Here’s that original short (which my mom might have seen in the movie theater along with a news reel about the World’s Fair or the Germans bombing London):

This was nominated for an Academy Award. If that disturbs you, perhaps you could pick up Everything Bad Is Good for You in which Steven Johnson argues that pop culture, by demanding more & more of our cognitive surplus in order for us to keep up with it’s increasing complexity, is actually making us smarter.

Not sure if I buy that, but I do know that the stranger Bugs got, the more I liked it:

What do you think? Do popular stories get more complex over time? Have the shows you watch become more challenging? Can complex structure offset vapid content? Is it possible to have both?

Participating in a zealous community of readers facilitated their reading growth–no matter how many books each child completed….Each book title represents a story–not only the words on the page–but the story of a reader, who discovered something about literacy, himself, or the world while reading every book. No tally or list adequately captures the power of these stories.

The Royal Shakespeare Company’s film adaptation of Hamlet, the Bard’s amazing ghost story / whodunit / will-he-do-it tragedy, starring, to our science fiction fan kids’ delight, Patrick Stewart and David Tennant, in performances, respectively, seemingly in command & seemingly mad. That we can watch such things for free over the internet via Great Performances on PBS is something for which I am immensely grateful. That this is just one more story we share as a family – that’s priceless.

Coming up for this weekend, another classic: Tron.

Boy. Dog. Mop. Also classic.

More pics:

Life with Cocoa Bean

“We have erected a monument to commemorate the funeral of a species. It symbolizes our sorrow. We grieve because no living man will see again the onrushing phalanx of victorious birds, sweeping a path for spring across the March skies, chasing the defeated winter from all the woods and prairies of Wisconsin….Yearly, the feathered tempest roared up, down, and across the continent, sucking up the laden fruits of forest and prairie, burning them in a traveling blast of life….Today the oaks still flaunt their burden at the sky, but the feathered lightning is no more.”

~ Aldo Leopold, “On a Monument to the Pigeon” (Wyalusing State Park, 1947)

Launch your favorite, most frequently used browser for surfing the web. Start by typing, one letter at a time, the entire alphabet into the search bar to see what pops up first. Record the results.

Here is my internet alphabet:

Amazon.com

Really, what did you expect?

The Book Depository

A new-to-me competitor to A, shipping free, and building the BibDib database – whatever that turns out to be.  I also just have to mention Better World Books, which is astounding in ways that deserve their own post.

WordPress Core Trac

The place where the free and open source software that runs this site is built for love.

Doodle

A really simple way to get ten busy people in a room together at the same time.

This Emotional Life

An excellent series on some essential aspects of being human. Good to watch with our pre-teen boys.

FLAME

The under-construction (by me!) website for the nonprofit, Christian homeschool choir & arts co-op that our kids attend each Friday – and that Nicole spends many more hours on as the Chair of the Parent Advisory Committee.

The Geneva Forum

An amazing arts outreach by a local church for which I was privileged to sell books!

Hearts & Minds Books

One of the most amazing bookstores on the face of the earth! Byron & Beth Borger have built a bookstore that can’t be described in just a few words. They are guides to deep treasure-houses of thoughtful engagement of the Church with the world in all its multifaceted wonder.

Indie Bound

The site for an alliance of independent bookstores and the readers that love them, sponsored by the American Booksellers Association.

Jesus Creed

Yet another post (this one on Intelligent Design) at The Jesus Creed blog that engages Evangelical and other Christians in important, discipleship-building conversations, hosted most often by Scott McKnight, the Karl A. Olsson Professor in Religious Studies at North Park University in Chicago, Illinois, across the street from my late-childhood home.

TeleRead | Shaking Down the Kindle Store & Software

Part of a series on that book-reading thingie from letter A, by John Midiema, who pays deeper attention than most.

Madison Public Library events

‘Cause how can you homeschool without a library?

Magic School Bus Books Review at Curriculum Choice

Comments on a surprisingly controversial book series.

The Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison

A place I’ve been honored to be a part of for the last four years.¹

Open Library

The utterly beautiful site that is undertaking the utterly awesome task of building “one web page for every book.” Get on over there and add a title!

Vladimir Prelovac

Author of the WordPress Plugin Development Beginners Guide, by means of which I am currently trying to move a little further toward expertise in wrangling that particular software.

The Quiet Revolution

For all his failures and omissions, in some ways President Obama is doing the job I wanted him to when I gave him my vote.

Reading Circle Books (home sweet home) & Resilience Alliance

Resilience Alliance is a hub for scientists studying how social & ecological systems grow, stabilize, collapse, and renew. Currently, this site is in the process of trying to capture sufficient resources (time, attention, expertise, cash) to reorganize & enter a growth phase.

Patterns on Squidfingers + Stock & Flow on Snarkmarket

One of the many stocks of resources available on the World Wide Web, and some thoughts on how such things might fit into the bigger picture.

Toshiba Satellite Laptop review on Retrovo.com

A little virtual window shopping…(see “V”).

University of Wisconsin Credit Union

Banking as a local, member-owned, not-for-profit, cooperative business.

Verizon & Rivergrace

Because we all like shiny tech stuff — and because there’s more to beauty than the shiny stuff.

WordCamp Chicago

Where I’m planning to be the first weekend in June, 2010, learning all I can.

Contexts

Contexts is a quarterly magazine of sociology, inviting readers to observe and think critically about the societies in which they live.

You Version

The online Bible that I’ve been using lately. I’m still not sure it has a search advantage over the Bible study tools at Crosswalk.com, but great for a quick link. Multiple translations, electronic search indexing, note-taking — Bible, meet the e-Book age. Gutenberg, eat your heart out.

Zephoria on Twitter

One of the many diverse people on who, by participation in many communities online and off, enrich my resources and sharpen my thinking every day.

Thanks for reading along with my meme. Hope you don’t get the song about the long word stuck in your head.

The other night I was clambering around amidst the book-boxes in our basement, and unearthed a book I’d been hunting for for some time: my old copy of Ray Bradbury’s classic, The Martian Chronicles. Having recently finished Walter Wangerin, Jr.’s The Book of the Dun Cow (and heard the author preach an awesome storytelling sermon at Luther Memorial Church!), we’d been casting around for what to read next. So I was happy to find the book, along with some other MIA classics: The Original Mother Goose, One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish & Green Eggs & Ham by Dr. Seuss as well as (at Nicole’s request) Nancie Atwell’s In the Middle: New Understanding about Writing, Reading, and Learning.

I didn’t introduce the Bradbury’s book in any way, just called the middle-school age boys in and started reading (ignoring questions) while they found blankets to snuggle down in on the couch, and the preschool-age girls negotiated between snuggling with their brothers, tickling them, or “washing” the dishes in the sink,¹ while Mom joined in the monthly Homeschool Chat on Twitter.

January, 1999²

One minute it was Ohio winter, with doors closed, windows locked, the panes blind with frost, icicles fringing every roof, children skiing on slopes, housewives lumbering like great black bears in their furs along the icy streets.

And then a long wave of warmth crossed the small town. A flooding sea of hot air; it seemed as if someone had left a bakery door open. The heat pulsed among the cottages and bushes and children. The icicles dropped, shattering, to melt. The doors flew open. The windows flew up. The children worked off their wool clothes. The housewives shed their bear disguises. The snow dissolved and showed last summer’s ancient green lawns.

Rocket summer. The words passed among the people in the open, airing houses. Rocket summer…

~From The Martian Chronicles via RayBradbury.com

Bradbury’s words worked their magic — the boys were entranced through several long stories. Then we moved on to Dr. Suess and Mother Goose, because the girls needed their own stories, and were tired of playing elsewhere. They giggled, much to their Mom’s delight. But what made my heart swell (three sizes!) was the boys — they were engaged right along with their sisters, wanting to see Dr. Seuss’ pictures, commenting on his sense humor, answering Mother Goose riddles. They were reading with much more sophistication than their sisters, but they were engaged in the same practice of reading in community that the girls were just learning.

Reading’s Power

Just how important is this sort of thing? Larry Ferlazzo shared via Twitter a reading specialist’s response to the idea of academic study for preschool kids that explains:

The single best predictor of how a child will do over 12 years of school is:  How much s/he was read to prior to the first day of first grade. It’s that simple.

A lot of reading aloud means 20-40 minutes per day. It does not have to be 20 consecutive minutes, but can be 5 minutes here and 10 minutes there. Those who’ve been read to have working vocabularies of 40,000 words. They have heard over 3 million words….

…if we want to change America, we need to change how parents read to their children.

This reading requires two-way interaction–lots of talk. So the parents are pushing their children, and all they need to do is read aloud, with joy and talk. Doing this is like treasure and gold for a child’s life and with libraries, does not have to cost either.

It may not cost a huge amount of money, but that doesn’t mean that family reading is without cost:

Just as I purchased separate size clothing for the three, I would read separately to each of them and then together as well. Reading aloud, talking about books and going to the library was a major priority in our house.

My husband was a naval officer at the time, deployed at sea for nine months, six months at a time and I’d send him books and tapes so he could record readings, and the children could hear his voice and read and reread stories as well.

Establishing literacy in the family can sometimes take extraordinary effort, but it has far-reaching consequences for both individual kids and society as a whole. The book we just finished, Walter Wangerin’s Book of the Dun Cow depicts the epic battle of Chauntecleer, Rooster lord of his land, to contain the archetypal evil of Wrym, imprisoned by God under the earth. And a battle there is, which must be fought, and sacrifices which must be made. But ultimately, it’s not the warriors alone that keep evil from consuming Chautecleer’s well-ordered land, but the relationships among its inhabitants:

Simply, the animals were the Keepers. The watchers, the guards. They were the last protection against an almighty evil which, should it pass them, would burst bloody into the universe and smash into chaos and sorrow everything that had been made both orderly and good…The little against the large. The foolish set to protect all the universe against the wise!

…The wasted land, the shattered society, the bodies dead and festering, were all great Wyrm’s triumph. In one small part of the earth his Keepers had been weakened and then killed. Their lives, which locked his life beneath them in the earth; their banded peace, which chained him there; their goodly love, which was his torment; their righteousness, which was iron against his will — that fabric had in one place on earth been torn.

And it is that fabric of relationships which in the end allows Chauntecleer’s battle to be victorious, restoring order to his community once again. Our family’s evening reading together was no more — and no less — difficult than all the other things we do together as a family. Sometimes reading together turns out to be too difficult — schedules get squeezed, tempers fray, patience tears, and chaos pushes in. But other times the book is what draws us together.  Day in and day out, this practice of reading builds up a foundation and a bulwark that will strengthen and protect us throughout our lives. Day in & day out, we parents are building up our children, our schools, and our communities, guarding them from a multitude of evils, just by reading aloud. Then the joy & engagement of children strengthens us in our times of need. And what a joy, what a blessing it is!

This little animation was great fun to watch with with my 8-yr-old-with-mad-scientist tendencies; and it was just the thing to help our 3 1/2 year-old daughter understand why she had to stay home from the neighbor girl’s birthday party today.

For me, microbiology always communicates a sense of secret revelation – it is so intimate, our very flesh & blood, and yet so intricate and strange. What a wonder to be able to see some small portion of the invisible entities that underlie our physical life! It makes me want to hunt around for my old copy of Lewis Thomas’ classic Lives of a Cell, or go find a copy of Lewis Wolpert’s contemporary version, How We Live & Why We Die.

I’ve been fascinated with the inner workings of cells ever since my high-school freshman biology text left me with an unanswered question: O.K., I can see how all these structures move around when a cell divides (& I’ve diagrammed it to death…) but what makes them move? Convinced I’d missed something in the textbook, I searched back & forth through the chapter, but never found the answer. It turns out the information wasn’t there, because, at that time, we didn’t really know — but we do now.

The Zirus animation, wonderful as it is, gives me that same sense of missing information. It’s scientifically accurate & detailed,¹ but completely unlabeled.  We know those “yellow knobby things called keys” all over the outside of the virus may be “keys” in function – but that’s not what scientists call them. I think those “blue peanutty” chomping “chefs” that make new proteins are ribosomes, but I’m not certain. And if I want to learn more about the thing that duplicates the virus DNA inside the cell nucleus, I’m left guessing what the name of “that big pink molecule” really is. The animation brilliantly explains a complex, multi-step biological process in one fell swoop, but ultimately leaves us as outsiders looking in, with out the vocabulary keys that would help us gain entry into the world of biological science.

The original story, Flu Attack: How a Virus Invades Your Body, does include a more in-depth answer to one of the points in the video:

In our video we ask, if a flu virus inside your body can multiply by the millions within seconds, why don’t we topple over and die quickly?

Here’s a better, longer answer than the one in the video. First, some new viruses get caught in mucus and other fluids inside your body and are destroyed. Other viruses get expelled in coughs and sneezes. Second, lots of those new viruses are lemons. They don’t work that well.

That second point is important — the virus gets reproduced with variations, some of which work better or worse than others. And reproduction with variation is a powerful key concept, or to use a slightly different metaphor, a threshold concept in biology, that opens the door to whole new realms of understanding.

I would have liked to see more such key terms & concepts worked into the video. Nonetheless, a visualization like this opens up whole new worlds of biological narrative, making it easy for parents to share the excitement of science and point the way to deeper questions & further exploration.

“All work leads to some rest.”
— Stefan Cardinal Wyszynski, All You Who Labor

“Idleness and lack of leisure belong with each other; leisure is opposed to both.”

“Leisure is not the cessation of work, but work of another kind, work restored to its human meaning, as celebration and ritual.”

“To celebrate means to proclaim, in a setting different from the ordinary everyday, our approval of the world as such…leisure depends on the precondition that we find the world and our own selves agreeable….[and] the highest form of approving the world as such is found in the worship of God, in the praise of the Creator, in the liturgy…We should expect, I believe, that humanity will make strenuous efforts to escape the consequences of this insight.”
— Josef Pieper, Leisure: The Basis of Culture (with a hat tip to Willa)

In these distracted days, it may seem counterintuitive to claim that true leisure finds its deepest roots in the work of memory, reflection, and appreciation. We can mistake a holiday for a chance to “check out” of thinking & intensify our hectic amusements, when it could be something more. Labor Day is a seasonal institution now, a long weekend at the end of summer – a time to relax, recollect oneself, and connect with loved ones before diving into the serious work of Autumn & Winter; a day away of work to affirm the dignity of work & its fulfillment in rest. This is the beginning of goodness; but to truly make this a holiday, to truly rest in praise of the goodness, truth, & beauty of Labor Day, requires contemplation:

We remember the Toronto Typographical Union, whose members in 1872 had the temerity to demand a limited work week of only nine hours a day, six days a week (they were working 12 or more). “Absurd! Unreasonable!” said their employers, and sent in the police. Twenty-four of them were jailed. They never got their 54-hour work week, and many of them lost their jobs & homes, but those wretched ink-monkeys caught the ear of Prime Minister Sir John A. MacDonald, who helped make labor unions legal, along with demonstrations and picket lines. What they won was the right to work and speak together.

The parades in Toronto & Ottawa that moved the Minister to action inspired annual celebrations, which eventually gained official recognition as “Labor Day” in Canada and the United States. But it was a long road from their time to ours, so it is good to remember the reasons for the birth of the Labor Movement in the changing nature of work in the 19th Century, the imperfect struggles of imperfect people against injustice.

We remember that work is part of being human, and that there really is no secret to doing it well, except perhaps to go and do what scares you. We remember the stories that show us the truth of human work, though we also know that work is not necessarily what it used to be, and that being a manager is hard, sometimes, too. We remember that the Future of Work is often a vision of heavenly progress, though we’ve failed before to choose that future for ourselves.

And we remember as well that every day of rest comes round to work again, and that while many workers today “take paid holidays, safe work places, medical care, unemployment insurance, fair hours, union wages and ‘the weekend’ for granted,” many more are literally enslaved, their condition concealed and enforced by fraudulent labor contracts and outright violence.

If you are celebrating this holiday, thank God for this weekend, contemplate its goodness — and remember how much work’s been done, and still remains to do.

1. Add more informative labels to the “Available Widgets” pool. Leave the column of available/used/unused widgets along the left side of the screen, but move the brief descriptions of widget functions (currently taking up space in the middle of the screen) underneath their respective widget icons (or into tooltips?), and add a note describing the current placement of the widget, e.g.the “Add” link could toggle with something like, “Currently added to Sidebar Three”
2. In the space that has opened up, allow users to display controls for up to six widgitized areas simultaneously, each in its own “Widget Area Management Box,” just like the “Current Widgets” single display. If the theme does not have that many widgetized areas, or you don’t need to work with more than one or two, the extra Widget Area Management Boxes can collapse, like the boxes for tags and categories below the post editing window. Uncollapsed boxes can display a widget area, or can read “none selected.”
3. Allow users to decide whether each Widget Area Management Box will display its widgets in a column (portrait orientation) or a row (landscape orientation).
4. Make everything draggable. Allow users to move individual widgets back and forth between the from the available pool and the currently displayed Widget Areas, and maybe even allow us to move the Widget Area Management Boxes themselves around in relation to each other.

And here’s the release announcement for the new software. (Watch for the New Widget Interface section of the video at 1:15.) I’d say three out of four science-based recommendations ain’t bad!

Much of the reasoning behind my recommendations involved freeing up working memory to focus on the problem at hand, the correspondences between the blog editor and the final product. That principle of not overloading working memory–and eight others–is brought to bear on teaching & learning by Daniel T. Willingham in Why Don’t Student’s Like School: A Cognitive Scientist Answers Questions About How the Mind Works and What It Means for the Classroom. I’m currently reading through this book with an online group of educators in Group 4 of this summer’s CASTLE Book Club hosted by Scott McLeod. Please do drop by and share your thoughts!

I was born in a university hospital in 1967, and in the absence of real military personnel, my childhood consciousness of soldiers (beyond the cartoon villains of World War II) was formed in the cultural echoes of Vietnam and the My Lai Massacre. Military service seemed to me to be something to be avoided, a potential moral failure, connected with American arrogance, dishonor, and injustice towards the world around us. If you truly wanted to serve the country and do good (and I did!), you should go to the city and work for the poor (which I did, for ten years). Speaking of the Vietnam War in his 1967 speech, Beyond Vietnam – A Time to Break Silence, Martin Luther King, Jr., said:

A true revolution of values will lay hand on the world order and say of war, “This way of settling differences is not just.” This business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation’s homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into the veins of peoples normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice, and love. A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.

This past January, listening on the radio to Dr. King’s brilliant (and still relevant!) outline of the tragic historical and moral circumstances of the United States’ involvement in that conflict, I realized how deeply the specific criticisms of that particular time (and the pain of them, more than their call to high American ideals) shaped me, without my ever having been involved in any real sense.

Because of course that tarnished era was ending. By the time we were in Jr. High, Vietnam was too old to be news, too recent to be history, and too painful to be explained to kids.¹ America was finding other distractions. “We were the uncalled generation,” says my brother David, born two years after me. “No one asked us to do anything but buy stuff and watch TV. We were left to salvage an identity for ourselves from the rubble of the Sixties’ culture wars.”

For Nicole, things were different. Her Grandpa Joe received a Purple Heart in the African Campaign in World War II, and the memory of his service has been honored and treasured by his descendants. Her father and all his brothers served in the military (one of them as a career chef), including among them time in Vietnam, Korea, and Germany. No one died. In 1967, she was born on a military base in California, like her father before her. She grew up seeing military service as almost a matter of course, the honorable thing for young men to do for their country when they got out of high school. For her, military service was not traumatic, but a connection with honor and duty and family.

Now we have kids of our own. They’re doing choir and Scouting and little league–and their uncles are going to war. Chris, my brother-in-law’s older brother, died in Afghanistan. Phil, who we just invited over for turkey dinner, may spend Thanksgiving in Tajikistan. Yesterday, our young Scouts planted flags on veterans’ graves and walked in a prairie restoration on the University campus; today we paddled kayaks at Brat Fest; and tomorrow Nicole will train for the Chicago Marathon before joining us on the parade route to watch the marching vets & Scouts & marching bands. Maybe catch the Cubs vs Pirates game in the evening.

About a week ago on Twitter, @TheCubsInHaiku shared an Email From Iraq:

There is nothing more

American than watching

The Cubs from Baghdad

Here is what Memorial Day means to me today: it means remembering the connections we have to those who are elsewhere, remembering that the small things we enjoy here at home exist in a larger system of past and present service, sacrifice and justice. It means both honoring the work, risk, and loss our soldiers are required to bear, and taking responsibility for our decision to require it of them. It means striving to understand the work & sacrifices of soldiers in partnership with the work & sacrifice of builders, programmers, engineers, teachers, storytellers, musicians, journalists, politicians, peacemakers, and parents. It means recognizing the countries and peoples with whom our soldiers interact, examining carefully the economic, cultural, and spiritual relationships we have with them, and repenting when we see we have been in the wrong. It means listening to all the different voices of our histories, so that the sacrifices we’ve made may be truly honorable, and truly honored.

Harwood’s 100 Days Citizen Test asks us as citizens to reflect upon and discuss five questions:

1. Do you believe the nation is moving in the right direction and, if so [or if not], what do you point to?

2. To what extent do you feel the first 100 days is generating “authentic hope,” and to what extent do you see “false hope?”

3. Is your confidence in the ability of government to act effectively [and appropriately] growing or not — and why?

4. How do you feel about those who have different views from the president: are they providing an effective opposing voice — and, if not, what would make them more effective in terms of a healthy public debate?

5. Do you feel there is emerging common ground among people about how the country needs to move forward?

The reason why I believe questions like these are important is because when change occurs, it is often hard to see, confusing to interpret, and for every couple of steps forward there are steps backward. So, on balance, what do you make of what’s happening? How does this current period feel for you?

Head on over to Harwood’s blog to post your answers, or feel free to chime in right here! And if you think (as I do) that he might be on to something, go get yourself a free copy of his most recent book, Make Hope Real

“Five designer aromas — 100% DRM compatible!”

So in the last couple weeks Ian Stewart linked to Scott Wallick’ tales of his accidental (and spectacularly successful!) plunge into the WordPress learning community in On Selling Something I Sort of Own and his encounter with the learner as community member in An Ideal WordPress User; and at Portable Learner, Shanta Rohse shows how she decorates her [thematiclink] ¹ header logo for Christmas and Darwin Day.

Meanwhile, Luke Holzmann of Sonlight Curriculum reminds us in Feeding the Problem that learning in community sometimes means coping with frustration and making the effort to work out your own solutions; and Dana Hanley, in What My Daughter Has Learned Through Blogging, tells how her 10 year old has taken ownership of her learning as she designs her new science e-zine for children, The Science Mouse. (Mouse is looking for contributions for the upcoming issues. Visit her list of themes to see how you can be a part of her learning community!)

Finally, Rob Glazebrook of CSS Newbie encourages his readers to buy some books for a good cause at the SitePoint Victoria, Australia, Bushfire Relief Sale. Through this Friday, February 13th, 2009, Melbourne-based web developer community SitePoint is offering FIVE of their well-regarded books (in PDF format) for the price of one — just US$29.95 — and all proceeds will go to the Australian Red Cross to provide relieve for the victims of the worst brush fires in Australian history. I’m picking out my titles already.

And for all of you named here, and many others unmentioned, who make learning communities happen at home, at work, and on the web — thank you!

• Is blogging killing communication? » Principled Discovery – Maybe it is the nature of the blog and the internet. A million voices are shouting through the noise and the easiest way to attract a following is to market outrage. The e-newsletters I receive never merely outline an issue, provide some background and offer suggestions for organizing against an action. Mixed in with this purported goal of the newsletter are hyperbolic statements about the end of America. The end of homeschooling. The end of the family. The end of worker’s rights… Everything is sensationalized. There is never a middle ground. There is always a call to arms.
• E-Books—This Time It’s Real » The Platform by Peter Osnos – In the face of the latest headlines—“Barnes and Noble Had Weak Holiday” (Wall Street Journal); “Putting Off The Ritz: The New Austerity of Publishing” (New York Times) and, grimmest of all, “An Autopsy of the Book Business” (The Daily Beast) by the correctly described “publishing legend” Jason Epstein—I feel like Voltaire’s ridiculous optimist Pangloss in saying that there is significant news to report that is wholly positive for anyone who cares about books.
• NEA Study Shows Reading on the Rise, No Idea Why » Booksquare – Hallelujah and pass the ammunition! Cultural decline is not inevitable. Romans, we are not…If you’ve been hanging around [Booksquare] long enough, you’re not surprised that I’m not surprised that adding online reading to the mix increases the percentage of adults who engage in literary reading, though the range of who, what, when, where, why remain wide open for studying.

Continuously, unnoticeably, at the rate of one second per second, the world turned from what it had been and into what it was to be.

–John Crowley, The Solitudes (Aegypt)

The future of reading

So they encounter Homer, Thurber, Kipling, Asimov, Bradbury, Sturgeon, Tolkein, Borges, C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Virginia Woolf, Ursala LeGuin, Staislaw Lem, Connie Willis, Piers Anthony, Susan Cooper, Beowulf. I am passing on my own personal version of my family’s culture, and it takes the form of printed books.

Texts like these have shaped my family’s vision of the world over generations. Yet in today’s brave new digitized world, those books themselves are no longer simple givens. We are, perhaps, living in the time of a publishing revolution to rival that of Gutenberg, when the rich printed heritage of the old is being thrown up against the gleaming possibilities of the networked new. In such a world, are books and reading as we have come to know them — as we have come to know ourselves through them — doomed to obsolescence? What does it mean for kids these days to be readers?

Two Visions

To be young is digital heaven!

Digital publisher Bob Stein at if:book (the Institute for the Future of the Book) imagines authors engaging with readers like professors around their topics. He gives us “an anecdotal report regarding reading in the networked era,” arguing that we should count all of these activities as reading:

A mother in London recently described her ten-year old boy’s reading behavior: “He’ll be reading a (printed) book. He’ll put the book down and go to the book’s website. Then, he’ll check what other readers are writing in the forums, and maybe leave a message himself, then return to the book. He’ll put the book down again and google a query that’s occurred to him.”

Stein’s vision of reading flows from his efforts to understand the use of books beyond their physical form, as conversations situated in a dynamic social network. He argues that the printed & bound form of books obscures the social nature of reading & writing.

The key element running through all these possibilities is the author’s commitment to engage directly with readers. If the print author’s commitment has been to engage with a particular subject matter on behalf of her readers, in the era of the network that shifts to a commitment to engage with readers in the context of a particular subject.

–Bob Stein, “A Unified Field Theory of Publishing in the Neworked Era”

Turn it off — before its too late!

Meanwhile, Emory University English professor Mark Bauerline, author of The Dumbest Generation, argues in the Chronicle of Higher Education that the physical form of text makes all the difference. Citing data from Jakob Nielsen showing that reading online differs dramatically from the reading of printed matter, both in the actual behavior the screen evokes and in the habits of mind that this behavior reinforces. It is good for some things, but not for others.

Once again, this is not so much about the content students prefer — Facebook, YouTube, etc. — or whether they use the Web for homework or not. It is about the reading styles they employ. They race across the surface, dicing language and ideas into bullets and graphics, seeking what they already want and shunning the rest. They convert history, philosophy, literature, civics, and fine art into information, material to retrieve and pass along.

That’s the drift of screen reading. Yes, it’s a kind of literacy, but it breaks down in the face of a dense argument, a Modernist poem, a long political tract, and other texts that require steady focus and linear attention — in a word, slow reading….

We must recognize that screen scanning is but one kind of reading, a lesser one, and that it conspires against certain intellectual habits requisite to liberal-arts learning…Digital technology has become an imperial force, and it should meet more antagonists. Educators must keep a portion of the undergraduate experience disconnected, unplugged, and logged off.

–Mark Bauerline, “Online Literacy Is a Lesser Kind: Slow Reading Counterbalances Web Skimming” in The Chronicle of Higher Education September 19, 2008

Like Robert Gu, poet protagonist of Vernor Vinge’s Rainbows End, Bauerline worries that a digital “paraliteracy,” whatever its particular strengths, will cripple and displace the deep and personal engagement with enduring texts that is the hallmark of traditional liberal-arts learning.

In the face of all this excitement, both pro and con, Siva Vaidhyanathan, author of The Anarchist in the Library and the forthcoming The Googlization of Everything, argues that digital literacy is not really generational, but based on opportunity and practice, and worthy of an “accurate and subtle” understanding not easily provided by simplistic generational theories:

As a professor, I am in the constant company of 18- to-23-year-olds. I have taught at both public and private universities, and I have to report that the levels of comfort with, understanding of, and dexterity with digital technology varies greatly within every class. Yet it has not changed in the aggregate in more than 10 years…

We should drop our simplistic attachments to generations so we can generate an accurate and subtle account of the needs of young people — and all people, for that matter. A more responsible assessment would divorce itself from a pro- or anti-technology agenda and look at multiple causes for problems we note: state malfeasance or benign neglect of education, rampant consumerism in our culture, moral panics that lead us to scapegoat technology, and, yes, technology itself…Too often we reach for easy, totalizing explanations for cultural phenomena, constructing cartoons of digital youth that have a tone of “gee whiz” or “shame, shame” to describe these new and odd creatures.

–“Generational Myth” in The Chronicle of Higher Education September 19, 2008

So what should we do? Should we worry about teaching our children how they should read? Should we hurry to embrace the radical, digital new? Should we fight to prevent the loss of the unplugged, organic old? When the books we have are no longer the books we knew, who will teach us to read?

Writing, too, provokes these questions, and there, perhaps, we can find a clue:

Who will teach me to write? a reader wanted to know.

The page, the page, that eternal blankness, the blankness of eternity which you cover slowly, affirming time’s scrawl as a right and your daring as necessity; the page, which you cover woodenly, ruining it, but asserting your freedom and power to act, acknowledging that you ruin everything you touch but touching it nevertheless, because acting is better than being here in mere opacity; the page, which you cover slowly with the crabbed thread of your gut; the page in the purity of its possibilities; the page of your death, against which you pit such flawed excellences as you can muster with all your life’s strength: that page will teach you to write.

–Annie Dillard, The Writing Life

As with writing, so with reading. Where we engage, we learn. The page, the page, the eternal text in all its infinite variety, with all its ancient verity, in all its ever-renewing form; the page with its subtle complexity; the page with its shape and smell and texture; the page with its links, connections, and tools; the page we seek and ask for connection, for comfort, for joy, for truth; the page of our parents, the page of our children; the page of our heart, soul, mind, and strength; the page that was, that is, that is to come — that page will teach us to read.

Entrepreneurs are entrepreneurial, as differentiated from managerial or strategic, because they think effectually; they believe in a yet-to-be-made future that can substantially be shaped by human action; and they realize that to the extent that this human action can control the future, they need not expend energies trying to predict it. In fact, to the extent that the future is shaped by human action, it is not much use trying to predict it ? it is much more useful to understand and work with the people who are engaged in the decisions and actions that bring it into existence.

–from “What makes entrepreneurs entrepreneurial?” (http://www.effectuation.org/ftp/effectua.pdf) by Saras D. Sarasvathy, Associate Professor of Business Administration at the University of Virginia Darden School of Business, and author of Effectuation: Elements of Entrepreneurial Expertise

For my part, I’ll be delighted if they make it possible to display two or more widgetized areas (“sidebars”) on the widget management screen, and to drag and drop widgets between them.

I explored the cognitive psychology behind that design strategy in an earlier post, WordPress 2.5 Widgets?Taking the Load Off Your Mind. Here are the takeaway design suggestions:

1. Add more informative labels to the “Available Widgets” pool. leave the column of available/used/unused widgets along the left side of the screen, but move the brief descriptions of widget functions (currently taking up space in the middle of the screen) underneath their respective widget icons (or into tooltips?), and add a note describing the current placement of the widget, e.g.the “Add” link could toggle with something like, “Currently added to Sidebar Three”
2. In the space that has opened up, allow users to display controls for up to six widgetized areas simultaneously, each in its own “Widget Area Management Box,” just like the “Current Widgets” single display. If the theme does not have that many widgetized areas, or you don’t need to work with more than one or two, the extra Widget Area Management Boxes can collapse, like the boxes for tags and categories below the post editing window. Uncollapsed boxes can display a widget area, or can read “none selected.” [Users could also decide how many boxes to display in the first place.]
3. Allow users to decide whether each Widget Area Management Box will display its widgets in a column (portrait orientation) or a row (landscape orientation). [This allows users to visually match the management screen display with the display of each particular sidebar on the blog.]
4. Make everything draggable. Allow users to move individual widgets back and forth between the from the available pool and the currently displayed Widget Areas, and maybe even allow us to move the Widget Area Management Boxes themselves around in relation to each other.

When it was proclaimed that the Library contained all books, the first impression was one of extravagant happiness. All men felt themselves to be the masters of an intact and secret treasure…. As was natural, this inordinate hope was followed by an excessive depression. The certitude that some shelf…held precious books and that these precious books were inaccessible, seemed almost intolerable….

We also know of another superstition of that time: that of the Man of the Book. On some shelf…there must exist a book which is the formula and perfect compendium of all the rest: some librarian has gone through it, and he is analogous to a god… Many wandered in search of Him.

It does not seem unlikely to me that there is a total book on some shelf of the universe….

–Labyrinths, “The Library of Babel”

Andy McCourt, a columnist with printing industry magazine Print21, left a comment on an earlier post to share their experience with the Espresso Book Machine print-on-demand gadget. Mr. McCourt is in the habit of applying critical analysis to his enthusiasms. In a post titled, “May the Ox Be With You,” he looks forward to 2009, the Year of the Ox, by reviewing his preditictions for 2008, the Year of the Rat. Some of those were off-target, but his fifth prediction rated 10 points out of 10: digital paper is indeed making great strides forward, tempting us with visions of that long-sought book of all books.

Here is the demo of the Plastic Logic Reader which McCourt links to. Don’t miss the point at about 3:30 in the demo, where they smack the screen with a shoe, or later around 5:20, where Plastic Logic CEO Richard Archuleta mentions that the device works with an “open format!”

Will e-readers like this one (and others from iRex, Sony, Polymer Vision, and Amazon) be as disruptive and transformative as the Espresso Book Machine? In some ways, I think so — but they will continue a transformation that has already begun in music, reference works, and news: flexible, remixable, & potentially democratized delivery of “content.” In this case, the content is text, and the digital delivery system is designed to imitate the printed page, but does that make a difference for those of us who already read the newspaper (or an aggregation of several “papers”) on our laptops? Not so much.

The crucial difference, I think, becomes clear when we realize that the text/content that we read and the paper/screens we read from are not the only elements at issue; that there is an important tension between the bound nature of books and the unbound nature of digital media. The editorial package itself matters. Perhaps the two approaches will eventually meet in the middle, but for the moment, e-readers are trying to give print-like qualities to essentially unbundled digital products, while POD technologies like the Espresso Book Machine attempt to give digital advantages to the quintessentially bundled item, the printed book.

A book is essentially whole, unitary — a little world of human thought, word, & spirit, chosen, shaped, and bound within its covers. Books are bundles; a book is what is bound together. For what makes a book more than its binding? (That books may be remixed and rebundled does not invalidate the point. An anthology has its own sort of unity. Nor does this definition necessarily require that books take physical printed form, only that there be some mechanism — glue, stitching, standardized file format like ePub, or whatever — that binds the content into a relatively enduring unit.)

Andrew Golis notes that “All text is not created Equal” :

You produce a different product online. Hyperlinks, tone, form (shorter post that assume readers have read previous posts, etc.). It makes for a fundamentally different product that simply doesn’t translate back onto the printed page….

All of which is just to say that what we?re dealing with is not just a transition in medium. We’re in the process of not just radically re-organizing the media business, but media culture.

By this reckoning, some texts that seem the most “bookish” (dictionaries, encyclopedias) don’t really need to be books, and others that might look similar to books when printed (journals, magazines, newspapers), turn out to be far different items when unbundled online. Might not his insights work both ways? Are there not texts, and ways of writing, that are naturally suited to a bound format? Or if the binding makes the book, then what is it that makes us want to bind certain texts together? If, in our “editorial” wisdom or best “publisher’s” judgment, we see value in making a unit out of a set of texts, then we want that value to be preserved; binding preserves that value in a “book.” Such a book may or may not stand the test of time, but is this not what a “book” must be in our brave new media culture?

Which brings us back to the Esspresso Book Machine and the idea of Print on Demand. The printed, bound book takes that editorial decision and gives it the force of physical fact. The book in printed form takes that bundled whole and makes it present to our senses in ways that e-readers cannot match. The EBM gives any editor — amateur or professional — the power to make his or her ideas physically present in the world as real, particular objects. When those really present, particular bound objects are freed by the web from the constraints of shipping, given the flexibility of digital manipulation, and opened up to amateur control — when any possible printed book can be made whenever it is wanted, wherever it is wanted, by whoever wants it — then we are indeed facing a print-culture revolution.