Artichoke's Wunderkammern

Muddying titles and Charlie Chaplin's Speech in "The Great Dictator (1940)

Charlie Chaplin's Speech in "The Great Dictator (1940) Mixed with "Time" by Hans Zimmer from the "Inception" soundtrack.

Quote:

  

General Schulz: Speak - it is our only hope.

The Jewish Barber (Charlie Chaplin): I'm sorry but I don't want to be an emperor. That's not my business. I don't want to rule or conquer anyone. I should like to help everyone if possible; Jew, Gentile, black men, white. We all want to help one another. Human beings are like that. We want to live by each others' happiness, not by each other's misery. We don't want to hate and despise one another. In this world there is room for everyone. And the good earth is rich and can provide for everyone. The way of life can be free and beautiful, but we have lost the way.

Greed has poisoned men's souls; has barricaded the world with hate; has goose-stepped us into misery and bloodshed. We have developed speed, but we have shut ourselves in. Machinery that gives abundance has left us in want. Our knowledge as made us cynical; our cleverness, hard and unkind. We think too much and feel too little. More than machinery we need humanity. More than cleverness, we need kindness and gentleness. Without these qualities, life will be violent and all will be lost. The aeroplane and the radio have brought us closer together. The very nature of these inventions cries out for the goodness in man; cries out for universal brotherhood; for the unity of us all.

Even now my voice is reaching millions throughout the world, millions of despairing men, women, and little children, victims of a system that makes men torture and imprison innocent people. To those who can hear me, I say "Do not despair." The misery that is now upon us is but the passing of greed, the bitterness of men who fear the way of human progress. The hate of men will pass, and dictators die, and the power they took from the people will return to the people. And so long as men die, liberty will never perish.

Soldiers! Don't give yourselves to brutes, men who despise you and enslave you; who regiment your lives, tell you what to do, what to think and what to feel! Who drill you, diet you, treat you like cattle, use you as cannon fodder! Don't give yourselves to these unnatural men---machine men with machine minds and machine hearts! You are not machines! You are not cattle! You are men! You have a love of humanity in your hearts! You don't hate! Only the unloved hate; the unloved and the unnatural.

Soldiers! Don't fight for slavery! Fight for liberty! In the seventeenth chapter of St. Luke, it’s written “the kingdom of God is within man”, not one man nor a group of men, but in all men! In you! You, the people, have the power, the power to create machines, the power to create happiness! You, the people, have the power to make this life free and beautiful, to make this life a wonderful adventure. Then in the name of democracy, let us use that power.

Let us all unite. Let us fight for a new world, a decent world that will give men a chance to work, that will give youth a future and old age a security. By the promise of these things, brutes have risen to power. But they lie! They do not fulfill their promise. They never will! Dictators free themselves but they enslave the people! Now let us fight to fulfill that promise! Let us fight to free the world! To do away with national barriers! To do away with greed, with hate and intolerance! Let us fight for a world of reason, a world where science and progress will lead to all men’s happiness.

Soldiers, in the name of democracy, let us all unite!

Why do I post this?

This video is a powerful example of new forms of collaborative authorship afforded by new media.  I have always liked the new ways of looking at collaboration and authorship used to communicate new ideas provided by Lev Manovich’s take on new media in the early 2000’s - and have used his thinking before in Artichoke Blog - Keep your eyes on my nipples- Living on the fringes of conversation

New media culture brings with it a number of new models of authorship which all involve different forms of collaboration. Of course, collaborative authorship is not unique to new media: think of medieval cathedrals, traditional painting studios which consisted from a master and assistants, music orchestras, or contemporary film productions which, like medieval cathedrals involve thousands of people collaborating over a substantial period of time. In fact, romantic model of a solitary single author occupies a very small place in the history of human culture. New media, however, offers some new variations on the previous forms of collaborative authorship.

 (1) Collaboration of different individuals and/or groups.
(2) Interactivity as collaboration between the author and the user.
(3) Authorship as selection from a menu.
(4) Collaboration between a company and the users.
(5) Collaboration between the author and the software.
(6) Remixing
(7) Sampling: New Collage?
(8) Open Source Model

And Hans Zimmer is noted for his community approach to collaboration when composing musical scores

Originally I had this idea that it should be possible to create some kind of community around this kind of work, and I think by muddying the titles - not having "you are the composer, you are the arranger, you are the orchestrator" - it just sort of helped us to work more collaboratively. It wasn't that important to me that I had "score by Hans Zimmer" and took sole credit on these things.

If only our schools (and those who work in them and for them) could muddy their titles.

But then I also liked this bit from the Chaplin 1940 text

Machinery that gives abundance has left us in want. Our knowledge as made us cynical; our cleverness, hard and unkind. We think too much and feel too little. More than machinery we need humanity. More than cleverness, we need kindness and gentleness.

With our relentless focus on the machine in schools 70 years later it is easy to neglect kindness and gentleness - for what Rem Koolhaus claims for threat of virtuality in Junkspace (2002) pdf we might also claim for learning places dedicated to learning through the screen - virtuality becomes the new real - and "friendship" is re-imagined. 

The constant threat of virtuality in Junkspace is no longer exorcized by petrochemical products; the synthetic cheapens. Junkspace is like a womb that organizes the transition of endless quantities of the Real - stone, trees, goods, daylight, people - into the virtual. Entire mountains are dismembered to provide ever greater quantities of authenticity, suspended on precarious brackets, polished to a blinding state of flash that makes the intended realism instantly elusive. Stone only comes in light yellow, flesh, a violent beige, a soapilke green, the colors of communist plastics in the fifties. Forests are felled, their wood is all pale: maybe the origins of Junkspace go back to the Kindergarten... ('Origins' is a mint shampoo that stings the anal region). Color in the real world looks increasingly unreal, drained. Color in virtual space is luminous, therefore irresistible. The average Powerpoint presentation displays sudden bursts of Indian exuberance that Junkspace has been the first to translate into realityä, a simulation of virtual vigor. A surfeit of reality TV has made us into amateur guards monitoring a Junkuniverse... From the lively breasts of the classical violinist, the designer stubble of the big-brother outcast, the contextual pedophilia of the former revolutionary, the routine addictions of the stars, the runny makeup of the evangelist, the robotic movements of the conductor, the dubious benefits of the fundraising marathon, the explanation of the politician: the swooping movements of the TV camera suspended from its boom - an eagle without beak or claws, just an optical stomach - swallows images and confessions indiscriminately, like a trashbag, to propell them as cyber-vomit in space. TV studio sets - garishly monumental - are both the culmination and the end of perspectival space as we've known it: angular geometric remnants invading cosmic, starry infinities; real space edited for smooth transmission in virtual space, crucial hinge in an infernal feedback loop... the vastness of Junkspace extended to infinity. Because we spend our life indoors - like animals in a zoo - we are obsessed with the weather: 40% of all TV consists of presenters of lesser atrractiveness gesturing helplessly in front of of windswept formations, through which you recognize, sometimes, your own destination / current position. Conceptually, each monitor, each TV screen is a substitute for a window; real life is inside, cyberspace has become the great outdoors...

All can be measured by the standard of the capybara.

Quote:

Unit of Measure

By Sandra Beasley

All can be measured by the standard of the capybara.

Everyone is lesser than or greater than the capybara.

Everything is taller or shorter than the capybara.

Everything is mistaken for a Brazilian dance craze

more or less frequently than the capybara.

Everyone eats greater or fewer watermelons

than the capybara. Everyone eats more or less bark.

Everyone barks more than or less than the capybara,

who also whistles, clicks, grunts, and emits what is known

as his alarm squeal. Everyone is more or less alarmed

than a capybara, who—because his back legs

are longer than his front legs—feels like

he is going downhill at all times.

Everyone is more or less a master of grasses

than the capybara. Or going by the scientific name,

more or less Hydrochoerus hydrochaeris—

or, going by the Greek translation, more or less

water hog. Everyone is more or less

of a fish than the capybara, defined as the outermost realm

of fishdom by the 16th-century Catholic Church.

Everyone is eaten more or less often for Lent than

the capybara. Shredded, spiced, and served over plantains,

everything tastes more or less like pork

than the capybara. Before you decide that you are

greater than or lesser than a capybara, consider

that while the Brazilian capybara breeds only once a year,

the Venezuelan variety mates continuously.

Consider the last time you mated continuously.

Consider the year of your childhood when you had

exactly as many teeth as the capybara—

twenty—and all yours fell out, and all his

kept growing. Consider how his skin stretches

in only one direction. Accept that you are stretchier

than the capybara. Accept that you have foolishly

distributed your eyes, ears, and nostrils

all over your face. Accept that now you will never be able

to sleep underwater. Accept that the fish

will never gather to your capybara body offering

their soft, finned love. One of us, they say, one of us,

but they will not say it to you.

 

Why do I post this?

So much of my professional reading interrogates the claims and counter claims around national standards, evidence-based practice, assessment and OTJs.  There is a lot of "froth and frottage" to tease through - heaps of "slogan shouting" and lashings of "Twitter touting".  It is hard to think clearly - hard to deal with the quantities of dogma and ideology.

Hattie (2009) asks

“The key question is whether teaching can shift from an immature to a mature profession, from opinions to evidence, from subjective judgements and personal contact to critique of judgements.” Hattie 2009 Visible Learning p259.

I wish I could be upbeat about the answer. Beasley's capybara measure poetry makes me laugh … it rescues me and makes me hopeful.

 

 

With smell of steaks in passageways.

Quote:

There is an extraordinary charm in other people's domesticities. Every lighted house, seen from the road, is magical: every pram or lawn-mower in someone else's garden: all smells or stirs of cookery from the windows of alien kitchens.

C.S. Lewis, Time and Tide, 16 June 1945

 

Preludes by T. S. Eliot

I

The winter evening settles down
With smell of steaks in passageways.
Six o’clock.
The burnt-out ends of smoky days.
And now a gusty shower wraps
The grimy scraps
Of withered leaves about your feet
And newspapers from vacant lots;
The showers beat
On broken blinds and chimney-pots,
And at the corner of the street
A lonely cab-horse steams and stamps.
And then the lighting of the lamps.

II

The morning comes to consciousness
Of faint stale smells of beer
From the sawdust-trampled street
With all its muddy feet that press
To early coffee-stands.
With the other masquerades
That time resumes,
One thinks of all the hands
That are raising dingy shades
In a thousand furnished rooms.

III

You tossed a blanket from the bed,
You lay upon your back, and waited;
You dozed, and watched the night revealing
The thousand sordid images
Of which your soul was constituted;
They flickered against the ceiling.
And when all the world came back
And the light crept up between the shutters
And you heard the sparrows in the gutters,
You had such a vision of the street
As the street hardly understands;
Sitting along the bed’s edge, where
You curled the papers from your hair,
Or clasped the yellow soles of feet
In the palms of both soiled hands.

IV

His soul stretched tight across the skies
That fade behind a city block,
Or trampled by insistent feet
At four and five and six o’clock;
And short square fingers stuffing pipes,
And evening newspapers, and eyes
Assured of certain certainties,
The conscience of a blackened street
Impatient to assume the world.

I am moved by fancies that are curled
Around these images, and cling:
The notion of some infinitely gentle
Infinitely suffering thing.

Wipe your hand across your mouth, and laugh;
The worlds revolve like ancient women
Gathering fuel in vacant lots.

 Why do I post this?

 I want to remember to pay attention to the little things in a life - the certain sorrows and uncertain joys of being.

Festo and The Windhover by Gerard Manley Hopkins S.J.

Quote:

The Windhover

To Christ Our Lord

I caught this morning morning's minion, king-

      dom of daylight's dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding

      Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding

High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing

In his ecstasy! then off, off forth on swing,

      As a skate's heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend: the hurl and gliding

      Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding

Stirred for a bird, – the achieve of, the mastery of the thing.

 

Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride, plume, here

      Buckle! AND the fire that breaks from thee then, a billion

Times told lovelier, more dangerous, O my chevalier!

 

      No wonder of it: shéer plód makes plough down sillion

Shine, and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear,

      Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermilion.

 

 

 

Why do I post this?

To remind myself that grace is not to be divorced from technology

Grace in the religious sense is not to be divorced from athletic, natural, often homoerotic, grace. In fact, it is fuelled by it.

Poem of the week: The Windhover by Gerard Manley Hopkins

So what is driving?

Quote:

Driving is a skill-based, socially regulated, expressive activity involving balancing capability and task difficulty to avoid loss of control, along with real time negotiation with co-present transient others with whom the driver is presently sharing the public highway to avoid intersecting trajectories, while maintaining or enhancing the driver’s mood and self-image.

Steve Stradling, Neale Kinnear, Transport Research Institute,Napier University, Edinburgh. LARSOA North East Region 5th Annual North East Road Safety Conference. Young Drivers: A Fatal Attraction Durham, 8 November 2007

Why do I post this?

The seemingly simplest of human activity - (something so trivial we see it as lying outside of the curriculum - or as an end of year when the real stuff is finished optional activity) - is so complex, and so nuanced it seems worthy of our greater attention when designing curricula and doing school.

Let the visitor sort it out

Quote:

While the Web is great for wading through vast oceans of information, it still seems that "sticky" narratives are the best way for acquiring  long-lasting knowledge.   Using the Web as a model for design criteria seems like it could easily lapse into the "let's just fill up the space with cool stuff and let the visitors sort it out..." school of exhibit (or museum) design. 

So, can a museum exhibition composed of free-standing units that can be viewed in any order, any more or less effective than the traditionally-styled exhibition hung on a clear narrative structure?

Should your next exhibit be designed like the web?  Paul Orselli

Why do I post this?

This is a “how do we learn” question and it needs to be interrogated in e learning spaces within schools as much as it does in museum spaces.  When we design learning experiences for students using information communication technologies I notice an increasing move away from sticky narrative teaching with learning experiences purposefully designed against differentiated intentional learning outcomes to a more "let the student sort it out" - an “access the database” type learning experience where whimsy and serendipitous exploration through student centered inquiry rules.

Hattie is an educator who comes closest to asking us to think about sticky narratives and databases when he states “Constructivism is a form of knowing, and not a form of teaching, and it is important not to confuse constructing conceptual knowledge with the current fad of constructivism” (Bereiter, 2002; Small 2003). Excerpt from Hattie - Visible Learning 

On Overestimation

Quote:

"Even when cloud culture does seem to threaten authoritarian rule it is easy to overestimate its power. A classic example is the role played by Twitter in the protests in Iran in June 2009 following the country's disputed elections. Twitter became one of the ways that web users in Iran distributed news of protests and crackdowns, as Mir Hossein Mousavi supporters took to the streets to protest against the victory awarded to President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Twitter provided a direct and compelling connection with events in Iran as they unfolded. Original tweets from Iran were passed on — re-tweeted — by other Twitter users in the west, often people with large followings, amplifying their impact. The scale and intensity of the activity led some web commentators to dub it “the Twitter revolution.” Between June 7th and June 26th there were 2,024,166 tweets about the Iranian election. For a few days it seemed as if Iran would provide conclusive proof of the web's power to remake the world. As the dust settled however the complex reality emerged more clearly. A study of 79,000 tweets about the protests by Mike Edwards, a social network researcher at the Parsons New School for Design, found that a third were re-tweets, people passing on an original posting. The majority of Mousavi supporters are young and urban, the main demographic of Twitter users. About 93% of Iranian Twitter users are based in Tehran. Most importantly the numbers do not add up. According to Sysomos, which analyses social media activity, there was a surge in Twitter accounts in Iran from 8,654 in May to 19,235 in June 2009. Part of this surge, however, might have been due to Twitter users outside Iran registering in the country to confuse the authorities. Yet even the higher figure of 19,235 is only equivalent to 0.027% of Iran's population (70,049,262 according to the 2006 census.) A survey carried out by the The Centre for Public Opinion and the New American Foundation found a third of Iranians have internet access. That would mean Twitter users at the time of the revolution made up 0.082% of Internet users in Iran."

Cloud Culture: The Promise and the Threat. Charles Leadbeater February 2010

Why do I post this?

I am interested in what is claimed - in how I can know.  This statistic surprised me - I had bought into the hype around the role of Twitter in the Iranian protests. My distrust of the motives of media and commerce moves me towards an increasing normlessness.  Is there anything I can aspire to or hold as true?  Leadbeater's analysis of "the cloud" is powerful and expressed with a simple elegance and logic.  It has many other insights that provoke new thinking about stuff I thought I knew. Leadbeater is someone who has oftentimes provided a balance to what I hear claimed at educational conferences and read in blogs and other media. This article in The Edge  reminds me that I must always seek the measured commentary.  

I worry about a world with less risk.

Quote:

“Many of the ways we talk about augmenting reality focus on reducing risk. By adding information to the bookstore, we reduce the risk that we buy a boring title and overpay for it. Augment the grocery store and we reduce the risk that we buy endangered, unsustainable fish or toxic glass cleaner manufactured by a gay-unfriendly conglomerate. Surrounding ourselves with information online – from authorities, friends, from the crowd – we make decisions in the physical world with increasing assurance that we’re getting the best deal, value or quality.

I worry about a world with less risk. With four stars shining over this trendy sushi bar, will I miss the unrated Uzbek teahouse down the street? Or the admittedly crappy dive bar that becomes a sentimental favorite? In a world rich with information, will I still stumble and explore? I don’t want to go back to a world where I can’t pull up record reviews on Allmusic.com… but I fell in love with music buying $2 cutout LPs in the back room of my local record store, stumbling through a forest of forgettable music to my own passions and tastes.” Ethan Zuckerman   Geocaching: Augmenting Reality for Enhanced Serendipity

Why do I post this? I am interested in unintended consequences – in how designing for augmented reality might in truth result in living a more limited reality – a lesser than before lived life. Zuckerman eloquently captures my disquiet over our increasing use of technologies that collect data and information online that is relevant to us. If in augmenting reality we exclude what we think irrelevant and unwanted we isolate ourselves from unplanned and unimagined opportunity and experience. For example, by finding the exact information we need from the screen we no longer seek it from the person on the street or in the motel room next door; we never talk to the complex human being who offers so much more than a line of text. We reduce our opportunity for serendipitous encounter, we never listen to a perspective that confronts our own, we are never undermined in our righteousness.   In this sense our use of technologies limits what it is to be human. I like how Zimmerman goes further and explores how augmented reality might be designed in ways that encourage us to be human - he offers a persuasive counter - a fabulous post describing his experiences when geocaching.    

We are attached to the one and long for the other.

Quote:

"Place is security space is freedom; we are attached to the one and long for the other.” P3

At first only the point of entry is recognised; beyond lies space. In time more and more landmarks are identified and the subject gains confidence in movement. Finally the space consists of familiar landmarks and paths – in other words, place. P71 Yi-Fu Tuan 1977

Tuan "Space and Place - The Perspective of Experience." 1977

Why do I post this? Tuan's analysis of space and place is a long time favourite of mine. I love the way his writing throws a little darkness on the things I take for granted forcing me to uncover them and look at them anew. I have used this thinking about space and place - what we are attached to and what we long for - in many different places and spaces over the years - it is wonderfully transferable.

A reminder to shamble widely ...

Quote:

 “They danced down the streets like dingledodies, and I shambled after as I've been doing all my life after people who interest me, because the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes "Awww!"”

                                                                          On the Road - Jack Kerouac

Why do I post this? I am a shambler - I shamble after people who burn.  I post Kerouac’s quote to remind myself that I need to open my conversational ambit to include the mad ones I meet on the road as well as the mad ones who play in education.