Learning Aesthetics

TED build this as: "Hans Rosling: Debunking third-world myths with the best stats you’ve ever seen". It’s all of that and a wake-up call besides (it’s TED talk so remember to turn down the audio for the first 30 seconds). After you’ve watched the video be sure and check out the Gapminder website where you can do your own visualizations.

This morning Shel and I were talking about art, which I feel a know little something about, and music, which I don’t. I have just had cataract surgery on my right eye, so if I look out that window snow is white, but if I close that I look out my left, the snow is yellow. Given that I was getting ready to spend some amount of money on color management hardware/software from my workstation printer the experience has been, you might say, confusing. If everything is dependent on which eye I use, what exactly is the point of color management. Shel pointed out that it was about RGB values, which might seem hard to argue with but I have a variety of talents. My point was that the final "decider" was going to be the artist, and that if she, the artist, thought yellow was white, God only knew what we, the rest of us, were going to see. Naturally enough, this led to a discussion of music, and passion. Why a computer can’t play music like a virtuoso even though it’s going to be technically more accurate.

So naturally I was presented with Benjamin Zander at Pop!Tech 2008. It’s 30 minutes; watch it, it’s worth every second, and you’ll feel a lot better when you’re finished, I promise.

There’s nothing like starting off the week with some must reads and useful links. Let’s start with an Ethnographic Research funded by the MacArthur Foundation; it’s the final report of the Digital Youth Research project. A shorter version, still a 58 page white paper, can be found here. It’s a relatively quick read but the implications are far-reaching. Was complicated enough being a teenager for digital media; it’s hard to imagine what it’s like today. Isn’t exactly something that you read for information, rather it’s a whole other stuff that we need to think about and then think about again. The implications are not just pedagogical, but it’s hard to imagine being very effective as an instructor if you haven’t given some thought to what’s covered in this report.

Superficially less complex, but in reality equally challenging is An Awesome Book by Dallas Clayton. I try to keep my newsreader subscriptions to a manageable level, which means I’m going to have to delete something so that I can add this guy’s blog. It actually brings up an interesting question about what "important" might mean in terms of a phrase like "important information". Whatever the case I’d hate to miss have on the description of the "celebrity muffler and transmission" shop.

And speaking of celebrities I’d hate to imagine that anyone had missed “Ulrich Haarbürste and I like to write stories about Roy Orbison being wrapped up in cling-film”, not to mention Dr. Snooks’ I guess it would be disco version. If you’re wondering what this has to do with digital youth research project I can only suggest that you’re not paying attention; return to step one and give it another go. Then to check your progress try this adventure game.

It’s just possible that you’ve noticed a lack of activity, not just here but on, SightWork generally; in part this is because my day job required an exploration of the Microsoft Live environment, so I’ve been blogging there. In the future I may do some cross posting, but SightWork is about to undergo some major changes. In part it’s an effort to simplify; one door to everything. Mainly though, it’s about trying to define everything. To quote a line from a country and western song, "…a lot of them boys can make a lot more music than I can." It’s not that I don’t have a things to say about politics, education, art, etc. it’s just that I read a lot of people that say it better than I can. Much of the MS Live work blog is going to be links to those people, but I’ve been thinking about what Emerson would call my own genius. Genius in the sense of what makes me unique. There’s a new year coming, and despite the fact that the current moment is kind of down beat, I remain excited and hopeful; I hope you’ll stay tuned and see how things develop.

…a followup on yesterday’s post:

Insanely Great is a little book on the history of the creation of the first Macintosh, in it Steve Levy writes:

Jobs’s speeches were punctuated by slogans. Perhaps the most telling epigram of all was a three-word koan that Jobs scrawled on an easel in January 1983, when the project [the release of the first Mac] was months overdue. REAL ARTISTS SHIP. It was an awesome encapsulation of the ground rules in the age of technological expression. The term “starving artist” was now an oxymoron. One’s creation, quite simply, did not exist as art if it was not out there, available for consumption, doing well. Was [Douglas] Engelbart an artist? A prima donna — he didn’t ship. What were the wizards of PARC? Haughty aristocrats — they didn’t ship. The final step of an artist — the single validating act — was geting his or her work into boxes, at which point the marketing guys take over. Once you get the computers into people’s homes, you have penetrated their minds. At that point all the clever design decisions you made, all the tists and turns of the interface, the subtle dance of mode and modeless, the menu bars and trash cans and mouse buttons and everything else inside and outside your creation, becomes part of people’s lives, transforms their working habits, permeates their approach to their labor, and ultimately, their lives.
But to do that, to make a difference in the world and a dent in the universe, you had to ship. You had to ship. You had to ship.
Real artists ship.

As always Paul Graham has a good point…

Programmers are unlike many types of workers in that the best ones actually prefer to work hard. This doesn’t seem to be the case in most types of work. When I worked in fast food, we didn’t prefer the busy times. And when I used to mow lawns, I definitely didn’t prefer it when the grass was long after a week of rain.

Programmers, though, like it better when they write more code. Or more precisely, when they release more code. Programmers like to make a difference. Good ones, anyway.

&

just as the greatest danger of being hard to sell to is not that you overpay but that the best suppliers won’t even sell to you, the greatest danger of applying too many checks to your programmers is not that you’ll make them unproductive, but that good programmers won’t even want to work for you.

Steve Jobs’s famous maxim “artists ship” works both ways. Artists aren’t merely capable of shipping. They insist on it. So if you don’t let people ship, you won’t have any artists.

Australia does it better…

I’ve been away from posting for a while, not so much depression as a sense of being lost, and absorbed in the literary.  I’ve been reading McCarthy’s Border Trilogy, which seems to argue by demonstration that art, or writing, or perhaps beauty can despite all logic hold against the random meanness of the world. I am persuaded but no less confused; here is something like an obituary for David Foster Wallace from Scott Rettberg.

Chris Brogan says this is a free the book; I’m not completely sure 15 pages counts is a book, however, they are some of the smartest 15 pages that I’ve read and a longtime.  It may be a little over a detailed if you’re not already pretty web savvy, but read it anyway.

Personal Branding for the Business Professional (pdf format).

photo credit: Nesster
Up to this point I’ve been assuming that I didn’t have a student readership, but now that I’m teaching a class…

Oh well, my real point is that we can’t turn off the electricity, so I may as well post this.  This Tweet just in form Michael Wesch: “Chacha … new ways to cheat on exams / new reasons to write different kinds of exams:  http://chacha.com/“.  You got a cellphone or a laptop, you got a question? Thanks to ChaCha you got an answer.