Charlie A. Roys last blog post..Catholic Schools and homeschooling?

Talk about the eternal teacher

@Jabiz - Another great addition. In the army, we had a notion called the “total soldier concept”. It meant that two soldiers violating the same regulation would be punished differently, based on their totality as a soldier. In the same way, there’s the total online identity, as you say.

And the danger of cherry-picking to distort that identity (or identity construct).

When the Comment Challenge started, I got a lot of comments that showed the commenters didn’t “know” me like my regular visitors. It was somehow disturbing.

Okay, off to some faculty meeting. Boo.

Thanks again.

I only mention my case again because I have always argued that our online personalities are a reflections of our histories. So this assignment you have concocted is brilliant in that it shows people that a person is more than one blog post or opinion or “inappropriate” art project on Flickr. People are now a collection of what the web says they are. Sure we have a say in that image, but sometimes it may get out of our control. It is crucial that we see each other in a complete light and research each other’s stories. Just as we would want our students to use a variety of sources to understand historic figures, we would hope that we could see each other, bloggers and online personalities, in the same light. How much of a person’s blog one must read to get a full picture of who they are? How accurate are these sketches? Your idea raises many great questions!

I was thinking about what people would find if I was person X in your assignment. Sure there may be one or two things that may ruffle some feathers, but over all I think there is enough historical data of which I could be proud. I love this project and think it would be fantastic for students to do it at the beginning of the year on their teachers. Just think of it, what would be worse: to have students find a collection of your ideas and work on the web or for them to find nothing. The latter would almost be like you don’t even exists in their eyes and with 21st century students, perhaps you don’t.

Your post has spurred me to start a wikipedia page on myself to set the record straight. I will send you the link when it is up and running, so perhaps you can join me in writing my history.

Intrepid Teachers last blog post..First Trailer

For me source comes down to ‘rent you have to pay! ‘History goes to the winner’- not because the author, but because the audience (the winners or their descendents) will not tolerate (buy, pay the writers rent) an alternative opinion.

The nightly news by this measure is ‘history on amphetamines’. EM Gombrich suggests (and I paraphrase) that there is no ‘spirit o the times’ just artists responding to the needs of an audience.

I would refine the above maxim to ‘history goes to the audience’ and then suddenly history gets exciting – because you are starting to consider recorded history in the terms of popular audience.

‘The Persians’ (472 BC) written some 15 - 20 years after the Greco-Persian war (If you seen ‘300’ then you’ve seen one of the battles) could be considered a celebration of Greek supremacy or an attack by Aeschylus, on Athenian increasing imperial aspirations. Would Shakespeare have written a sympathetic view Richard III; given that the grand daughter of the winner (of the ‘War of the Roses’) was one of his patrons? That said, a US audience would not tolerate as sympathetic portrayal of Osama Bin Laden as Shakespeare gives Richard III.

If we could educate a contemporary audience to understand this, then their perception defined by ‘postmodernists’ would be less about content, than context.

At this point I roll out Dawkin’s concept of ‘memes’: ‘packets of information’ that are amoral, apolitical and perpetuate because the audience (infosphere) allow them to exist. Aeschylus and Shakespeare took their social criticism as far as they could because ultimately they needed to put ‘bums on seats’. The audience would not have tolerated a more defined ‘meme’ of criticism. What make them genius is that they still criticised, ‘paid their rent’ and assured the life of their meme by balancing potency of message against audience – respect!

Then we move to interpretation – ‘we learn from history that we do not learn form history’ – because we teach history in (left-brained) dates rather than in (right-brained) patterns.

If we look for patterns then our history teachers should set enquiries like: ‘Find the common patterns of human behaviour in the Peloponnesian war, WWI and the ‘War on Terror’ and based on evidence suggest an alternative path the US could pursue to assure its influence on the world will not fade in the same way that the Athenian and British empire?’

That said most history teacher who have come to enjoy patterns over dates; would challenge that I have not chosen the two most relevant wars to diagnose our current situation? So even at its most developed, interpretation of history is opened to folly and may simply end up as literary analogies. I’m about to ‘cross the Rubicon;’ so hold on.

This is what happens if you try to bring a hard science rational to social phenomena, believing the past in some ways, (like two parts of hydrogen to one part of oxygen always make water) will provide us with a guide to the future.

This is where the collaborative aspect of your wikiography starts to get shaky for me – The ‘aggregation of the many’ is not necessarily empirical evidence in terms of the scientific method and does not justify the historical validity of your aggregated life over other sources. It may go a long way to getting to a ‘truer truth’ than your own autobiography, but it may not be superior to well researched authorship.

Clay wikiography as told by his friends, enemies and everyone who ever read his blog or Clay told by the aggregation of his Twitter posts interpreted by Prof X with PhD in Twitterology. My truth about Clay will be in the version I prefer – so I am with the post-modernists (depressing bunch as they are) on that one.

The value I place on the historical ‘meme’ will be a function of the transaction I am currently engaged in. The life of Clay when talking to his friend, peers and even his enemies will have greater value if I quote the wikiography. The life of Clay as told by Prof X will have greater value with an audience who value Prof X’s opinion.

The patterns I use from history are only valuable in so much as they help me solve the challenge I am confronted with in the present. This is the way our students consume all knowledge – will it help me to achieve what I want to achieve? The relevance or authority of the source is defined by the transaction. This is where yours and Will’s posts have their potency.

I find it increasingly difficult emotionally, despite my daughter’s requests, to watch the video I made with my,now deceased, mother holding my new born daughter. Yet my daughter is enriched (which was my intention all along) by the viewing and the questions about my mother and my life as a child that result. This has personal relevant and very specific functionality. My concern with the ‘prosumer’ is that as we move from the personal do we lose relevance and just become another faulted historical text?

My belief is that beyond the personal, we should blog, podcast, vlog to solve problems in front of us now, not for the future. – Shakespeare wrote to solve the problem that confronted him, get the biggest audience, he did not write (lots of evidence of you want it) for posterity and neither should we. The human condition will persists and someone may find use in the artefacts we leave behind. But let history decide.

I am concerned that that beyond the private family audience all that we write i just propaganda and subjectivity is not mitigated by collaboration.

Gilbert Halcrows last blog post..Web 2.0, the Axolotl and Communication Literacy

I read the thread on Will’s blog, and was embarrassed to see that, as you mentioned, part of my comment had already been expressed (and more eloquently) in your comment over there. Apologies for not giving credit where it was due.

Jason Priems last blog post..Party like a chemical

Your project sounds very interesting. An interesting if not bizarre twist might be to pair with a colleague unknown to the students and for the sake of academic work insinuate with the students that Mr or Mrs. X is no longer with us. As they construct his or her views on current events based off of their past blogs and writings they could then at the end meet via skype or visit the actual person and see how close they were to being accurate.

Might be something in that mix that doesn’t mesh with the guidelines for good research but it would add an interesting twist.

Charlie A. Roys last blog post..Catholic Schools and homeschooling?

@John, Interesting as always. I’m with you on the summary crams. I’ve been doing little but test prep lately for my seniors’ AP Literature exam, and it’s been a head-shaking experience for me too.

I’d reply to comments on your posthumous self-eulogy. More mind-bending. And I’d pay to see a film of some of your history sections. I enjoy teaching history more than literature, and have missed it all year.

@C. Tschofen, I’ve thought about the lifespan of current web content due to the evolution of the tech formats. Should we really expect the day when our YouTube vdieos, blogs, podcasts, etc no longer work online? That’s a bummer. Points to the beauty of the good old book.

@Diane, In Will’s comments, I wondered if we were shortchanging our descendants by being so text-heavy and video-light. We educators are strangely shy about allowing our faces and voices to express the ideas we choose to confine to text instead. I’d much rather watch and listen, than only read texts. Not an either/or, but it seems to be for us typing types. Do we fear our webcams?

I, too, hold back some. But I hope to get over that (though perhaps in prudent ways).

@Lindsea - You should push this as a learning activity in your school next year.

@Ken, Since we don’t disagree this time, I’ll just close with a smiley

I find that I always hold back “something”, a part of my makeup that’s too fragile or intimate to share with anyone. The nightmare fears, the private doubts - they never appear in my public persona. I can’t even articulate some of them to myself.

Can we ever truly know another person?

diane

dianes last blog post..On the Occasion of my 200th Blog Posting