Humanistic Provocationz

Posted on September 25, 2010 by Antonio Vantaggiato

I have tried lately to read Shakespeare, and found it so intolerably dull that it nauseated me.

— Charles Darwin

I was lately thinking of the importance of reading, being myself an avid reader: of both stories and essays, papers, etc. So I began reflecting on those who don’t read, whose living rooms are not filled with books. Those who read little or nothing at all, those who read only c-literature. Is it that important to **read**?

Then, a post by Odifreddi (the mathematician whose logic gave us such remarkable books as “Why we cannot be Christian”) hit me. In it, he writes about this idea of writer Alessandro Baricco (author of the great novel “Silk”) about our society being barbarized (ampong other causes, by the use of new networked technologies). Baricco sees the people who fill commercial centers as the people being barbarized, while Brin & Page, the creators of Google, are the new barbarians, those who are changing the world. Well, Brin & Page didn’t read Flaubert (the Classics) when they changed the world, because, well… because they didn’t have the time to read “invented stories“: they were too busy changing the world and producing knowledge.

Thus, he continues in his post (read it in an (approximate) English translation, courtesy of Google!), so happened with Newton, who entered a theatre just once -only to exit before the end!- or Darwin (who found Shakespeare “intolerably dull”), or all those “barbarians” who are committed to creating a new world. Odifreddi ends with this provocative reflection (again, translation by Google):

And then, more generally, is not there a risk that those who are accustomed to be told stories, eventually become easy prey to the storyteller?

NB: Aquí hay una buenísima entrevista de Odifreddi a El País, de 2008.

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Attraversiamo

Posted on September 20, 2010 by Antonio Vantaggiato
Eat, Pray, Love
Image via Wikipedia

What do you want to do? What are the biggest answers? Most important, what are the greatest questions?

This is what Elizabeth Gilbert asked herself on her quest which was to bring her to a discovery trip throughout one year spent in Rome, India and Bali.

Game of words, is what she likes and pursues. Liz loves language, so while learning Italian she gets enchanted with a simple verb like “attraversare” (“the ‘ah’ of trepidation, the sweetness of the ‘s’…”), literally to walk across, and which will bring the film to a close while she crosses over the sea with the man she is happy to love, at last.
This is Hollywood at its best circa 2010. Really a nice, well done motion picture, with a total respect for the book it’s born of. A little romantic, but solid in its focus on the main message of the book: know thyself, ask questions of yourself, try and understand what you love.
Liz and friends talk about describing cities with words. What word would you describe Stockholm with? “Conformity” Rome? “Sex” they all say.

Why is it so difficult to answer those questions? Why is it so difficult to know what one loves? Is it because we try for all our lives to be the guys we “want” to be, as opposed to the man and women we’d love to be? Is it because we learn some patter-matching response schemes and we apply them blindly through most of our life?

I was sad while watching the movie, sadder than I remember I was when reading her book.

I was watching the romanticized shots from Rome and I was saying to myself “What the hell! What about your own questions?” Nice shots by the way, with the usual American rhetoric of “Italians know how to live life”, the “dolce far niente” (sweet do nothing), etc and conversely, the stereotype of Americans being perceived in Italy as tunnel-vision-prone, workaholic people who can have fun but know not how to have pleasure.

Still, the question lingered above my head while watching the movie, while the story took off from Italy and touched India and Bali. Bali, a place I visited when my eldest daughter was just 4 years old! The sadness I believe came not from revisiting the rhetoric shots (with all they remind me about Italy or Bali), but from realizing I have not yet found those answers. Worse, I have just begun asking the questions! But perhaps this is very good news.

You will lose all your money. Don’t worry: You will get it all back.

Here’s a nice interview with Liz Gilbert. Enjoy, read the book, then…

… go see the movie!

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Three persons; one passion to learn and change

Posted on September 19, 2010 by Antonio Vantaggiato

After one week has passed since the New Web Symposium of Sept. 3rd, I cannot but remember our three speakers and their different backgrounds.

I linked their presentations and wrote a summary of other people’s notes of their talks here: Toda redención es mutua.

Today, I just want to go back to them, and think of one little thing which is common to them all, besides their beliefs in the Web as a changing force for education and other social issues.

All three of them are actually people who made themselves on a path different from the professional path suggested by their studies. Jim Groom (bavatuesdays) is a literature major, plus cinema. Dolors Reig (El Caparazón) and Mario Núñez (DigiZen) are psychologists, plus other specialties and interests.

Jim built himself a knowledge of programming for the WordPress environment which is really way off his literary background. Still, he is a very good programmer! And one who can quote Shakespeare and b-movies! And he went pursuing a career in programming and educational hacking. Not really your typical description of a Literature program’s goals.

Mario is the psychologist who first practiced and later chose the education/research path. Through that, he also developed strong computing skills and now can manage a Web server as easily as a Jung treatise.

Dolors is the woman who hasn’t accepted the lurings of academia and stayed on her own, designing her own path from the outside. Thus, Dolors is the one self-entrepreneur among them, the person who has been relying on blog and Web 2.0 technology to create from nothing her own space. A testimony to this trend, Dolors is so the woman who symbolized at the Symposium the possibilities the New Web offers to people who just want to take their own professional life in their hands. It’s possible, it’s fun: she says!

However, all three share this last entrepreneur thing, since all three did not follow the path suggested by their studies: Mario did not become a practicing psychologist, Jim did not become a literature scholar, exactly like Dolors. Also, all three learned by themselves! No teachers involved, except perhaps people who served as mentors, as inspirations and guide. Only their own passion pushed them through learning! OMG: Informal learning appearing…

These Web 2.0 technologies are people-enabling and life changing, aren’t they.

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Wanted, but not Welcome

Posted on September 18, 2010 by Antonio Vantaggiato

Wanted, but not welcome

This is the video presented some days ago in Milan, completely shot with migrants’ cellphones. It tells the hard story of people who escape their fate in Africa and try their fortune going north.
They first cross the Sahara desert on overstuffed trucks. Those who survive embark often on small rafts to cross from the shores of Libya to Italy. Those who survive may be “rescued” in international waters by Italian ships. But they ignore they will sent back to Libya, in force of current agreements. Those who get ashore unnoticed will begin living as clandestine; if they get caught they will be housed in awful, overpopulated camps until deportation.

Those most unfortunate who get shipped back to Libya will be brought out of the country, and left to survive, or die, at the desert border, back where they had begun their travels.

Watch the video: it’s strong enough, specially at the end, to shock our sensibility.

Wanted, but not welcome

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Teachers: can we be replaced by machines?

Posted on September 13, 2010 by Antonio Vantaggiato

A Quote by Sugata Mitra, from his talk at TED,  Feb. 2007.

Whenever you go to a teacher and show them some technology the teacher’s first reaction is, you cannot replace a teacher with a machine — it’s impossible. I don’t know why it’s impossible, but, even for a moment, if you did assume that it’s impossible — I have a quotation from Sir Arthur C. Clarke, the science fiction writer whom I met in Colombo, and he said something which completely solves this problem. He said a teacher than can be replaced by a machine should be.

OMG. How true and mystifying this is. Easy to say, get rid of the bad teacher. But I’m proposing here a new way to look at the issue. May teachers be, as a whole, the issue here? May teachers be education’s bottleneck, after all?

I’m starting to think we actually may be. We are the forces opposing to whatever change. We oppose changes in curricula (students ought to study that before this, because it worked for me, essentially); we impose stupid driving-license-style exams we call “quizzes” (weren’t quizzes once upon a time just tv shows?); we focus on “objective” content instead of showing students what it means to pursue a research quest; we still debate over constructivism or, now, connectivism, but our classes are done essentially the same way as Martin Luther’s.

This is one reason good enough to continue my series around myths of teaching and learning.
If I should find the social class which is the least prone to innovation, guess what would that be? Teachers!

Teachers, might the Pink Floyd sing, Leave Your Children Alone!!!

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