stimulant

a few, tasty links (July 26th - July 27th):

• WYMeditor - web-based XHTML editor - Home - Neat, clean editor!
• In pursuit of code quality: Unit testing Ajax applications - AJAX unit-testing.
• Programming Resources, News and Ideas: Top 10 source code search engines - Wow. Lots more peopler have confronted this problem than I thought.
• Instructables Controlling Peripherals and Saving Electricity - Automatic control of peripheral power consumption.
• Instructables How to make simple motion sensors - Motion sensors!
• Wolfram Blog: A New Kind of Building? - Generating forms with CA.
• Deep packet inspection meets ‘Net neutrality, CALEA: Page 1 - Scary.
• CSS Specificity: Things You Should Know - CSS Specificity. Easier than floats.
• Overcoming Bias: Schools That Don’t Want To Be Graded - I guess that’s a pretty good point: if you don’t want to be encapsulated by a number (US News & World Reports) your students probably don’t want to, either (GPA, grades)
• TED | Talks | Will Wright: Toys that make worlds (video) - Spore sure looks neat. What about fragile models?
• Instructables Bubble Speakers - Another speaker project. With bubbles!
• Google Architecture | High Scalability - A few lessons on scalability. You know, for when I’ve to worry about that problem.

a few, tasty links (July 25th):

• Why Congress Needs a Version Control System - A pretty neat idea. And a pretty significant problem.
• Henrik Frystyk Nielsen on the RESTful architecture of Microsoft Robotics Studio « Jon Udell - Ed mentioned this today, and then I ran across this article. It looks pretty neat.
• YSlow for Firebug - Find out why your site is slow.
• Django Master Class - More Django!
• DNStunnel.de - free DNS tunneling service - Circumvent those pesky portals in the airport.
• Ideas For Dozens: RAD: The first step towards Ruby on Robots - Oh boy. This looks like a ton of fun. Ruby microcontrollers.
• Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories - Five Electronics Tools You Might Not Know About - Consume!

I have a big idea.

And it germinated from a few, basic questions:

1. Why are politics so impenetrable? The political system is shrouded in corruption, money, and law. It is not accessible.
2. What does it take to be a good, effective citizen? Why is this such a hard role to assume?
3. How does an unpopular war make any sense in a democracy?
4. How can I change this? What does it mean to teach/raise an effective citizenry, from a pedagogical standpoint?

For all my thought about social reform and education, I must confess that until recently, politics hadn’t been on my radar. Why not? Because I felt so isolated from it. I felt like trying to fix problems by going into politics was like trying to fix education by becoming a public school teacher. Of course, the problem is that there are alternative avenues for pursuing education reform. Outside of self-defeating initiatives like communes, I didn’t see any “outsider” approach for politics.

Nonetheless, it continued to bug me. And then, when I sat down to read Alex Russell’s blog I happened upon this post detailing his approach to voting:

Despite all of that, however, I vote every chance I get. Jennifer and I study for elections, usually reserving most of a weekend beforehand to pore over the hundred-plus pages of voter information booklets that get shipped to every California voter. We spend time researching, trying to pick the best person for the job, peering through the morass of private interest and political machinations and not always coming away feeling like we really understand all that’s at stake. I’ve never voted a straight party ticket in my life, mostly because I don’t think anyone really has all the answers. I expect my elected representatives to duke it out to a good compromise. I want the kind of slow, deliberative government that leaves everyone slightly bruised and no-one very happy.

and I fell in love with the idea of working toward making effective citizenry a viable goal. I realized that spending a weekend in preparation puts you ahead of 99% of voters, much less citizens. And that’s a straightforward, if not scalable solution (i.e. I doubt a national “Give up a weekend to vote in a rigged election” campaign would go over so well).

So I filed away that interest of mine, and mulled over the problem for the next few weeks. And one day, I realized that being a citizen is awfully hard. But for no good reason. Sure, there are tough decisions and moral quandaries and compromises to weight, but the hard part of being a good citizen for most people me is logistics. I don’t trust the media; there’s a proliferation of candidates; all the candidates tow pretty similar [party] lines; but I know they’re not all equally suited for the job. I don’t have the time or inclination to spend all the time sorting through truth and fiction on my own. And I doubt others do, either. I want a straightforward resource detailing facts, that’s it. Just facts. No commentary, nothing like that. Just facts, backed up by well-documented, well put-together primary sources. Speeches, voting records, financial records, biographies — I want a trusted source of information. I’ve never found a media outlet that cuts it.

With that, I realized I wanted to make a tool to make an active citizenry plausible. And then, the chips started falling in place with increasing frequency:

<

ul>

They say you don’t want to see either laws or sausages being made, but I think they are wrong. Imagine how much more transparency and accountability our government would have if it were possible to see what changes were made by whom, who inserted extraneous riders into various bills, and generally to track the influence of various interests by the new visibility into their actual control over the knobs and levers of government!

“I stumbled into a series of discussions about broadcast media, societal fragmentation (and unification) and the political and technical enablers for that fragmentation.”

<

ul>

And now, I’ve a big idea: Imagine a tool (and more broadly, a community) dedicated to ferreting out and making accessible political facts. Fact-checking would be based on a network of trust, augmented by scores affected by how often you provide misinformation or well-documented primary sources of information. But this would provide users with the ability to maintain a notebook of sorts, to which they can add issues, proposals, keywords, politicians, courts, cases, etc. All of these elements would have an online presence that would be continually updated and documented. Every fact would be required to have a documented primary source to which could be added a verification process.

Even better, the data that is usually hidden from citizens (voting records, earmarks, fiscal records, financial interests, legal records, pork, noteworthy comments or promises during campaigning or session: there are reams and reams of information from which most citizens are isolated. Putting a good interface on them is the first step towards opening all that up.

Imagine a non-partisan tool to which everyone flocks to get facts — not commentary — but facts that have been checked and re-checked and argued about and pared down until the language is as straightforward as possible and the item as accurate as possible. Finally, a useful conduit for the oppositional tension in government! And, the more important (read: higher-profile) an issue is, the more scrutiny it will receive and the stronger its documentation will become. And even more exciting is the possibility that legalese could become annotatable.

Let me expand on that. Recently, I met with a lawyer to talk about setting up a corporation and/or non-profit. At some point, they made the offhand comment, “That’s how we stay in business, we know a language most people don’t, and work hard to keep it that way.” I wanted to punch him in the face. But he was meeting with me for free. And I doubt that would have fixed anything. And I reminded myself that I’ve yet to find a profession or culture whose repugnant elements weren’t manifest in its practitioners. Teachers, government officials, lawyers — they aren’t malicious. It’s just a fucked up system.

Anyway, given that I have difficulty imagining the effective, retroactive streamlining of our legal system (c.f. the Paperwork Reduction Act), it seems like the key to making the legal system more equitable and relevant is to make it more accessible. Imagine if it were possible for documents in legalese — whether they be acts or bills or federal statutes or municipal regulations — to be annotated so that a user could click on a paragraph, and read a “human-readable” version explaining the content and relevance of the paragraph. This is a much bigger undertaking, and it’s not entirely clear how nicely it fits in with the other features and goals of the system, but there it is…

So I guess those are the broadest strokes: a user interface to the political world pasted onto a decentralized [social] network of trust that makes the legal system and documentation traversable and human readable. Groups could be formed, campaigns funded, information and platforms documented, criticized, and constantly fact-checked. Combine this with the personal value and functionality of a political notebook, and it sounds like we’ve started skirting around the beginnings of an exciting tool to streamline political involvement. Pair that with powerful, social pedagogy…!

What do you think of that, Alex Russell? Maybe it’ll free up a weekend?

1. in reality, I was — and probably am — reading all this context into it, so take this with a grain of salt [↩]

Update: Not all of them do.

a few, tasty links (July 24th):

• Freshman Orientation on Some Campuses Now Features a Family-Friendly Perk - Chronicle.com - According to today?s Boston Globe, the child-care services also serve as subtle propaganda for the next generation of college applicants. Siblings in Boston University?s program are rewarded with lollipops for correctly answering trivia questions abou
• Instructables the minty vibrating and blinking flash drive proximity sensor - A proximity sensor!
• GardenMon(itoring project) - Hack a Day - Soon, I’ll have a garden.
• Urban Gymnastics - Wow.
• Welcome to Mr. McGroovy’s - Rivets for cardboard! Make construction _trivial_ and fun and easy and …

From the Foreword of Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs:

“Armies, students, and some societies are programmed.”

There it is, hidden in plain sight. And Sussman, Abelson, et al are some of the most-respected and lauded teachers and pedagogues around.¹

1. Note that the foreword itself was written by Alan Perlis. [↩]

So quite a while ago — December 2006, if I remember correctly — I wrote up a kinda whiny piece about some things that frustrated me about the way the educational system work[s/ed] and evolves.

I started writing in the first place with the ambition to sort out and articulate my ideas about education (and hopefully, become a competent writer in the process).

I submitted what I’d written to Education Week on a lark. They decided to publish it, pending a couple revisions.

In any case, I’m preserving a copy from the EducationWeek site here¹.

And for those of you too lazy to download the PDF, here it is, in plaintext:

I once tutored a bright and energetic young high school student named Dan. He was intensely motivated, goal-oriented, and respectful. For years he had juggled sports, school, church, an active social life, and a plethora of the proper civic activities, as well as extensive family obligations, without complaint. He always made the honor roll. He was an all-around good guy who was successful, handsome, and disarmingly modest to boot. Alas, Dan was unhappy. No surprise here. We’re bombarded with stories of overburdened, overstressed teenagers, children of the achievement ethos who cannot relax. We bemoan the pressures that push kids into the massive machinery of higher education while we snap up copies of U.S. News & World Report’s “America’s Best Colleges” issue. If we see the contradiction, we do nothing to change it. Nonetheless, this discussion is old hat. One day, Dan was confounded by an old rival of a math problem. He sighed with exasperation, “Not this crap again.” Bemused, I tried to continue. Before I finished my second sentence, Dan hit the well-worn Formica of his desk in frustration, exclaiming, “I don’t want to know why it’s like that. Just tell me how to do it on the test. Write out the first step, the second—” I interrupted him, pointing out that memorizing any one set pattern would do him no good. He rolled his eyes; I continued with the lesson. While working with Dan, I found that he would wait for me to complete a few steps, and then, when my prodding became sufficiently energetic, do one of two things. Either he would give up entirely, flustered and angry, or he would attempt to force patterns where there were none. He regurgitated steps, numbers, and relationships specific to past examples and tried to extend them to all problems, missing the underlying ideas in the process. When this failed, he became more confused and less motivated. As I grew more impatient with his obsession with producing an answer, I moved on hastily, with increasing ineffectiveness. Dan’s frustration fermented, transmuting into bitterness. “Math sucks! What am I going to use it for, anyway? This stuff is too hard. I only care because I need to keep my GPA up.” In my own 17 years of education, I’ve found that Dan is much more the rule than the exception. From a small public school in west-central Florida to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, I’ve consistently encountered people who act and react in creative, original, and ingenious ways when confronted with real-world problems, but freeze in an academic context, failing to muster anything but the dullest, most lackluster thinking. Dan’s problem was not unique. The conditions that created his difficulties afflict each and every student. The difference between the successful and unsuccessful student is that the successful student has adapted more effectively to the system, to playing the game. The more closely, quickly, and cheerily you can follow the lead of the adults around you, the more successful you will become. What matters to these adults? Grades, scores, prestigious colleges, good jobs—in short, success. Youths and adults from all backgrounds know that education is the way to scramble up the socioeconomic ladder. This means more and more students are becoming professional students earlier and earlier. School is their job. And, so the ethic goes, a productive worker is a good worker. Though what exactly they produce is unclear, there is no question as to what they become: fully credentialed, well-schooled students. They become the modern aristocrat, the educatocrat. They are marked by dean’s lists and honor rolls, stellar SAT scores and relentless community service, glowing letters of recommendation and moving personal essays: all those elements stuffed into that oversized envelope sent off to a dream college the winter of senior year. On the small scale, this means that professional students are always looking to produce the alleged bedfellows of success as defined by the College Board or the National Honor Society or Who’s Who Among American High School Students. The problem is that none of these have anything at all to do with learning. Any measurement founded upon a combination of fear (of failure and the associated bogeymen) and bribery (prestige and the trappings of success) cannot reveal anything of import. Companies such as Kaplan Inc. make billions teaching students how to take tests. They don’t make billions by teaching students, but by training them in the art of appearing to have learned. This should not surprise us—it is exactly what we require of our students: to produce those signs which we have decided indicate intelligence and diligence. The atmosphere to which this burgeoning culture of omnipresent carrots and sticks is partner suffocates the carefree curiosity that should be the hallmark of a good student. When we try to motivate students by fear or greed, we inevitably force them to shut away vulnerable instincts of curiosity and trust. Education has become a commodity. Even if that fact remains unarticulated, students of all ages understand that at the end of all their schooling is a valuable degree. Education is a prudent investment; it is the commodity to hoard. When graduating from high school was still significant, its value was a result of its relative rarity. A high school diploma represented a good education. But a sizable majority of American students now graduate from high school. This means that a high school diploma has lost its cachet in the job market. More and more people are going to college, because that’s what it now means to get a good education. As long as education is a commodity, its rarity, rather than its content, will determine its market value. This vicious circle will continue. We are spending more time studying more narrowly just to remain competitive. How will it end? These conditions inevitably encourage students to hyperfocus on production, in all its varied forms. Students are more worried about grades than learning, answers than questions, ends than means. This misplaced emphasis is manifest in cheating, the boom of the test-prep industry, the culture of stress engulfing college admissions—all are direct results (and reinforcing causes) of the pervasive obsession with production rather than education. Recently, I was speaking with a friend who was then a teaching assistant for MIT’s multivariable-calculus course. I asked him about his experience with this producer-learner split, and was flabbergasted by his response. He said that more than half of the students in his section consistently and flagrantly copied answers on problem sets. Moreover, he said that when he complained of this to fellow teaching assistants, they cynically acknowledged that they were in the same boat. Worse, the confirmation was laden with apathy: Cheating was a de facto policy among students. Students who would consistently ace the weekly problem sets would barely scrape by when tests came around, my friend said. When his students did (far too rarely) come to him for help, their strategies in confronting problems and trying to master new concepts closely paralleled Dan’s “pattern-matching,” as my friend termed it. There is a clear dissonance in our society between the interests of those who give the grades, those who get the grades, and those who want the grades. Grades are intended to be a byproduct of learning, a measure independent of the process. But for anyone who has been pushed to study those few extra hours to pass that upcoming midterm or to ace that final, the proposition that grades are merely ancillary to the learning process is patently ridiculous. The situation has grown so dire that students at top universities cannot imagine learning without school, motivation without grades, success without measurement. The nation’s best students have become so tied to the system they have mastered that the system has mastered them. What’s worse is that school has in some ways left them worse off than they were when they began their education. In most cases, all they have gained is a knowledge of facts, and they have lost confidence in their ability to think, learn, analyze, and absorb unaided. Unless young people can be convinced that their futures should not be ensured by some sort of recipe, the divide between those who can play the system and those who fall short will continue to grow. With education as the basic commodity of success today, the stratification of this skill also means socioeconomic stratification in the long run. All of this hit home to me on a subway ride in Boston. The metropolitan transport authority has provided advertising space to Kaplan, and in one ad a montage of well-groomed, appropriately multicultural students splits a clean, purple background in half. The text of the ad says simply, “Higher score. Brighter future.” Not “Smarter kid. Brighter future.” or “Harder worker. Brighter future.” A higher SAT score. Are we willing to pin our children’s futures on something that a test-preparation company sells?
Educatocracy is licensed under a Creative Commons Public Domain License.

1. You can get the TeX source here and the original, PDF submission here. [↩]

Kristi Sword calls them interventions. That word encapsulates a neat idea concisely: public art that stimulates thought using the common domain as a jumping-off point.

Anyway, I’m excited about this idea for a couple reasons:

1. I don’t know if I’m becoming more aware or if street art is becoming more popular, but between Banksy and Kristi Sword and Nagle’s idea for sidewalk chalk this concept has been coming up more and more.
2. I want to get in on it in order to address education issues. More importantly, I want to play around with the idea that this could be a normal forum for public expression so that I can start thinking more concretely about the pedagogy of reform.

The second point needs elaboration. The only real analogue I can come up with is graffiti. But this is a problem for a number of reasons. Among them are graffiti’s perception (and too frequent role) as a contemptible element of public life as opposed to a potentially expressive tool. But what if everyone started using the public space for expression the way Sword and Banksy have? Their work has an element of artifice simply by virtue of its association with their identity. Take a look at design sponge’s discussion of Sword’s work:

“one of the nicest things about living in new york is the way public art intregrates so seemlessly into your life. i love finding little pictures, tiles, and drawings people have placed on city streets and signs. some see it as vandalism but i really enjoy the projects that are fleeting (and leave minimal ecological impact) and draw attention to something seemingly mundane like cracks in the pavement or an old drainpipe.”

I’m intrigued by the idea of bridging the gap between the public and art by making “art” a common, public tool.

I haven’t taken this idea very far yet, but its current incarnation involves developing a kit¹ of easily, cheaply obtainable components that lend themselves to flexible, fun public expression. Stickers and sidewalk chalk come to mind. Made portable, I could start playing around with them anywhere and everywhere whenever I feel happy or sad or whimsical or riotous.

Everyone could. And to varying degrees. The planning and execution of work like Banksy’s will still pay off. But it seems like the tradition of public art is stifled by that artifice (note its complete absence from graffiti).

Consider what this could do to/for advertising. On the T, I’m usually pretty frustrated with at least one of the ads. Even short of defacing or replacing it, there’s rich fodder all around us for social commentary.

Combine all of this with some easy way to document and post these things online, and you have instant² public fora.

Everyone harbors resentment toward some element of public life. School, corporate abuses, government, taxes, police — whatever it is, none of it has any permanent or visible (much less constructive or socially acceptable) forum for most people.

It would be fantastic to provide that.

So, how do I do that?

My suspicion is that there are plenty of people who would try it out. What’s missing is some set of constraints, right? I mean, we’ve all been on a subway and had a pen or Sharpie on hand, as well as emotions or ideas to express. Why haven’t we?

What if instead leaving that question so open-ended, you began with the makings of a community (online) with a description of tools and a few, seeded ideas, the whole thing carefully couched as fun, as opposed to artistic?

Stencil graffiti, tagging, street art — all of these are well-established, if not mainstream. So what’s missing (if anything)?

I keep coming back to the cultural and practical barriers. Is that all there really is? Add community and mix?

World-changing is never really addressed in school. Why not? A strange scaffolding of academics is supposed to give rise to an edifice housing tomorrow’s leaders and all that bullshit. But instead of, you know, actually addressing what’s hard about changing things and how to go about doing it, we teach people to diagram sentences. We teach them calculus. We teach them to consume and follow. To get a job. There’s constant talk of teaching “workplace skills.” I’ve never heard of a curriculum redesigned to create more effective leaders. The idea of social leadership never came up in my education (even at MIT) outside of bald-faced lip service. Why not?

1. not necessarily for distribution — by kit I just mean “set of tools designed for quick and easy deployment” [↩]
2. I’m taking for granted the adoption of all this [↩]

a few, tasty links (July 23rd):

• Craftzine.com blog: Sticker and Sprinkes Interventions: Art by Kristi Sword - Man, interventions like these (or Nagle’s idea with sidewalk chalk) seem like a ton of fun.
• Position Absolute : Ajax History Defined : A Method of handling the back button. - Finally, a tutorial about working around this ridiculous limitation.
• MAKE: Blog: Power-Saving pedometer also measures speed - A pretty neat project, with lots of imaginable uses.
• php ajax code: 85 AJAX Solutions For Professional Coding - You know, more code. Who needs a code library?
• Teens trade lazy summer days for jobs / Work experience seen improving college prospects - No shit, sherlock.
• Colleges say no to U.S. News | Inquirer | 07/23/2007 - Next on the list, after Kaplan! I should think carefully about how to bring them down.
• Fighting for Free Speech in Schools - TIME - Someone started to write it up. But not enough, yet.
• MAKE: Blog: Ordering PCBs from China - A guide. A useful guide, for whenever I make something I want a lot of.
• BBC NEWS | Technology | ‘$100 laptop’ production begins - Yay!!!
• SMS tracking with a GPS GSM enabled AVR - Hack a Day - Tracking position via GPS+GSM+SMS+AVR
• EPA Library Materials: Not Open for Public Access (TreeHugger) - Uhh…what? Things are awfully scary.

You know all these “things to look at” posts? They’re automated.

Yeah.