Results tagged “education” from Uncivil Society
Carrot Top holding a rabbit on the red carpet of a Las Vegas poker benefit--this quintessential icon of celebrity do-good culture comes from the camera of talented teen-age photographer Nick Leonard, who is using shots of scenes from his hometown to build a killer professional portfolio.
UPDATE: For more on poker & charity, check out Betting on Poker to Change the World.
An iron fence on W. 21st St. in New York depicts the classic image of a rocket crashing into the Man in the Moon from Melies' 1902 pioneering science fiction film, Le Voyage dans la Lune (A Trip to the Moon).
The fence is across from the Clinton School of the Arts, and I happened to snap this photo during lunch break. After I was done shooting about 10 or so photos, I noticed that a crowd of kids had surrounded me and continued talking about the image as I walked away.
Soooo, educator that I am, I went back and asked if any of them knew what it was. None of them did, but they agreed that it was "awesome" and wondered if the thing in his eye might be a bullet. I explained about the Melies film, its history, and what the image was supposed to be, all of which the kids said was even more awesome, so they asked me to repeat the title so they could watch the film on Youtube.
Highlight of my day, that.
From a 1927 ad for the Coyne Electrical School.
Throughout the ages the finger-painter, the play-do sculptor, the Lincoln-logger stood alone against the day care teacher of her time.
She did not live to earn approval stickers, she lived for herself that she might achieve things that are the glory of all humanity.
These are my terms, I do not care to play by any others. And if the court will allow me, it's nap time.
Via Robot6, this is brilliant stuff--an essential archive for anyone with an interest in the history of charity & public service.
As fate would have it, I had to be out of town at the very time Amazon held its Kindle DX press conference at Pace University, where I happen to teach. Nonetheless, since such a high-profile media event took place right by my office, I figure I might as well jot down my initial thoughts here.
Of course, as per my disclaimer below, I probably should add that that any thoughts here aren't those of Pace etc. etc.--these are just the ramblings of the dork what writes this personal blog.As I noted to my social enterprise class, the arrangement that Amazon apparently has with its five universities--essentially to demo the larger Kindle as a textbook killer--reflects the symbiotic relationship between charities and commercial providers that has been the norm in recent years, particularly in such areas as higher education, health care and museums. The notion that higher education has fallen from an Edenic noncommercial purity may be an appealing myth, but from a historical standpoint it has been misleading since, oh, about the twelfth century.
From a legal perspective, arguably the most critical issue is for the universities signed on to the Kindle venture is that of retaining control over activities expressing their exempt educational purpose. Were Amazon, say, to start dictating textbook choice or the substance of the curriculum, the IRS might question whether a university is pursuing a substantial non-exempt purpose. Judging from what we've seen--and I know no more than what is available to the general public--that won't be the case, so one would expect few if any problems on the legal front.
Still, the relationship between Amazon and its partner universities is bound to raise questions, especially among academics from outside relatively more commercialized disciplines such as law and the natural sciences. Essentially what we have here are universities helping a single company to establish dominance in the market for educational texts.
There are analogues throughout the university--exclusive deals for soda machines and big box franchises running student bookstores--but this venture is more central to the academic enterprise. Given the realities of Amazon's usage policy and proprietary DRM, one could argue that the university's control over its curriculum would be illusory should the Kindle become the academic norm. It's one thing to force an academic community to choose Coke; quite another to create an environment where student must buy Kindles and professors are expected to assign books that are available in the Kindle format.
We can also expect questions as to the ethics and practicality of requiring students to buy an additional, not to mention branded, device in order to pursue their studies. Even with the academic discount that is likely to become available (extrapolating from the deals available from computer & software companies), the Kindle is in the price range of a netbook, low-end laptop, PS3 or an iPhone. As any number of other people have noted, the market is primed to be more receptive to electronic texts that can be viewed in media students already own or would like to have another reason to buy.
Finally, the Kindle venture is also interesting from the perspective of the history of the university as a medium for processing and transmitting information. It's tempting to classify those who favor the Kindle as on the cutting-edge while branding those who question it as hidebound traditionalists, but that would be a drastic oversimplification. In fact, one could argue that the Kindle itself embodies a traditional approach to electronic communications media.
As Marshall McLuhan observed, our initial impulse when dealing with a new medium is to recapitulate more familiar forms--for example, early TV transmitted stage plays and symphonies before developing rhetorical styles that expressed the television medium. At base, the Kindle does little more than replicate the textbook. Sure, the Kindle weighs less and does not cost as much as a many required texts, but that's it. The fundamental model is still one-sided and top-down: the authors write a text that students read.
That's not the environment in which today's students live and work. To be valued in the marketplace--and yes, to live a more meaningful life--students need to do more than read books. They have to become adept at finding useful information from a wide range of resources and communicating ideas in ways that are useful & engaging.
Perhaps a more cutting-edge approach than replicating the textbook would be to shift away from the model of students as information consumers. Instead, we could focus on helping students become more effective and compelling information producers. Rather than requiring students to buy a fixed text, we could focus on creating opportunities to collate resources and to write material that would in turn help future students learn.
In this environment, the professor relinquishes the industrial age mantle of hallowed authority to assist students in becoming professors themselves. By this I don't mean professors in the sense of the contemporary academic guild, but in the classical meaning of the word from which "professor" is derived--the Latin profiteor, "to speak forth." What university professors do is no longer the province of a privileged few; today everyone has the opportunity--and the responsibility--to gather, produce and transform information. The sooner we stop pretending that university professors have a monopoly on expertise, the better professors will be at fulfilling their new social role.
That said, I'm curious to see how this Amazon venture will play out. Among its other functions the university is a place for experimentation, and this is exactly the sort of thing we should try--especially if it means I get a free Kindle!
McCann Erickson Polska designed this PSA series for the Warsaw Metropolitan Police, in which thought balloons protect cartoon riders.
I like the ads, though it does seem that the designers could benefit from this new graphic technology.
NONPROFIT COMICS EXTRA:
Metabunker has details on the formation of the new Danish Comics Council, which promotes comics art & industry in Denmark.
The HBO series In Treatment reminds me of the 1950s comic Psychoanalysis, which used the comic book format to make Freudianism accessible.
The book is one of several noble failures in socially responsible publishing after the comic book inquisition of the 1950s; do-gooders interested in a more compelling example would do well to track down reprints of EC's earlier Shock SuspenStories, which took on racism, sexual exploitation, mob justice and host of other hot-button issues.
Another must-read from the same company: Judgment Day, in Weird Fantasy 18 (online here). This story & issues of Shock made a huge impression on me when I was a tyke scoring copies of ECs for a dollar a pop at flea markets & private homes.
A UK charity has sparked a religious war with a comic strip aimed at promoting tolerance. The latest issue of Who Cares? Trust magazine Klic! features Standing Up For What You Believe In, in which a cross-wearing Christian bullies a Muslim girl for wearing a hijab. The key scene (image above):
In a cartoon strip, a boy wearing a large cross around his neck is shown telling a friend that a smiling Muslim girl in a veil looks like a terrorist.
He later confronts her and shouts: "Hey, whatever your name is, what are you hiding under your turban?"
She replies that the garment is called a hijab and that it is part of her religion "like the cross you wear".
The girl is then shown standing up for another boy, who is being bullied, and her behaviour is contrasted with that of the boy wearing the cross.
Some Christians are in an uproar over being stereotyped as bigots, and the fact that the charity receives a substantial amount of funding from the government is only stoking the fire.
The charity's intriguing response: the cross is not a reference to Christians.
Who Cares? Trust chief executive Natasha Finlayson described the cross as "bling" rather than a religious symbol.
Via Robot 6
As if kids really needed a multibillion-dollar corporation to sell them on eating crayons . . .
Via Gothamist & Kinetic Carnival, video of a 1905 school outing to Coney Island. So much of interest here--the fashion, the barrel roll, the mechanical horse ride and, of course, the "charabang."
A must-see exhibit with a must-buy book: The Brinkley Girls, exploring the art of Nell Brinkley:
Nell Brinkley widened her scope to include pen and ink depictions of working women. Brinkley used her fame to campaign for better working conditions and higher pay for women who had joined in the war effort, and who were suffering economic and social dislocation due to acting on their patriotism. Unlike most of her contemporaries, she drew women of different races and cultures.
Another student social design project, featured in Osocio. Also interesting on this front: the Design Rebels course noted in conjunction with this review of Do Good Design.
Utah Tap :: Here's to the World from Mike Morris on Vimeo.
One of my refrains re higher education is that it should shift from a culture of info consumption to production--college should be a place where students go to learn by creating, not by taking tests & writing reports that no one but their professors will read.
The BYU Ad Lab "is a student-run, professionally mentored ad agency" where undergrads create PSAs. Their animated Utah Tap project has been getting a fair amount of good press.
A meditation on the long-term educational & cultural impact of Guitar Hero, in the current Atlantic:
Greg LoPiccolo was at pains, too, to point out the educational component. “The game does set you up, in a way, to be more receptive to learning about how to create music,” he said. “You learn about time, you learn about what the parts are … There’s this natural, intuitive knowledge about how songs are composed and arranged that the game totally gives you. My guess is that in five years’ time there’ll be an explosion of garage bands.”
My background today has been Turner Classic Movies, which has been playing a series of films and short subjects from the 1930s. There's quite a bit of fascinating stuff here re the interplay of technology and culture, particularly in relation to an economic crisis.
The cliche that "Americans flocked to escapist entertainment" is enticing, but wrong--there's nothing escapist about it. It's all quite strategic, even at its most playful.
I'll explain this more here & elsewhere once I finish a hard-deadlined project, but for a glimpse of what I'm up to just check out an old Robert Benchley mock-educational short. Stuff like this sounded a death knell for the professoriate as a profession with authority--when everyone has access to rich data and mass communication, someone who claims to hold the information franchise becomes inherently ridiculous.
Does that make the academy obsolete? Not necessarily. However, with seventy+ years more of technological development, the need to adapt becomes even more urgent.
It's the first day of this semester's venture initiation & entrepreneurship class, so I'm steeped in class prep. More about the class later, but what's striking me most now is how interesting it is to be teaching this class after a crash as opposed to before.
So many of the texts seem archaic, even those just a year or two old. New economy! Ample credit! Ample investment capital! Good thing I've always taken a critical historical approach to bubblenomics. In fact, this year should be a bit more smooth, since we won't be fighting ubiquitous memes of unending unbounded wealth.
Not much else to say right now, since I'm off to hit the keyboard for other things. In the meantime, for your entertainment & instruction here are some robots from the future:
"Sadly, all the Marxists are in academia rather than broadcast sports. That's the problem with Marxists. They're everywhere you don't want them to be and nowhere you really need them."
--Jonathan Chait on interviews with corporate sponsors during the broadcast of college football bowl games
Above: Stained glass Lenin at the Humboldt University library in Berlin
For the past few years, the endowment managers at top universities have reported record returns--and making big bucks themselves. Turns out they invested in the stuff that's now tanking.
