Card stacks

Today, after a pleasant meeting at UPR’s Graduate School of Information and Technology Science, just above the library, my attention was caught by some strange furniture in the shape of drawers.

Card stacks

[Photo by me. CC Licence BY-NC-SA]

Yes! They are drawers containing the famed catalogue cards which I used to browse when there was no Web. Little did we know of what was there to miss when it was decreed they had to disappear in many libraries!!

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Creation and meaning and House of Cards

[No spoilers ahead] One episode of the new season of House of Cards has some Tibetan monks make  a beautiful colored-sand mandala in the White House. Like all good mandalas (and puzzles, by the way) a mandala -as a pure exercise of meditation- is to be swept away as soon as it is finished. Volatility of all that is created? Non-attachment to stuff? Finiteness of human creations? OK, sure enough, it’s more or less old stuff. The novelty comes because one night the President comes back home and he notices the monks (and the mandala) aren’t there.

Mandala

Photo by me. License cc-BY-NC-SA.

Gone. So, the metaphor gets more powerful, see? Power, and volatility, and humanness. All finite and gone with the wind. But then, there’s another big, interesting side. Frank and Claire discuss on their bearings as a couple, and he comes out mentioning that they created the life they wanted.

Exactly. Life as a product of life. Life as a creation of our own mind and work and our most intimate ourselves is nothing but a creation made by… ourselves. A creation -as volatile as any other- and as personal and subjective as possible. I mean, we do not “only” give meaning to all we think and do, but we create that meaning and project it onto everything. Powerful metaphors for a simple tv series, eh?

Now, I’m also thinking that while doing their meditation with mechanical art (perhaps even our ideas of creativity and inspiration are constructed and mechanical, seem to suggest the monks), they might as well dedicate that time and concentration and energy to solving (mechanically) some of the greatest problems of mankind, like many computers do.

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Plaza de Toros

The roads on the Internets are infinite. A simple question lingered on myself, which Hilda promptly answered. Were there bullfight arenas in Puerto Rico in the past? With real corridas? –Yes, she said. I remember one in Isla Verde, she reminded.

An easy googling produced the evidence. Indeed at Isla Verde (not far from the San Juan airport) there stood one. Viva Internet!

Plaza de Toros - Isla Verde (1960s).

[Plaza de Toros, Isla Verde (1960s). Photo by Hernán Bustelo, Flickr.]

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Nordic

Ny-Ålesund is an extreme place, probably the northern-most inhabited place on Earth.

Post Office in Ny Alesund by Tom Phillips.

Photo by Tom Phillips.
Post Office in Ny Alesund. CC License A-2.0

It has a post office and a hotel. It is an international research station on the island of Spitsbergen, in the Svalbard archipelago, north of Norway. I came to know about this place at a recent beautiful art expo by Osvaldo Budet and Shonah Trescott, where a gorgeous series of images of this arctic region where shown. These images document the man-made changes, which are often irreversible, upon the environment.

Osvaldo Budet & Shonah Trescott, 40 Days in the Arctic

I always daydream about the North (and –by symmetry– the South), its clear lightness, cold brightness and infinite waters. So, my family and my travels have often involved Canada, with its lovely Price Edward Island and Nova Scotia, and of course the coast of British Columbia. I dream about visiting Iceland and southern Patagonia. However, this post is not about traveling. But about the curious coincidence that a TV series I am about to watch, just recently broadcast in the UK, is precisely set there –but shot in Iceland. The series’ title is Fortitude,  played by the great Sofie_Gråbøl of the memorable Forbrydelsen (The Killing). OK, thus spins the world.

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The face-to-face myth

Writer Susan Pinker published a nice article on The New York Times titled Can Students Have Too Much Tech? It is a bit biased, in my opinion.

First, let me say I haven’t yet read her bestselling book The Village Effect: How Face-to-Face Contact Can Make us Healthier, Happier, and Smarter, in which she –according to the reviews I saw– explains why face-to-face contact and communication is better than technologically mediated communication. I am eager to read the book, and I want to immediately say I sympathize with her position. I, too, believe that touching and looking in the eyes another human being is “better”. But –that’s the point– what does “better” mean? In what capacity or sense is it better to communicate in close intimacy?

Certainly in many ways, we’d answer. But not necessarily all. If I’m angry, for instance, it may better to have a mediated contact. It depends, but again, I tend to sympathize: True, let’s say it is better, in the sense we all intuitively understand. However, when the telephone was invented, people screamed that it would have ended all intimacy.

So, I look at claims like these with some skepticism. The thing with Pinker, I think, is that she confuses Obama’s just and fair call to “protect a free and open Internet” and “extend its reach to every classroom and every community,” with “more technology in the classroom […], a policy-making panacea.”

All Pinker arguments would be OK if she had separated the two things. One thing is Internet access in every classroom and another altogether is to have more tech in the classroom. The former implies a recognition of the Internet (and more exactly in our case, the Web) as the most important technology the humankind has produced after the printing press, with all its fantastic and revolutionary impact on all aspects of life. We are just beginning to understand this and to make good use of it within the educational framework. But we still use such great tech the old way, so we keep lecturing students instead of devising new and human-rich forms of interaction among students and faculty. We lecture and we record lectures on iPads. Wow. Progress?

The latter means exactly that: using devices which are connected to the Internet but disconnected from the educational experiences our students seek and deserve. Experiences, not lectures, not games, not videos. Until we keep reusing new technology the old ways, there won’t be any real substantial progress, and education’s problems will live on.

In a review by Stefan Stern on the LA Times (with the even-more-biased title, To truly interact, try it offline), it is noted that “Citing a wealth of research and reinforced with her own arguments, Pinker suggests we should make an effort — at work and in our private lives — to promote greater levels of personal intimacy.”

Alone 3

Certainly true, but there are many studies that suggest young people well connected online have deeper social skills and establish truer friendships than people who are not. Thus, the Internet and the Web may actually promote intimacy in many instances. Sure, if you asked me if I would prefer a skin-to-skin intimacy with my spouse or a “virtual” one, which one do you believe I’d choose? But this doesn’t necessarily mean that other forms of intimacy aren’t possible. What counts is intimacy, and definitely the medium to live intimacy changes it. Also, Pinker in the same article is quoted as writing:

In a short evolutionary time we have changed from group-living primates skilled at reading each other’s every gesture and intention, to a solitary species, each one of us preoccupied with our own screen.

This is more or less the same position of Sherry Turkle (in her book Together Alone), and this we must be worried about, meaning we ought to find a balance in the use of high tech in education and in other walks of life. Technology is always a double-sided coin. Nobody would say today that writing would impair our memory, but Socrates actually did. Martin Luther hated books, and some dislike ebooks.

Image by Ales Motyl, License CC BY-NC-SA.

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