ijohnpederson » Change

Apple iPhone 4: Hands-On @ BoingBoing

John Pederson — Wed, 23 Jun 2010 00:08:46 +0000

AT&T still sucks, and the best engineering out of Cupertino won’t change that.

via Apple iPhone 4: Hands-on review – Boing Boing.

“Limits on lists.” Bonus: Look who’s back! They come back. They always do.

John Pederson — Sat, 05 Jun 2010 14:16:01 +0000

+++

My own internal dialog in working on lists of instructions goes something like…

OK, step one. Where are my reading glasses?

Step two. Going good! Get a beer.

On to step four. Wait, did I skip step three?

Up to step five. Damn, this isn’t working. Oh, I did step two wrong. I have to go back.

Step six already. This is completely unintelligible. English is obviously not this writer’s first – or second language!

Step seven. To hell with it.

And step eight – give it to a kid who can do the task without looking at instructions at all.

Optional step nine – complain about technology in general.

Step ten – have another beer.

via Doug Johnson’s Blue Skunk Blog.

Related…

I am giving Twitter another go. Since I whacked my previous account, I now have a new Twitter name: BlueSkunkBlog

They come back. They always do.

We can now get on with learning, right?

John Pederson — Thu, 25 Mar 2010 01:45:00 +0000

Wisconsin fourth graders scored 220, which was the same as the national average. The state score was not significantly different from 2007 when it was 223.

Wisconsin eighth graders scored 266, which was above the national average of 262. The state score was not significantly different from 2007.

Because if they were 120, there’d be some sort of cause for alarm.

Source: Wisconsin Schools’ Scores Change

Happy New Decade

John Pederson — Sat, 02 Jan 2010 00:56:15 +0000

“The first internet generation is old enough to spend money, go to work and build companies. Industries are being built every day (and old ones are fading). The revolution is in full swing, and an entire generation is eager to change everything because of it.”

I’ll add that our “internet generation” spawns make up a large part of your “elementary school” demographic. Remember that “digital native” meme of the past 10 years? It’s not just the students anymore. It’s the students and their parents.

Happy New Decade.

[Source: Seth Godin]

This I Believe

John Pederson — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 19:27:46 +0000

In no particular order.

“The network is more powerful than the node.”

Story of my life during the past 3 months.

That little doodle in the bottom left is, in itself, my favorite Hugh cartoon. The title of that doodle is “The network is more powerful than the node.” The backstory: ”While the network is more powerful than the node, the network needs nodes like flowers need sunlight.”

No Child Left Behind

It’s a social issue for the Democrats, a fiscal issue for the Republicans. Both are right. It’s screwed up in the implementation.

Read these books once each year.

This is the gear list.

MacBook Pro (15 inches)
iPhone (Hide the phone icon on the home screen.)
Timbuk2 bags

Verbs are more interesting than nouns.

Learning is more interesting than education.

One Laptop Per Child is an education project, not a laptop project.

Lorem Ipsum is simply dummy text of the printing and typesetting industry. Lorem Ipsum has been the industry’s standard dummy text ever since the 1500s, when an unknown printer took a galley of type and scrambled it to make a type specimen book. It has survived not only five centuries, but also the leap into electronic typesetting, remaining essentially unchanged. It was popularised in the 1960s with the release of Letraset sheets containing Lorem Ipsum passages, and more recently with desktop publishing software like Aldus PageMaker including versions of Lorem Ipsum.

You are a social object.

Ze Frank is the man.

Color Wars 2008 was among the coolest things to happen on the Internet.

Networks are made up of people.

Net neutrality is a consumer vs. producer issue.

There’s a huge disconnect between upload and download speeds. Media companies choke the upload to make sure that we are all consumers instead of producers of information online.

We overestimate what we can do in a year and underestimate what we can do in five.

Unlearning.

It’s more important than learning.

We are all 6 year olds in this social media revolution.

Jimbob Says it All.

21st Century Skills

We’ll know that “21st century skills” have finally caught on only when they aren’t called “21st century skills” anymore.

Favorite City

Seattle, Washington

Favorite Dining Experience

Pitty Pat’s Porch in Atlanta, Georgia during NECC 2007

Favorite Steakhouse

Five O’Clock Club in Milwaukee, Wisconsin

Favorite Italian

Luigi’s Restaurant in Washington, DC

Favorite Seafood

Bubba Gump in Maui, Hawaii

Favorite Barbeque

Goode Company in Houston, Texas

Favorite Dessert

Goode Company Pecan Pie in Houston, Texas

Favorite Fish

Piece of Lake Superior Salmon purchased at Superior Meats in Superior, Wisconsin

Favorite Pizza

Glass Nickel Pizza in Madison, Wisconsin

Favorite Fast Food

Butter Burger Deluxe Basket at Culvers Restaurants throughout Wisconsin

Favorite Deli

Fraboni’s Italian Deli in Madison, Wisconsin

Favorite Mexican

The Wet Burrito from Los Dos Amigos in Houghton, Michigan

Favorite Concert Experience

Rage Against the Machine opening Lalapalooza way back in the day.

Favorite Moment in Sports

In a hockey game when player loses a glove an fan yells “Somebody lost a hand!”

Networked Learning Manifesto

John Pederson — Sat, 17 Oct 2009 22:30:12 +0000

Overview

Networked learning enables powerful new forms of social organization and knowledge. Experiencing it changes learners fundamentally. How do we construct personal meaning amid the chaos of this emerging medium?

In 2005 I began developing a concept titled The Networked Learning Manifesto. Based on The Cluetrain Manifesto, the seminal work of how social media changes markets, I outlined how emerging social networking technologies would influence learning and teaching. Building on these ideas, I want to expand educators’ thinking about networked learning and help begin to construct personal meaning for how it influences learning.

Networked Learning Manifesto

Learning is conversation consisting of human beings. Networks are enabling new learning, new conversations, and new relationships that simply were not possible in the past. Rather than being one to many, this learning is happening many to many. Networked learning is owned by people, not institutions, and cares little about demographic sectors.

Networked learning allows human beings to speak to each other in a powerful new way. It enables new forms of social organization and knowledge exchange to emerge. Networked learners are getting smarter, more informed, more organized, and are changing what it means to teach and what it means to learn. Networked learners realize that they get far better information and support from one another than through traditional means. Networked learners know more than schools do about their own learning.

Schools struggle to speak the same voice as networked learners. Their attempts sound hollow, flat, literally inhuman. By speaking a language that is distant, uninviting, and arrogant they build walls instead of embracing the opportunity to communicate with their learners. Schools need to talk with learners with whom they hope to create relationships, else networked learners will seek schools who speak their own language.

Networked learners are getting smarter, more informed, more organized, and are changing what it means to teach and what it means to learn.

Networked learners are communicating. The conversations are happening in schools, in communities, and online. People talking to people. Not just about rules, standardized tests, curriculum, and funding. Schools depend heavily on these networks to generate and share critical knowledge that is learning. When they are not constrained by fear and filters, the conversation they encourage sounds remarkably like learning. Schools need to resist the urge to control these networked conversations. Communities are built through conversation. Human speech about human concerns. Schools must share the concerns of their communities, but first they must belong to a community. However, at the moment, millions of networked learners now perceive schools as little more than quaint legal fictions that are actively preventing these conversations from happening.

Smart schools will help the inevitable happen sooner. A healthy community organizes learners.

For networked learners, our allegiance is to ourselves‚ our friends, our acquaintances, even our sparring partners. Schools that have no part in networked learning also have no future. To traditional schools, communities of networked learners may appear confused, may sound confusing. However, we are organizing faster than they are. We have better tools, more new ideas, no rules to slow us down. We are emerging and linking to each other. We are watching. But we are not waiting.

Supporting Research

boyd, danah. “YouTube – danah boyd on Teenagers who are Living and Learning with Social Media.” 22 Sep 2009 .

Locke, Chris et al. “The Cluetrain Manifesto.” The Cluetrain Manifesto. 22 Sep 2009 .

“National School Reform Faculty.” National School Reform Faculty. 22 Sep 2009 .

Nussbaum-Beach, Sheryl, and Will Richardson. “Powerful Learning Practice.” Powerful Learning Practice. 22 Sep 2009 .

Pederson, John. “Networked Learning Manifesto.” Networked Learning Manifesto. 22 Sep 2009 .

Siemens, George. “Connectivism: A Learning Theory for the Digital Age.” Connectivism: A Learning Theory for the Digital Age. 22 Sep 2009 .

Thoughts on Core

John Pederson — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 15:50:22 +0000

Will Richardson…

I’ll admit to a certain sense of “whatever” about these standards; there’s little doubt at this point they will be adopted pretty much as is, and they reflect even more a continuing, frustrating retrenchment of traditional thinking about education that seems to be permeating the conversation right now. When we hear that our kids’ performance on the Math NAEP is essentially flat, and the Secretary of Education’s response is that the results “underscore the need for “reforms that will accelerate student achievement,” and that those “reforms” include “opening more charter schools and linking teacher pay to performance,” you know that the way we assess kids isn’t going to change any time soon. At the end of the day, it still feels like the battle for sanity when it comes to the future of education won’t be won until there are enough people who understand that many of the traditional standards and assessments that “worked” for us won’t work for our kids. In other words, no time soon.

Source: On Common Standards

Chris Lehmann…

This Core Standards movement should scare everyone who believes that meaning and learning is still most powerfully made in the spaces that students and teachers share. More than teachers, students, state administrators, the group that stands most to gain from national standards and a national test is the education-industrial complex.

Source: Core Standards – Sound Bites and Standardization

I still wonder if informed, networked parents might be more effective than educators or policy makers to take learning back from the education-industrial complex. Teachers have a ally in parents that’s going unnoticed. The problem is that neither knows how to talk to each other. I’m more comfortable around my car mechanic than I am my child’s second grade teacher.

I’m back to wondering whether I should run for school board or start a Facebook group.

Will Richardson's reflections on opening day(s).

John Pederson — Thu, 03 Sep 2009 01:16:58 +0000

What I am sensing, though, is that more schools and districts seem to “get” that the Web is affording some new opportunities for learning, and that they are willing to seriously consider what the impacts are for their schools. The problem is, and this is just my take on it, that most still see it as a conversation about technology as opposed to a conversation about change.

Source: Opening Day(s)

How to use Google Reader subscription bundles. Bonus: See who I stalk.

John Pederson — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 20:30:28 +0000

Way back in the day we all used to go to Will Richardson’s Bloglines account and steal his shared OPML file. This allowed the rest of us to simply import his subscriptions into our RSS reader and we were all smart like that.

Then we all moved to Google Reader.

I’m not sure how long the “subscription bundle” piece has been available for Google Reader. It’s buried a few clicks deep. But it’s powerful. Below is a quick silent film produced by yours truly that shows where and how to click. It’s up to you to make it interesting.

Tip: Expand this video to full screen size as you play it back to eliminate most of the distortion.

Now for examples.

Here is a link to a selection of blogs I watch dealing with issues of broadband.

Here are the people, places, and things I watch dealing with education. It’s true. I rename each feed using the author’s name instead of their silly blog titles.

Have fun.

I'm looking for a WordPress + Twitter ninja to answer a question.

John Pederson — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 01:19:27 +0000

I’m doing a bit of pixel lifting this weekend. Rethinking the integration of my blog and Twitter account. Subtle changes.

I need is a way for visitors to send any comments they leave out to their Twitter accounts. I’ve found two extensions (Echo and Disqus) that do this in a blunt way…they take over my entire comment function and add the kitchen sink. I’m looking for something more subtle. Similar to “Tweet this…”, but for comments. I want people to be able to point at their own comments on my post, not my post.

Understand?

Testing out tweaks to my new blog design.

John Pederson — Sun, 23 Aug 2009 16:52:32 +0000

Check out this use of a pullquote. This is what makes the Interwebs awesome.

Lorem Ipsum has been the industry’s standard dummy text ever since the 1500s, when an unknown printer took a galley of type and scrambled it to make a type specimen book.Lorem Ipsum is simply dummy text of the printing and typesetting industry. Lorem Ipsum has been the industry’s standard dummy text ever since the 1500s, when an unknown printer took a galley of type and scrambled it to make a type specimen book. It has survived not only five centuries, but also the leap into electronic typesetting, remaining essentially unchanged. It was popularised in the 1960s with the release of Letraset sheets containing Lorem Ipsum passages, and more recently with desktop publishing software like Aldus PageMaker including versions of Lorem Ipsum.

School was the big thing for a long time.

John Pederson — Wed, 19 Aug 2009 18:44:28 +0000

If I were going to wager, I’d say that the free, abundant learning combination is the one that’s going to change the world.

School was the big thing for a long time. School is tests and credits and notetaking and meeting standards.Learning, on the other hand, is ‘getting it’. It’s the conceptual breakthrough that permits the student to understand it then move on to something else. Learning doesn’t care about workbooks or long checklists. [From School Was the Big Thing for a Long Time]

Please Turn on Your Cell Phone

John Pederson — Thu, 13 Aug 2009 13:24:39 +0000

It might surprise you to learn that students from New York City’s most impoverished neighborhoods arrive at school each day with personal computers. The problem is that they deposit these powerful learning tools at the nearby bodega — where they’re held like a coat check service for a dollar a day — because their personal computers are cell phones, and they are banned by New York City’s school chancellor, Joel Klein. Many students will circumvent the ban by blind-texting from their backpacks or from the bathroom. But it’s not that simple for those who have to pass through metal detectors and scanners to gain entry into the school building each day.

Source: Please Turn on Your Cell Phone: Change Observer: Design Observer

Update: James, a native New Yorker new to WiscNet, caught this story. A) Confirmed. B) “It’s not all that bad. A few years ago it used to be knives they checked at the bodegas.” C) Worse, “…they didn’t use the metal detectors every day. You knew they were checking when long lines developed outside of school. On those days, I just went back home.”

Re: Your AT&T Contract

John Pederson — Mon, 10 Aug 2009 17:56:50 +0000

This may allow all of us to leave AT&T without penalty.

In other words, thanks to the new wording of the AT&T contract, if you feel like entering into a class action lawsuit against AT&T, well, you can’t. It’s all there in black and white.

Source: Get angry: AT&T changes contract to prevent class action lawsuits

The New "Money for Megabits" Program

John Pederson — Sun, 09 Aug 2009 00:13:53 +0000

The deeper issues are more troubling. Cash for Clunkers only makes sense if we believe that our #1 problem is that we don’t drive sufficiently fancy cars.

Well said.

Rather than putting in the effort to innovate through technology, American car companies find it much more effective to make money through political means.

If we spent the Cash for Clunkers money on Let’s Try to Catch up with Korea…a lot of Americans might not have needed to make so many trips in their cars because (1) they could work from home, (2) they could shop from home, (3) they could get information from home, (4) they could find out, from home, that some place they were planning to go was in fact closed.

Well intentioned.

Unfortunately, AT&T is the new GM. Give them $N billion and the only thing they know how to do is what they’ve already done for the past 20 years. Apply 10% to technology. Apply 50% to other. Use the remaining 40% to fund the political efforts to receive their next fix.

We have solved the technology issue. It pains me to watch folks get excited about their new 10Mbps connection when 10Gbps is within their grasp.

The Good: You don’t have to go to Korea. It even exists in Wisconsin.

The Bad: We have 40% of $N billion working against us and only 10% of $N billion is going toward their version of innovation. It’s working out very well for them.

Quotes and Inspiration: Philip Greenspun’s Weblog » Cash for Clunkers

Update: An example two stories later in my newsreader.

Context: The telecommunications industry says “Everything is fine with broadband.” The government, upon dedicating $7.2 billion in stimulus money to broadband, asks them to prove it. Show us who has access to what and for how much. The government antes up $.3 billion to make a map.

If this mapping exercise is going to be worth even 1/10 of the money Congress appropriated, it’s about time for the government to step away from the table with the industry, remind itself of its public interest obligations and quit giving away the store. It doesn’t matter if it was a “good deal” or a “bad deal” to make those changes. There was no reason for any deal. Either scrap the program, extend the deadlines and start over, or hold the industry to some meaningful commitments.

Source: NTIA Losing Game of Data Chicken | Public Knowledge

Imagine three companies are working together to lay the first highway system. Everything is a toll road. Those public entities that need 10 lane interstates have already built them in the normal course of business at 30% the cost of the tolls that others paying on county highways provided by companies.

The government dedicates $7.2 billion with the intention of putting in the 10 lane interstate they have heard about.

40% of $N billion first goes towards twisting the meaning of “10 lane interstate” into “county highway”. Fact: The broadband stimulus bill defines “broadband” as 768k down, 200k up. Seriously. Welcome to 1996.

Next, when $.3 billion is spent map what already exists, the companies convince the government to not disclose a) how big their roads are, b) where they go, and c) how much they are charging.

Change Your Icon to Support Victims of Twitter Attacks

John Pederson — Fri, 07 Aug 2009 00:55:12 +0000

Show support for victims of Twitter denial of service (DDOS) attacks.

Change

Source: jasonpermenter

New Network Neutrality Bill

John Pederson — Tue, 04 Aug 2009 19:52:35 +0000

You can only get away with charging users $50/month for a 3Mb service for so long before users demand more. If the market were to ever get competitive, how would they provide value?

Imagine if AT&T subscribers could access Google twice as fast as Yahoo (or another start up search engine) because Google cut deals with AT&T for preferential treatment. The Internet as we know it would change substantially and innovation would slow because those who could afford to cut deals with major service providers would attract most viewers.

You know how the NFL Network gets two games sometime in November and 1/3 of people are eligible to receive it because they have DirecTV? It’s like that. But with the Interwebs.

Source: New Network Neutrality Bill
Site: Municipal Networks

Bad Idea, AT&T

John Pederson — Mon, 27 Jul 2009 01:19:40 +0000

AT&T has just opened perhaps the most vindictive, messy can of worms it could have possibly found. Blocking any site seems like a breach of user trust, but the decision to block 4chan in particular just seems stupid. Expect the web equivalent of rioting if this doesn’t change soon.

via Tech Crunch.

Progressive Education, Waves, Bulls, Sand Castles, Etc.

John Pederson — Sun, 12 Jul 2009 14:07:31 +0000

Ze Frank on Waves

In 1908, of course, Ocean Beach won the least creative name for a public space ever contest coming in just ahead of Green Park in London.

On that beach, young children were making things that kind of looked like castles by pushing together tiny grains of silicon dioxide. Annoying parents stood by to tell the children what castles did, and did not, look like. The end product was often intricate with buttresses, ornamental shells, and sharp defined corners.

For a moment the children could step back and say “this is a castle,” and very few people would argue with them, but being on the edge of an ocean, beaches also sometimes have waves.

These waves often started somewhere far away, and are the result of many incremental forces. As they approach the shore they have a certain inevitability to them. Waves don’t really give a crap what a castle is supposed to look like, and they don’t really give a crap about the children that made those castles.

In fact, waves aren’t really capable of giving a crap at all. When they’re done, the waves leave behind a clump that’s soft and rounded that doesn’t really look like a castle anymore. It looks like something, but we don’t really have a word for it.

On Ocean Beach some people get tired of building sand castles and choose to interact with the waves directly.

Some people just hang out and bob up and down. Other people float on things that are filled with air, but everyone knows it’s the surfers that really know what’s goin’ on. Besides the Pacific Ocean, San Francisco is also on the edge of something else.

To the south, in silicon valley, hundreds of thousands of people play on the leading edge of technology.

As they struggle to make a name for themselves on that beach they’re also confronted by waves. Waves that started awhile ago and are the result of many incremental forces.

Some people push together a whole bunch of little bits so that they kind of resemble places that we’re familiar with. Annoying people stand over their shoulder and tell them what things like community and friendship do, and don’t, look like.

If they’re lucky, they can step back and for a moment it reminds them of something that they’ve seen before, but the wave has a certain inevitability to it, and the wave doesn’t really give a crap about what you’ve seen before.

When it retreats they’re left with something that doesn’t really look like community, and it doesn’t really look like friendship. It looks like something but we don’t really have a name for it yet.

Other people swim out, and they bob up and down. Sometimes, when people get to the top of a wave, they say “I made this wave, this wave is because of me, and because I’m wearing yellow swimming trunks,” and then lots of other people put on yellow swimming trunks and the swim out, but by the time they get there that guys at the bottom and some guy in red trunks is yelling the same thing.

Other people sit on inflated rafts, so even when they’re at the bottom their little heads peek out over the top of the waves, but, eventually, a lot of those guys tip over or they run out of people that are willing to blow.

It’s the surfers that are the most fun to watch.

They know they didn’t start the waves, but they do study them. While they’re surfing, they don’t congratulate each other for pushing the water closer to the shore. They understand that the wave has a certain inevitability to it, that it doesn’t give a crap about them… it just moves.

So, they play on it and explore its natural contours and do tricks. And, by doing that, they give the wave meaning, human meaning.

Sure, they get beaten up quite a bit, but when they get it right they can actually experience what waves can mean to people, and when they come back in, those are the people that get to name those little rounded lumps of sand.

This is Zefrank, hoping that you’ve got a surfboard.

Ze Frank on Progressive

So in Tasmania there were these bizarre events. Crop circles kept on appearing in medicinal poppy fields and farmers wanted an explanation. Maybe it was some weird weather pattern, maybe aliens were trying to communicate with us, but it turned out that the crop circles were caused by wallabies, which are like little kangaroos. These wallabies would go into the poppy fields, eat the poppies, and then take off, but by this point they’d be so high that they wind up hopping around in circles.

Last week a bizarre event in politics left plenty of people searching for explanation. Sara Palin resigned as Governor of Alaska in the middle of her term. There were all sorts of speculations. Is she going to run for office? Was she just sick of her job? Are aliens trying to communicate with us? In her resignation speech, Palin said that she was “Taking her fight for what was right for Alaska in a new direction.” But she was a bit vague on what direction that direction was. But, at the end of her speech, she hinted at it with a quote that was mistakenly attributed to General McArthur.

“We are not retreating. We are advancing in a another direction.”

And it’s true. Advancing and retreating can look very similar, especially if your goal is simply to get away from wherever you are right now.

It can be hard to tell. For example take the running of the bulls which was celebrated in Spain last week. Who’s advancing and who’s retreating? From the bulls’ point of view, they could be like “Why are all the people running? There must be something chasing us, we should get out of here.”

And that makes me think of all the fancy stock market mechanisms that lead to the financial crisis. “Why are all these bulls running? I don’t know, but let’s stay ahead of them!” One little stumble and what we thought was progress winds up being a retreat to recession.

But that makes me wonder what progress is. Is it moving away from something you don’t like our towards something you do? Plenty of people call themselves “progressives” these days, and progressive means advancing forward, but the definition of forward has changed quite a bit over the last 100 years of progressivism and critics say that modern progressives are just retreating back to socialism.

To find out what the definition of progressive actually is, I went to the online journal Campus Progress, which is an outreach for the Center for American Progress. I found an article called “What is Progressive” by a young man named Andrew Garib.

Here’s my attempt at a radical oversimplification.

Conservatism sees the world and human nature as static and predictable, so progress is getting out of the way and letting people do their thing.

Liberalism on the other hand thinks that government can help build ideal societies and progress is getting closer to those utopian ideals.

But Garib says that progressives are different. They see the world as ever changing and dynamic. And the notion of progress changes with it.

I’m not sure if I totally sure if I understand what that means. But I do know that if progress is a moving target, it can be awfully hard to figure out whether you are advancing or retreating.

And all of that makes me think of former defense secretary Robert McNamara who died last week. McNamara was seen as the prime architect of the Vietnam War, but later in his life regretted not having withdrawn the troops sooner. McNamara experienced first hand the difficulties of knowing when progress means to advance and progress means to retreat.

In the documentary “The Fog of War”, McNamara pointed to an excerpt from T.S. Eliot, perhaps giving one more view of the definition of progress. It reads…

We shall not cease from exploration

And the end of all our exploring

Will be to arrive where we started

And know the place for the first time.

- T.S. Eliot

So in Tasmania there were these bizarre events. Crop circles kept on appearing in medicinal poppy fields and farmers wanted an explanation. Maybe it was some weird weather pattern, maybe aliens were trying to communicate with us, but it turned out that the crop circles were caused by wallabies, which are like little kangaroos. These wallabies would go into the poppy fields, eat the poppies, and then take off, but by this point they’d be so high that they wind up hopping around in circles.

Last week a bizarre event in politics left plenty of people searching for explanation. Sara Palin resigned as Governor of Alaska in the middle of her term. There were all sorts of speculations. Is she going to run for office? Was she just sick of her job? Are aliens trying to communicate with us? In her resignation speech, Palin said that she was “Taking her fight for what was right for Alaska in a new direction.” But she was a bit vague on what direction that direction was. But, at the end of her speech, she hinted at it with a quote that was mistakenly attributed to General McArthur.

“We are not retreating. We are advancing in a another direction.”

And it’s true. Advancing and retreating can look very similar, especially if your goal is simply to get away from wherever you are right now.

It can be hard to tell. For example take the running of the bulls which was celebrated in Spain last week. Who’s advancing and who’s retreating? From the bulls’ point of view, they could be like “Why are all the people running? There must be something chasing us, we should get out of here.”

And that makes me think of all the fancy stock market mechanisms that lead to the financial crisis. “Why are all these bulls running? I don’t know, but let’s stay ahead of them!” One little stumble and what we thought was progress winds up being a retreat to recession.

But that makes me wonder what progress is. Is it moving away from something you don’t like our towards something you do? Plenty of people call themselves progressives these days, and progressive means advancing forward, but the definition of forward has changed quite a bit over the last 100 years of progressivism and critics say that modern progressives are just retreating back to socialism.

To find out what the definition of progressive actually is, I went to the online journal Campus Progress, which is an outreach for the Center for American Progress. I found an article called “What is Progressive” by a young man named Andrew Garib. Here’s my attempt at a radical oversimplification.

Conservatism sees the world and human nature as static and predictable, so progress is getting out of the way and letting people do their thing.

Liberalism on the other hand thinks that government can help build ideal societies and progress is getting closer to those utopian ideals.

But Garib says that progressives are different. They see the world as ever changing and dynamic. And the notion of progress changes with it. I’m not sure if I totally sure if I understand what that means. But I do know that if progress is a moving target, it can be awfully hard to figure out whether you are advancing or retreating.

And all of that makes me think of former defense secretary Robert McNamara who died last week. McNamara was seen as the prime architect of the Vietnam War, but later in his life regretted not having withdrawn the troops sooner. McNamara experienced first hand the difficulties of knowing when progress means to advance and progress means to retreat.

In the documentary “The Fog of War”, McNamara pointed to an excerpt from T.S. Eliot, perhaps giving one more view of the definition of progress. It reads…

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
- T.S. Eliot

And now of the questions at the end of the chapter.

Are we too worried about the color of our swim trunks? Who is trying to name the little round lumps of sand? Who should be naming them?
What are we running from? What are we running towards? What is “it”? How do we get there from here if “it” is changing and dynamic?

A Few Rules About Twitter

John Pederson — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 01:09:04 +0000

Now that Oprah has gone and stirred the pot, it’s time for some rules.

Here are a few things I want to get out on the table regarding my use and preferences regarding Twitter.

1. I’m random about who I follow and why. I frequently delete around half the people I follow and start over. This strategy helps me discover new people, reconsider why I’m following the ones I do, and keeps my ADD in check.

2. I’m getting around 10 new followers a day. 8 of them are crack whores. The only reason Twitter works is because you choose the folks you follow. When 4 of 5 are spammers, it’s hard to take that “new follower” thing seriously.

3. I’m purposefully playing with your attention. I’m watching the people watch the caged monkey that is Twitter. I’ve watched Twitter enough. I’m watching you watch Twitter. Social objects, etc.

4. Don’t thank me for following you. Seriously. Odds are I was following you in the past.

5. Finally, and most important to this whole post, I need you to check the “Settings” of your Twitter account. Change “Name” to something other than your user name. Extra points if you use your name. Anything I use gives me the option of seeing your real name instead of your user name. Go ahead and use munkyhugz88 as your user name. Give me something I can recognize in the Name: field. Once we get this problem cleared up, I’m coming after those of you that use special characters.