to Ted, I can’t claim to be an open source expert, yet I agree with these values. Also this great quote:
Work matters, but curiosity matters more. Nobody works harder at learning than a curious kid.
Curiousity kept the kid alive
Our desire to preserve our childrens’ organic curiosity plays a large part in our desire to homeschool. Too often the school system crushes curiousity out of a kid. Kids have a natural desire to learn. It emerges almost from birth, with tiny hands and feet eager to crawl around corners and open cupboards. Boys and girls are happy to explore and discover, to dig deeper in the garden dirt, to walk further into the woods, to scribble songs on construction paper scraps, to pour salt and pepper into water glasses at the restaurant, to pick up slugs and rocks in the garden.
Yet often, as Doc described happening in his own life, by the time the educational system has finished with the child, the child has finished with education. Learning has become boring. Often it becomes a game of passing tests and pleasing teachers. Education seems disillusioning or irrelevant. One size doesn’t fit all: the system of uniformity leaves behind painful blisters, so to speak, on the mind and soul. Ted and I believe in discipline. There are times to do what one doesn’t want to do. We have structure. But I also believe in giving children the freedom to explore with scissors and glue, shovel and microscope, to stare at ants or birds or stars without any specific purpose, without a box to check or lesson to fulfill, only an imagination to satisfy.
We want our kids to keep that creative spark and let it burst into flame. We want them to develop initiative and resourcefulness, to learn how to teach themselves and pursue passions. We want each child to be who she was made to be, not someone stuck into a mold and squeezed but someone unique and confident, able to contribute to the world in her own ways.
Despite our occasional disagreements, Ted and I agree on his statement I want my girls to be ready to thrive in the flat new world..
There’s much more to Doc’s piece but I’m out of time and have a pot to scrub: please read.
Also read Ted’s Doc spills the beans on Open Source and Homeschooling.
Coincidentally, I happened to write part of this post while listening to Kayne West’s The College Dropout (an album which I requested from the library, out of curiousity, months ago when Grammy nominations were announced) – some fascinating relevant lyrics floating past me that I wish I could quote.
Other education related pieces:
Amanda Witt on Socialization. Years ago when Abigail was a baby, I read David Guterson’s Family Matters. I remember how he answered the socialization question, describing his children’s interactions with people of all ages, having tea with a British neighbor and also spending time with a Japanese friend, learning about World War II from both of their perspectives. The idea of spending enormous quantities of time with people the exact age as oneself is artificial, I believe, and dangerous, promoting conformity (and feeding the marketing machine). Building relationships with people across generations builds community and diversity.
The island where we live will soon have a vote on a tech levy. Cathy Nickum at Bainbridge Buzz responding to intense critique of her published questions, observed that education is about loving the questions. Yes, more and more I am learning to ask and love questions. Our two-year-old is learning to ask questions too. We hope she never stops.
