Finally
from here
What I learned (and thought about) in Copenhagen
I tried to think of a way to present what I learned via Internet Research 9 in Copenhagen, but I’m still heavily jet lagged. So I’m going to present it in discrete chunks.
Work and Play
There are certain ideas and words that trigger a very serious gut reaction in me. I really appreciate these conferences so I can sit with those feelings and talk with others about them to see if I need to fight with my gut or against it. One of those triggers went off during the pre-conference workshop when we talked about the terms “game”, “play”, “recreation”, and “leisure”.
First, game: this came up in the perennial (and yawn-inducing) question about whether or not Second Life is a game. In my opinion, Second Life is a game engine with the game pulled out, just like MOOs before them. But the term came up again. My answer is the same: no. It’s not a game.
“What’s wrong with play?”
No no no, “game” does not mean “play”, and “play” does not mean “game”. I have no objection to games, but turning all play into a game is a dangerous slide in terminology. I’ve read Julian Dibbell‘s fantastic book Play Money and I already know that there’s a difference between play and games. You may “play a game”, but play is much more than a game. A game has rules and outcomes, play can be just about anything that’s fun. Julian Dibbell notes that there are always elements of play in work, and those are the most productive times across the board. He also notes that there is a lot of work in games, so the classic allocation of “play” behaviour to games alone is a misnomer. No. Just because it’s play doesn’t make it a game. And that goes on with “leisure” and “recreation”. Limiting our days to “work” and “non-work/fun” portions makes my skin crawl. The only distinction there is that one is rewarded financially and (presumably) is not, and I’m not sure I’m ready to let capitalism dictate the basic terminology of my life. There are so many areas where I want to break down the false dichotomy between work and play for the sake of my own sanity, I just can’t get into a worldview where fun is a thing that happens when not working. I must back away slowly from that entire set of terminology.
But the conversation is important. Play has value in education, and needs to be understood that way. Working with social networks and technology on a full time (more than full time) basis, I run into a lot of people who have problems with people “playing” or having fun at work or in school. So one of my goals, added to all the others I already have, is to help people understand and accept the amazing value that play brings to our work and to academic success.
This isn’t about fighting work-life balance; I’m all for that. But I’m also all for letting your “play” life bleed into your work life and not deliberately holding back the most productive and creative parts of yourself for only one or the other. In a way, this is like the old blogging argument; a good blog, according to some, has one topic and sticks to it. This is “work”. Then there’s the rest of us, who blog about whatever’s going on and catches our interest, and thus lets it all blend together in a big creative pile. My current case in point: I “played” in Second Life for many hours to build Cancerland, which is ultimately expression of something so personal I was assigned an agent at work to help me manage the communication of it. But now it’s very much linked to my work life as well, as an experience, as an idea, and an example, and by turning my brain around to the idea that you can create experiential learning spaces that express information in amazingly effective ways. That’s valuable, in spite of the false distinctions of work and play.
Ubiquitous Computing
One of the conference’s keynotes involved a fascinating look at what a fully integrated city would look like; where the internet is a part of everything. I like this idea, and I need to spend more time considering it. Unshackle the world from computers themselves but hook them into the internet in million new ways. Walk through the world and stay online at the same time; overlay a google map on the world as you see it with your own eyes. One of the ideas that tweaked my imagination was the idea of using the city as your interface. I’m kind of already down that road in my thoughts about replica builds in Second Life and how the replica element of it allows us to provide layers of meaning into the interactivity and affordances; the idea of your city as interface takes that idea and turns it around. Being out in the world and playing an online game with your city. (Probably not Grand Theft Auto.) My first thought was this: how do we turn the library into a location for a ubiquitous computer game? How do we take students offline but keep them online? It’s an expensive proposition (maybe), but it’s something I’d like to keep thinking about. There are lo-tech ways to do it, and I want to try them.
In/Formal Learning
I realized during this conference that my true interest in education goes beyond just technology. My interest, at its heart, is in examining the many (many) means and methods of informal learning, and bringing them to formal learning. When people make the distinction between formal and informal learning there’s a big part of me that wants to shout: “Why are you making those two things so distinct?” The passion that’s so often present in spades in informal learning is what I want to see more often in formal settings.
End Fat Talk
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RKPaxD61lwo&color1=0xb1b1b1&color2=0xcfcfcf&hl=nl&fs=1]
Pretty cool, huh?
Interesting things about Twitter
I’m heading out to Internet Research 9, the annual conference of the Association of Internet Researchers, in Copenhagen today. My flight leaves tonight, so I’m still in my pjs, going over my packing, counting pairs of underpants, looking for socks, and filling up my toiletry bag. Since my list of friends on Twitter is largely people like me, interested in the internet from a professional as well as personal perspective, many of them are also attending the conference. With each update, I see more and more of them heading to the airport, reporting on line ups and airport staff, giving their final hurrahs as the plane door shuts. Seeing people already on their way makes me question whether I got the time right for my flight, and I’ve already checked my ticket twice.
While many people can’t work out what the point of twitter is for, and I might not be the right person to explain it to them, I can’t really think of another medium that gives you that kind of glimpse into other people’s lives as pieces of a puzzle that occasionally all fits together. For me, right now, it’s a look at the zeitgeist, a sense of shifting from one place to the next that we, as a group of professionals, are in the process of taking.
Jeremy is already there; he left yesterday and is stumbling around Copenhagen right now trying to stay awake and enjoy the sunshine. I wish we were traveling together; I don’t much like overnight flights and I’m anxious about getting there and going through all the minutae to get myself to the hotel while feeling groggy, exhausted and uncomfortable. I find it strangely comforting to see so many other people, just like me, so unlike me, going through the exact same process.
How do you quantify the feeling of comfort?
Cancer Redux
For the last few weeks I’ve been attempted to recover from treatment-related anemia. It’s not uncommon, and someone (including me) should probably have seen it coming, but I certainly didn’t. I haven’t been feeling well for some time, but I couldn’t accept being sick again. I just felt tired; everyone feels tired sometimes, right? So I worked through it until I started losing my balance and was so light-headed I had trouble concentrating. My doctor’s response, after seeing my blood test results, was: “Oh crap.”
Denial is an amazing thing; there may be no force more powerful.
But that said, in the last few weeks I’ve started to really come to terms with cancer. Easy to say: it appears to be well behind me now (just had my 6 month all-clear). I’ve gone through periods of cursing my body for doing this to me, for allowing this to happen, for creating cancer in me. But lately I’ve been turning around on that.
My body found that group of malignant cells before any doctor ever did. And when it found them it started coating the in stone to keep them away from me, to keep me safe. My bod deserves a pat on the back for that.
Things other than my tumour that are 1.5cm:
Postcard, by Lainy Voom
[vimeo 1690420 w=500 h=313]
Postcard (Documenting the Virtual 2) from Lainy Voom on Vimeo.
The Last of the Neanderthals
Such a great article from National Geographic today. The most poignant part, for me:
Evolutionary biologist Clive Finlayson, of the Gibraltar Museum, was standing in the vestibule of Gorham’s Cave, a magnificent tabernacle of limestone opening to the sea on the Rock of Gibraltar. Inside, fantastic excretions of flowstone drooled from the ceiling of the massive nave. The stratigraphy in the cave is pocked with evidence of Neanderthal occupation going back 125,000 years, including stone spearpoints and scrapers, charred pine nuts, and the remains of ancient hearths. Two years ago, Finlayson and his colleagues used radiocarbon dating to determine that the embers in some of those fireplaces died out only 28,000 years ago—the last known trace of Neanderthals on Earth.
Imagine it: the last outpost of the Neanderthals, a tiny remaining group of fur-clad hunters sitting on the edge of the earth, looking out over the ocean as the sun sets, warming their hands around the last fire. Going gently into that good night.
How to keep a Good Blog
I’m listening to Nora Young talking about how to keep a good blog (as opposed to a crappy one) on Spark. They say her own blog is pretty crappy. The advice she got was to pick a topic that’s unique and that she’s passionate about; that thing that everyone tells you to shut up about should be the topic of your blog.
I think this is a very male geek perspective. Perhaps male nerd perspective. That’s about branding yourself with your own singular idiosyncrasies; you always post about the intersection between WoW and Freud? Sure, you can be the WoW Freud guy to your tiny wedge audience, but I’m not sure that gives you an awesome blog.
I don’t think you need to have one topic to have a good blog. In fact, I think I’d get bored of your blog if you only have one topic. (It’s like allowing your blog to be dominated by, ahem, cancer or something.) The only advice she got that I think is any good is this: find your own voice. Any blog, and any topic, can be interesting if it’s really coming from you, if the ideas and feelings and observations are genuine. I don’t even think your voice, your perspective, has to be radically unique, either, and I don’t think you have to go out of your way to make yourself unique. I think you just have to be passionate. There’s no point writing about something you’re not passionate about, and I’d hope that you’re passionate about a lot of things.
Nora Young is, apparently, interested in both technology and philosophy, so her adviser told her to write about the intersection of those things. That could be interesting. Equally, I think her interests would naturally create that, when appropriate. The better advice would be: write about what really grabs you.
I think the point is to talk back to popular culture, to hegemony, to media, to teachers or authority or peers. Make yourself an active participant rather than a passive absorber of information, regardless of your situation. It’s more of a way to reorient your vision of yourself and your importance in your own grand scheme. To remind you that you have a voice in your world, and your blog can be your platform. I don’t think the point of that is to get more readers, or to have a more entertaining blog, so perhaps I’m a bad adviser on that front. I think the idea is to train yourself to speak out, no matter what the topic is. To think critically about what’s going on, read/listen/think carefully and add your opinion. Not just absorbing what you’re hearing, what you’re experiencing, but responding to it. To be political, I think that activity can make you a better citizen and a better person.
As a side effect, I think it gives you a better blog, too. Because your passion is obvious. You are a speaker in the world rather than a listener. You have something to add. That makes you interesting.
Scar update
Someone asked, so I took a picture of my thyroidectomy scar today. For reference, here’s a short history of my scar:
one week post surgery (mid-February, 2008)
two weeks post surgery (end of February, 2008)
about four weeks post surgery (early March, 2008)
about a week post radiation (mid-March, 2008)
today
For those who are curious, and for those facing this exact surgery. The body takes it’s time to heal. This is how one learns to be patient, I suppose. It heals at its own rate, and it probably takes a full year or more before you get to see what it will look like as a permanent scar. Even then, I wonder; there are lots of products you can put on scars these days. I put vitamin e on mine during the day, and zinc (diaper rash cream, yes indeed) on it during the night.
When do you become a Survivor?
In the SL cancer survivors group meeting today, a friend raised the question of the definition of the term “survivor”. For most of us, we understood it as being a person who has gone into remission. But that’s not the definition they use. (And by “they” I think I mean the American Cancer Society.) To them, you become a survivor the moment you get your diagnosis.
We debated that. I understand wanting to use the term that way, to help people stay out of victimhood. (Though: sometimes you really are a victim. Do we use the world “survivor” to obscure this fact? Is it healthy to obscure it?) The leader of the group is a fan of this method, and I’m sympathetic to her motives. Who wants to tell someone that they’re a victim right now, but one day soon they’re going to move into the role of survivor? (Now that I think of it, that doesn’t sound all that bad at all.) We discussed the concept at some length. Many of us had moments where we felt we moved into survivorship; for some, you become a survivor the moment you decide to fight back. The youngest of us in the group (aged 26, stage 4 lymphoma, currently in remission) says he decided to fight back a second after he got the diagnosis.
I didn’t. For the first few weeks I felt that my incision belonged to my surgeon. I wasn’t a “survivor”. I was a battleground. I felt very passive. Now, even though I’m still struggling with some after effects and I probably have another 6 months before I start to get back to being my old self, I feel like a survivor. I think it might come when you decide to claim it.
I’m not even sure what that means.
At the beginning it was only fear, a fate I couldn’t bear to think about. It was too big for me to cope with. Once the surgery was over with, I felt certain that it didn’t matter to me anymore, the treatment was already done, right? The thing was out, it was over. I underestimated the importance of that final, confirmed diagnosis. It was cancer. I couldn’t say the word. I thought I had accepted it then, but I really hadn’t.
Through treatment I felt like I was going through the motions laid out by my doctor and the nuclear techs. I did what I was told, exactly the way I was told to do it. I clung to the lists of rules. I didn’t take shortcuts. It was like dance by numbers, follow the pattern of feet on the floor. Except in my case it was the outline of my body, and my job was to lay down and wait it out. I didn’t feel like a survivor then either. I felt pretty much like a puppet whose strings are pulled by someone more knowledgeable and more powerful. I was an avatar of cancer treatment.
I didn’t feel like a survivor when the depression sunk in, when I couldn’t stop crying. When my hips burned in pain. I didn’t feel like a survivor when I struggled just to walk from my bedroom to the bathroom. I definitely didn’t feel like a survivor the day after my wedding, when getting out of bed caused pain in every joint and all I wanted to do was lie down and cry.
I didn’t even feel like a survivor when my endocrinologist gave me the first all clear. (Hopefully I’ll get the second all clear in a couple of weeks when I see her again. Apparently this life is going to be a series of all-clears, or the opposite. If you never have cancer, you don’t get told that you still don’t have it. But once you’ve had it, I guess they’re always going to be checking, and giving me the all-clear, again and again and again. Unless I’m unlucky.) You’d think that would be the moment, when you’re finished and it’s gone. Nope.
I think I started to feel like a survivor when started building it and communicating about it. I blogged about it all the way along, that isn’t what I mean. There was something pretty magical about turning it into virtual-physical form that made a huge difference. It made me less afraid. No, not less afraid: less in denial. Once I turned the experience into something concrete, and other people started experiencing it with me in this way, telescoped out with lots of discussion and questions, it was then I started to feel like a survivor.
Maybe you become a survivor when you’re no longer in denial about what’s happening to you. You survive the denial, you move past it. It’s harder to move past cancer. Maybe we need more words for this. Words that pop into mind that are useful: victim (because let’s face it; this is one of the stages we go through), battleground, warrior, survivor.
If there’s one thing I’ve learned through all this it’s that there aren’t enough words in the English language. Not by a long shot.
The Future of Questions
I was asked recently to fill out a survey about the situation, goals, and ideas of “future library leaders”. One of the very first questions the survey asked was a true or false type thing; there was a statement and I was asked my opinion about it. The statement said something like this: “In the future, 100% of questions will be directed first at Google.” It was worded better than that, though.
I disagreed. I explained why, but now that I’ve answered this question, I want to elaborate on my answer, and why I’m positive that I’m right.
I don’t mean to imply that Google will become less important. If anything, it will probably become more important. It works. But I don’t think all questions will start there. I think we’re missing something really key.
While everyone loves Google and uses it, most people would prefer to ask their questions of real people, in digital form. In every online community of which I’m a part, there is this constant problem; new users “abusing” the group by picking their brains. On Feminist, the erudite community on livejournal, there were so many questions looking for help writing women’s studies papers that schoolwork-related questions were actually banned from the community. Similarly, on Academics Anon, another livejournal community, many, many questions are posted that are answered thus: “Google is your friend.” There is a near-constant conversation going on about how people don’t read and can’t they just google that citation question, and why does everyone expect us to answer all these silly questions that we’ve answered already 15000 times? The crankiness about it is one thing (and I understand it, in spite of being a librarian). The fact that anyone would rather face that kind of hostility and ask their question to a community of jaded academics (the basic premise of the community) rather than simply type the keywords of their question into google (how to cite a website, etc.) is telling.
In the last two days, as I’ve been preparing for Burning Life, the same thing is happening again. In order to get into the land set aside for Burning Life, you have to join a group. The chat related to that group is almost 99% basic questions that are all answered on Burning Life’s webpages, and the natives are getting very restless. Those webpages are actually very clear and well constructed, but when redirected to these pages, the question-askers are getting mightily upset, as if being asked to read a webpage is some kind of insult. I find this fascinating. They don’t want to read the webpage, even though they are told repeatedly that the answer to their question is there. They want to be told. They want their hands held. They want the personal touch. All digitally, of course.
So why is it that reference as a service is dying by this desire for personal communication is so prominent in online communities?
I think the key to it is trust. And it’s not that these new Burning Life folks trust the rest of us in the group as individuals. They trust that we went through this process already and know how to do it. They trust that we have expertise, and an unwillingness to share it with them offends them. The same is true in the feminist and academics community; they don’t come to us because they like us as people, or find us approachable. They come to us because they trust that we know what we’re talking about.
What makes this all the more confusing is that there’s that constant refrain out there about how you never know who you’re dealing with on the internet, but no one takes that too seriously in these cases. They don’t care if you’re really a dog. They only care that you know something about this very specific category of knowledge, and your participation in this forum provides that degree of trustworthiness.
How can libraries get themselves into that kind of category? I’m not sure. But I think clearly defining and expressing our particular expertise is part of it. The rest is an open question.
Burning Life
You’ve probably heard of Burning Man, the art festival that happens in the middle of the Nevada desert every year; Second Life has a Burning Man festival of its own. It’s called Burning Life.
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YgqojJ987wY&hl=en&fs=1]
It’s run by Second Life owners, Linden Labs, and they put up plots of land for grabs at intervals this week. So the festival is open to anyone who can grab a plot. I missed the 5am rush for land this morning, but I got in at 1pm today, and got myself a plot. I was very lucky to get it; I took off my hair and all of my attachments in order to teleport in faster, so I grabbed the plot not naked but bald and shoeless.
Second Life events are amazing, so how could I pass up this one?
My build:
I built a light version of this several weeks ago for fun. Basically, I recorded 6 notes in a major chord. In this build, I created frames and “tacked” sheets up on them. The sheets each contain one of those notes, and when you walk through them, the note plays. I put them in sets, so each row is one incidence of the chord. You can run through it in any direction you want, creating different variations on the chord.
I really wanted to do pachelbel’s canon, and while I can see exactly how to do it, it has to be in a difference space. It needs to be a long loop, not strips. Pachelbel’s canon can’t be played all notes at once and sound good. So I reverted back to the major chord. There’s no dissonance in it. It doesn’t matter which side you start on. I want this build to be for groups to run through, and the sound of a major chord sounding in places like that is very ethereal.
I built a tiny campsite above it, because that’s probably going to be the best place to sit and listen while people run around below. I’m really looking forward to Burning Life. It runs from September 27 through October 5. Got an account? Come visit! It should be interesting.
Orientation Video
I’m proud to finally present one of my summer projects: University of Toronto Mississauga library’s Orientation Video, Going for Gold.
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZcD3NkbEXCQ&hl=en&fs=1&rel=0]
LOLcat
“This is my hiding place. It is ideal. It is soft and warm and from this vantage point, I can see any and all monsters as they attempt to enter the room. Why are you looking at me like that?”
“You! You are a monster! Beware my batting orange paw of doom!”
Homework
I object to anyone getting homework. I object to it in elementary school, in middle school, and even in high school. University doesn’t count because it’s not homework. You could, if you were dedicated, spend only as much time as you spent in high school doing university level work and you’d probably still gets As. Think about it. 8:30am to 3:30pm every day, Monday through Friday. That would do it, including class time.
You know why I object to homework? It doesn’t teach you the value of work/life balance. Kids sit in those desks all day for hours on end, and then you want them to go home and do more? What are you teaching them? That they should eschew their weekends when they grow up and work themselves into a frenzy, burning out early? Sure, there are times when work has to come home. You do it because you love it, and you want things to be easier. But as a rule? Don’t do it. I wish I’d had this revelation when I was a phd student, because it’s crushing to think, every moment of every day, that you should be working. No. You shouldn’t be doing homework at 7pm on a Thursday night, little middle-schooler. You should be out playing road hockey or jumping rope or swimming in your best friend’s pool. That’s better for you, mind and body. Math can wait.
Made the Front Page!
Check it out! Hot off the presses: the latest edition of the Metaverse Messenger, with Dulcie Mills and Verde Otaared’s article, “Cancerland offers a close look at disease”, profiling my build in Second Life. I kind of sound like an airhead, since I couldn’t really claim to have built it for the good of cancer survivors, and I have no good sound bites for the how and why or what of it. Ah well. Poppy and Feeg, who I met through the American Cancer Society’s support group in world, had some great and very kind quotations in there too. There’s my rather crappy model of a tumour on the front cover! OMG my 15 minutes of fame have begun!
The Cat Sanctuary
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vwM6f0liHpo&hl=en&fs=1]
This woman is a saint.
How to Dehumanize a Person in One Easy Step
Today on the train downtown, I got to thinking about my sick leave. Before I had to take it, there was a big part of me that dreaded it, since I knew I would be very sick, but there was this other part of me, a smaller, quieter part, that longed for it. I just wanted the break. I was so incredibly tired and stressed out and panicked, the idea of a long time out seemed like a good idea.
And it was, for a while. There’s something about lying on an operating table and facing a cancer diagnosis that puts things like paperwork and job stress into perspective. My job basically faded away into the wallpaper while I focused on my health. My main priorities were sleeping and keeping warm.
These days, I’m back to work full time, and I love it. I love so much of what I do, I feel so lucky and blessed at every turn. I’m learning a lot of new skills that are sharpening my brain and organizing my life. My projects are interesting and challenging and fun. But some days aren’t as good as others for me, health-wise. I have bad days. I often have very groggy mornings that make it difficult for me to get myself moving at a normal speed. And some days I have pain management problems that make it impossible for me to do anything other than curl up and try to keep breathing. So I have to take those days off. Fortunately those days aren’t too common, but at this point there is nothing I hate more than taking more time off work.
I’ve been away long enough. I’m supposed to be all better by now. (Har har.) I want to be perfectly healthy and on all the time. I want to catch up somehow, make up for lost time. I love my job and the people I work for and with, and don’t want to be a losing proposition for them. While paid time off work sounds nice, there’s a serious downside.
I’ve come to realize how dehumanizing it is to have no working relationship with the world you inhabit. Does that make sense? When I’m not part of the human community as a functioning, productive member, I feel lesser. I feel embarrassed and cut off. I feel like a leech. I feel like my opinion is irrelevant, like I’m erased. I’m not participating, I’m not pulling my weight; that’s guilt talking. But I’m also not able to exert control/power/influence, either. That sounds more sinister. I’m not able to shape my world in the way I want it shaped, the way I think it aught to be shaped. I can’t argue my points and make my case. I can’t direct the flow of things. My presence recedes, the world doesn’t have my stamp on it like it feels like it does when I’m working. Work defines me in ways I wouldn’t have guessed. It’s linked into my self-esteem in a way that I find intriguing.
We are social animals. We build working communities and participate in them. The nature of our value comes from the ways in which we participate in our community and help improve it, or make it run, or provide some kind of service. I feel it most strongly when I have to miss work for unfun reasons, as if I’m being dragged out of my community; I’m being removed. My voice doesn’t matter as much, if at all. I’m dehumanized.
So then I started thinking about the numbers of people who are constantly marginalized in our culture, the people who don’t provide a service, who don’t improve the world or make it run. The people who are expected to be the recipients of our goodwill and charity. Those same people who get noses turned up at them because they are “lazily living off the public dime”. What a terrible place to be in this culture, where your input determines not only your community worth but your sense of self-worth. Am I overstating the point? I am certainly one of those people who want their actions to at least subtly alter someone else’s day/life in a positive way every day. When I feel I don’t have that ability or option, I feel shut out, on the outside, no longer part of the human community. It gets me down.
Everyone brings value to the human community in their own way. Perhaps this is the heart of why I felt I needed to build Cancerland in Second Life, so that at least my fallow period could be transformed into something useful. September is Thyroid Cancer awareness month. In my optimistic moments I can imagine that this blog and my Cancerland build are monuments to my attempt to raise awareness about thyroid cancer, to help others to cope with what they’re facing, to help those who love someone with thyroid cancer to understand what they’re going through, and how sick they are even when they don’t look as sick as you expect someone with cancer to look. I can spin it all that way. Maybe I need to spin it that way.
But it shouldn’t be that difficult to feel that you have value; on the flip side, everyone should have the opportunity to demonstrate their value in some way. Perhaps your disability doesn’t allow you to hold down a job; do you feel, as I did, dehumanized by that reality, unable to contribute to the all-mighty economy like everyone else? The bleakness of it jars me. My own guilt and formulation of “value” in that sense absolutely reeks of privilege. It makes me want to seek out and support alternative ways for people to contribute, regardless of their sickness or disability or personal struggles. There are so many wonderful things that can make our community a better one; they don’t all involve going to work every day. It reminds me of the power of play, the power of art, the power of voice. These things can have more impact on people’s lives than many workaday jobs. I want to have a personal revolution on the qualities that define that nebulous concept of an individual’s “worth”.
The Value in Replicas
Jeremy and I have a recurring argument about replica builds. Well, it’s not an argument so much; mostly I agree with him. He does an excellent presentation describing his point that’s very convincing. There are a lot of replica builds in Second Life. And it’s not really a good thing.
By replicas I mean exact reproductions of real-world locations in Second Life. Spending significant money and time to reproduce, say, your campus down to the most minute detail. Jeremy’s argument is that the purpose behind these builds is primarily branding, and he questions the point of it. You branded a piece of Second Life by building your campus on it, but the campus in world is empty. So what was the point? He anticipates that most of these virtual campuses will start shutting down one by one as they fail to produce any recruitment or interest in the real life institution.
I agree with him, easily, that building a replica of your campus for the purposes of branding is a fairly pointless idea. The population of Second Life is not that big, given that it’s a global system. They claim to have over 14 million residents (at present), but only roughly 500K have logged in in the last 7 days, and to be honest I’ve rarely seen more than 60K on at any given time. Sure, by any human standards that’s a lot of people, but compare that to facebook: 90 million active users. Second Life is a small fish in a big internet; it’s filled with some tourists, some business people, some mavens who love building and coding, and a whole bunch of people who just like hanging out. The chances of any university administration having even a tiny minority of its students in Second Life is pretty minimal. The chances of any university administration having any prospective students in world is practically nil; remember that the minimum age requirement to log into Second Life is 18. I personally assumed that no students at my school have ever logged on until someone caught a glimpse of Second Life on a laptop in the library (so maybe there’s one). Putting things in Second Life to get attention of parents and prospective students simply won’t work. Whose attention are you going to get?
The best thing you can do in Second Life, the wisdom goes (and I don’t dispute it), is create something you can’t create in real life. Create impossible structures; the weather is always great and everyone can fly. Create a physical manifestation of a concept, an idea, a feeling. I’ve tried my hand at this and it has proved compelling. It works. It works and it’s unique, it’s using a tool to do something that breaks the barriers to which we’re accustomed. Doing something that you can’t do anywhere else; that’s the only way to make it worthwhile. There’s no point using the place as a chat room. Too much bandwidth, to expensive to maintain. So when you choose to do something, it needs to be worthwhile.
So replicas: where’s the value?
Same principles. Do something you can’t do in real life. What if you need to build the replica first in order to do that?
Example one:
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nw7eDKxEN0c&hl=en&fs=1]
Build a building in Second Life that doesn’t actually exist yet. Make a movie about it. If I were them, I’d probably use that build for presentations, or displays. Have a character running around inside it, doing a virtual tour, while you’re talking about it. Set up stations and let people log in and wander around through it. Make a movie of it without sound and display it on digital signage. You’re encouraging interest in something that doesn’t exist yet, allaying fears, answering questions, letting people feel like part of the process. What a fantastic idea.
But that’s not quite a replica, is it. It’s realistic, it’s real world, it’s abiding by real world physics and a literal plan, but it’s still something virtual (for now). You could do something similar with a renovation; make the soon-to-be real virtually. But what about things that really do exist?
The standard line does indeed run along branding lines; set up your campus, let people explore it. It’s not a bad idea, at its heart. But maybe it’s not enough to just recreate it. What if you recreate it, but add something impossible to it? Something real, something legitimate, but not something you’d ever get in real life?
One of my very favourite art projects was dotted around the streets of Toronto a few years ago. It was a sign in the shape of an ear, with a cell phone number on it. When you call it, you get a recording, someone telling you about a memory about the spot you’re standing on. It’s like a digital tour of the city, in personal stories. This is hard to do in real life, but relatively easy to do in person. What about a story around every corner? The collected stories of students on your campus, added to regularly. Add them in audio, text, pictures. Bring your campus to personal, legitimate, intimate life. People it not with avatars but with real stories, voices of real people, talking about what it’s like to be there, experiences. Moments of epiphany, stories about coffee with instructors, mentorship, enjoying the beauty of an autumn morning. Sounds of the street, random conversations. The options are really unlimited.
It’s not really so very far from the concept/feeling idea. You can use replicas in the service of those things, as the canvas on which you can build your masterpiece. But the masterpiece needs to be built; it’s not enough to just nail the canvas together. Don’t just brand; convey genuine, honest information. Use the tool to its fullest.
But who’s going to see it? Again, I think it’s something you demonstrate rather than expect people to stumble upon (though: if they do stumble on it, great!). Maybe you make movies; maybe you do something else with it that I can’t think of. Though I think it’s not unlikely that, once built, prospective students would jump in to see something full of stories and information from other students, especially if it grows every year. I imagine it would be a neat project for graduating students. Force number one to contend with: first year students are excited. They’re excited the moment they get that letter of acceptance. They want to pick their courses, meet students, ask questions, buy books. They want any scrap of advice or information they can get. They are keen. And yet for some reason we don’t do a heck of a lot to entertain that energy. We make them wait until September. For some of the less sexy but more useful services (like, say, reference, or interlibrary loan, or career services) that eager time where all information is absorbed with great glee, wouldn’t that be a great moment to express what is really available for them? Maybe they’re the audience, one way or another. And I can’t think of many other places where you could do it.
So I’ve come full circle with the replica build. On its own, not so interesting. But I can see it getting more interesting the more stories you add to it.
Me and my Avatar
Best Underused Technologies in Education
I’ve been searching and watching and experimenting, and in the last few months I’ve come to realize that these handful of technologies, some very well known, some less so, have a lot to offer teaching and learning but are less well-used for those purposes than they perhaps ought to be. Here’s my rationale:
Wikis
Some of the real leaders in instructional technology have been using wikis with students for some time, but they’re just not as widely-used as they should be, not by a long shot. Wikis can be both extraordinarily challenging for both the instructor and the students, or they can fit rather seamlessly into a traditional classroom. This flexibility makes them almost universally useful. Students can use wikis to keep collaborative notes in small groups or with the entire class, collectively annotate a poem or other text, create a collective bibliography, collaborate on assignments, write documents in a group, or create a document (an encyclopedia, a book of chapters, a picture book, anything) that end up supporting, say, a classroom in an underprivileged area, for instance; collectively rewriting the syllabus of the class; the options are almost limitless. Wikis, in short, are cool. They take very little training to use, they revolve around traditional skills and activities of writing and citing, and there are few classes that can’t benefit from their use. In time I believe they will be a standard tool inside courseware, simply because they are so incredibly flexible.
Flickr
Pretty much anyone with a camera and an internet connection uses flickr already, so flickr alone isn’t the revelation. The reason I include it here is primarily because I’ve pretty much given up trying to discourage people from using powerpoint. Most people in my circle of influence are married to powerpoint and won’t give it up regardless. So I’ve decided instead to encourage people to be a bit more conceptual and interesting with their powerpoint instead. Why not use creative commons licensed images from flickr to make that powerpoint more punchy? Under advanced search, flickr allows you to search only for content that you can borrow and reuse. Why not take advantage of a free source of amazing-looking images? My favourite powerpoint presentations are the ones that use no text at all, but represent points and ideas through creative commons images only. It fulfills the instructor’s desire to have a prompt for the next point, and it at least gives the class an opportunity to try and guess the point based on the picture alone. Hey, at least it’s something beyond endless bullet points on slides, right? We are turning into a user-content driven society, but so far we have been focusing more on creating it rather than using it. There’s a time for both!
Odeo and Seesmic
I’m linking these two particular technologies, but really it could be any of the significant number of online audio and video recorders. Odeo and Seesmic are, I think, only the simplest of them. (Though, the video recorder in facebook is stellar.) Here’s why I put it here: we waste a lot of time in education being talking heads. Often, people don’t even want to be interrupted; they want to read their their paper, or process their way through their detailed notes of the lecture, and take questions afterwards. Why are we wasting valuable in-class time for this? Why not read the paper at home into a microphone and/or webcam a couple of weeks beforehand and post the audio/video stream as a reading? Then you can use the time you have in class to actually build upon that lecture, build on the ideas and communicate with the students. I know lots of faculty feel students won’t watch it or listen to it or pay attention to it, but I think our fear around that support it happening. Listening to or watching the lecture is required; put them on the spot when you’re face to face. Tell them they need to come up with 3 questions and 3 comments based on the lecture and the readings, and post them before class starts. Expect them to do it. Students might be just lazy, but I think in fact we train them that they don’t need to do the required reading, because most of the time they sit in a lecture hall bored out of their skins and they don’t see the point of all that preparation. They’ll do the reading when it will matter, ie, before an exam. In graduate seminars you are expected to talk, and everyone feels the pressure to get the reading done and have something to say. Put the same pressure on undergrads! I see audio as a way to off-load our easiest ways to use a 2 hour lecture slot and do something that actually requires everyone’s presence and attention during that time. Life is short. Every face-to face minute should have value. The hardest part is figuring out what to do with 2 hours when everyone’s already heard your excellent lecture. What a great problem to have, I’d say.
Second Life
As much as some technologies are almost universally useful, Second Life is not. I know there are cohorts of educators that believe all courses should be at least partially in Second Life, but I don’t understand their reasons. Second Life is an amazing tool, but only where its particular kind of tool is needed. I think most people are excited by the togetherness factor; unlike message boards or email, when you’re all logged into Second Life, you’re all in there together. You can see each other moving around, and lately, you can hear each other’s voices. That’s very cool for distance ed courses that require face-to-face time. It’s also pretty cool for language learning. However, I’d say for the most part that Second Life’s greatest use is in building. I believe that the tools inside Second Life are excellent for in-depth research projects where students work either alone or in groups, where it is too easy to plagiarize or buy a paper rather than learn anything. If you’re ready to throw the traditional essay assignment out the window, a Second Life building project (say, a particular historical moment, a biography, an idea or concept like postmodernism or the nature of the hijab) might be just the thing. Students need to do a lot of research to get the details right and build it, and then they make a movie out of it that fits into another class, or on a website, or as part of a larger project. It’s interesting, it’s different, it’s engaging and unique, and it’s a lot of fun. With the right concept and the right support, I think this could be one of the most rewarding projects for instructors and students alike.
Firef.ly
This is brand new. When people first look at it, they don’t get why I think it has any relationship to education. I did a bad thing in that I grabbed an article from First Monday to try and explain it: check it out here. Look for the little bar at the bottom with the button “start chatting”. Get it? Basically it puts cursors and chat over top of a document, anchored to the document. So if I start typing while I’m reading the introduction, anyone else reading the introduction will see it. If I start typing while I’m in paragraph 5, others at that point will see it. If I get confused part way through, I can hover around the confusing part with others who are also confused. Essentially, we can now book a time and read collaboratively with students. Students can meet together and go through a document. You don’t have to wait until you get to the end anymore. I think this is way more valuable than you’d think, because one of the first skills students need to pick up when they start university is a new kind of reading. Reading an academic article is not like reading a book; it’s more like sitting in someone’s office and hearing a personal lecture. You to learn to respond as you hear it, you need to become part of a conversation with the article. If we encourage that early on, we end up with more vocal students. Also an advantage: with a tricky article, the class and read together and the TA or instructor can scroll through and see where the clusters of cursors are to see where students get stuck. And work it through right there!
Those are my current top 5. More next week or so, I’m sure.
Manga Me
Everyone’s doing it…a manga me via faceyourmanga:
Though I don’t look too manga to me. Just a cartoon. I couldn’t get hair that’s straight and in ponytails, sadly.
Tell me a Story
A message I sent to the Second Life in Education Mailing list today:
I was just listening to the latest Radio Lab episode, which summed up a great deal of what I’d argue Second Life has to offer academic communication: the tools to create interactive, powerful, immersive and engaging narrative out of scholarly ideas and works. In this podcast, Robert Krulwich talks about the long conflict between “popular” means of communication and the sciences, and how that stand-off between them has resulted in the dramatic gulf between the ivory tower and everyone else. He links it directly to the power of the anti-evolution front springing forth from the US and spreading out over the world, because the anti-evolution front has an excellent *story* to tell, while science has agreed that story is not useful, is “play”, and science must be “work” and “fact” rather than metaphor and play.
At the same time I’m currently reading Julian Dibbell‘s excellent book Play Money, which underscores the odd divide western culture places between work and play, even when it becomes startlingly clear that productive work and play are by no means seperate entities.
So this podcast brings together these ideas; metaphor, story, and “play” have a valid place even in academic/scientific communication. Play and metaphor doesn’t cheapen or simplify ideas; it merely makes their implications strike us at deeper levels than mere facts. They are the driving mechanism for facts, perhaps. The means to deliver information.
And really, since language is really just a derivative of song, how is metaphor any less frivilous a means than singing?
Second Life, and and any other constructivist worlds that have appeared before and will appear in future, provides the tools to communicate concepts and ideas in a different, more emmersive way. In a way more like play, more like story, with a strong metaphor. I think this is crucially valuable.
Perfume
The world is awash in scent.
I couldn’t smell anything for a while, so now I’m hyper-attuned to it. I’ve got a running catalogue of the smells that populate my day; the faint smell of french fries in the front foyer at the library, the smell of green, growing things along the road on the way to the bus stop, diesel fuel and the whiff of old cigarette smoke by the bus depot. The closed-in, grassy smell around the doors in and out of the hallways, the rich, beautiful smell of coffee in the Starbucks across from the library main entrance (I don’t like the taste of coffee–too bitter for me– but the smell of it is fantastic). The smell of rain on the grass, the earth, the streamlet that turns into a roaring river during these repeated summer rainstorms we’ve been having; it smells alive, thick, mossy, on the edge of turning into something new. My hands smell like a camping trip (roasted vegetable sandwich for lunch, the smell of which just doesn’t seem to want to come off). My cat, with his saliva-tinged coat, smells clean. His fresh litter (untouched, fresh out of the container) is pure clay, unscented, and smells like the old concrete walls at the skating rink where I used to practice twice a week; like old stone, crushed and pushed into submission, crumbled by sheer force of will into something practical, like walls to protect us from the cold, a pool of sand for my cat to dip his feet into. The smell of my husband, always tinged with mint and water, which is starkly missing from my home now that he’s gone back to Virginia.
I went to the drugstore yesterday to buy shampoo. I spent 20 minutes popping them open and smelling their insides.
Goals in Second Life
From Harry E. Pence, “The homeless professor in Second Life,” Journal of Educational Technology Systems, Vol. 26, 2 (2007): 171-177.
Some people try to classify Second Life as a game. If Second life is a game, it is a most unusual game, since it does not define goals for winning nor is there any method for keeping score. Each resident is responsible for defining his or her personal goals. Setting goals is just as important in Second life as it is in real life. The failure to regonize this fact may explain why many people drop out in frustration after only a short time in Second life. The confusion about goals has probably also contributed to the various articles in the popular press that focus on the sexual aspects of SL; pornographers have established a robust business model by preying upon those who are confused about what to do.
I love this idea of thinking about goals. Reading this paragraph gave me a mini-ephiphany. Unlike traditional game spaces, the system doesn’t give you goals; you need to come in with them, or develop them as you go. If you’re not prepared to provide your own internal motivation and structure, Second Life will indeed seem pointless.
The Witching Hour
What I’ve learned lately is that there are many kinds of tired. More than people generally accept. Perhaps the language around tired in English is simply not rich enough; perhaps the creation of language and vocabulary is a young, healthy person’s game.
First, there is physical tiredness. This is the best kind by a long shot. After a long day of physical labour, sleep comes like a sweet breeze and is an uninterrupted rest. After that, there’s the tired you get when you’ve gone too long without sleeping; that dizzy kind of tired, the kind that sometimes doesn’t lead to sleep as fast as you’d think it would. Then there’s the kind of tired you feel when you’ve got a bad cold or flu or a fever; that bodily exhaustion, the stuffiness in the head, the grogginess. All generally relate to sleep very directly. You get tired, you struggle (or not) to fall asleep, you wake up and feel better.
That’s not what it’s like when you’ve got thyroid issues.
Walking through a world where air is thick like molasses; sleeping and not feeling rested; too tired to think, to parse words, to imagine things. To tired to remember; being startled by the same coat hanging by the door more than once (forgetting the simple explanation: you’re just keeping it for someone else, it’s not a dark shadow peering in at you).
Why is it that sleepiness seems to stem from the eyes? I’ve seen it in both of my nephews, who rub their eyes when they’re tired. I feel it myself when I feel groggy and slow; as if my sleepiness is stemming directly from my eyes.
This is what I have learned: being tired and sleeping are not necessarily connected. If your sleep is thrown off hormonally, you can get plenty of sleep and still feel tired, both mentally and bodily. What do you call it when you’re not so much tired (though it feels very close), but you feel as if your body missed a step along the way between sleep and wakefulness? There’s that witching hour in the middle of the night when you wake up for some reason (a voice in the hall, a car back-firing, an anxious dream), and the world seems different, dream-like, unreal. Your thought-process is on some other level where the rules of the world are different; walls move, the dean rides up to your office on a horse, you chew through your own broken teeth. And while you’re in that dream-space, the real world is confusing. A dripping tap is an enigma; the feel of a cat’s tail against your shin can make you jump three feet into the air in fear. Sometimes (not all the time, mind you, just once in a while) I don’t think my switch between that world and the normal one entirely materializes. So I can go for hours feeling like I’m about to fall back to sleep at any moment, where things will make more sense again. Phrases contain words but don’t make sense; there’s text on the screen in front of me but I can’t read it. Being unable to keep up with a conversation; asking people to repeat themselves more than once, even though a question was already answered moments before.
Somehow the word “groggy” just doesn’t quite cover it.
Though these days are few and far between. I’m doing pretty well, but I have my occasional rough days (like yesterday and today).
I got my test results back. No more cancer, by the looks of things. I’m in the clear for a while.
Rickroll’d in Chicago
Yesterday, Jeremy and I got rickroll’d by a wall in a tunnel on the way out of the University of Chicago campus.
Even without a computer or an internet connection, the Rick keeps on rollin’.
Synthroid Cyborg
I haven’t been saying much about all this yet, mostly because I’m horribly disappointed in my progress, and embarrassed, and also guilty and ashamed that I’m not better yet. This is what happened: my first day back to work I felt pretty fantastic; the next day I was tired, the day after that my joints started to swell a little. But I recovered alright, and aside from being increasingly tired, I was doing sort of okay. There are some things I didn’t want to admit to: while I used to be multi-task a lot, now I can’t seem to. I forget about other windows too easily. I’m easily distracted and forgetful. I’m having trouble concentrating at all. I feel sort of blank. Things went rapidly downhill after that, until within a few days I had excruciating, nearly immobilizing pain in my hips (for reasons as yet unknown), I burst into violent sobs with no provocation or apparent reason whatsoever, and I was entirely, completely exhausted. I hoisted the white flag. I know when I’m beat. My GP took one look at me and said, “Okay, that’s enough. Rest.”
He also told me the thing I hadn’t known yet: my first post-radiation nuclear scan showed something unexpected. That’s why I got called back to the hospital to do it again a week later. It wasn’t a technical problem, or bad pictures. My thyroid bed was lit up like a christmas tree on the scan, indicating more remaining thyroid tissue than expected. My GP told me this because I wanted to know and no one would tell me. He isn’t sure what they’ll do about it. He mentioned “a second surgery”, but that doesn’t seem likely to me, and my GP admits that he has no idea. My surgeon is good. If he didn’t get it out the first time, it’s not coming out. Possibly it means another round of RAI (radioactive iodine), which is not a great scenario either. Going hypo is hard (and takes up to 5 weeks), and recovery from hypo is hard (takes anywhere from 2-3 months). My current recovery has been difficult and I don’t relish the idea of doing it again. But I won’t find out more until the end of the month. So this is why I didn’t get a cake with writing on it in pink icing saying YOU’RE CANCER FREE!!!! They don’t quite know yet. Not for sure.
Everyone told me this was a simple deal; surgery, lounge for a while, sit under a machine for a while, take pill. Easy. I can’t overstate how much this was a poor description of what was to come. And at each stage I thought I was over the very worst of it, only to discover that there was another, taller hurdle to leap over. There is all at once too much information about thyroid cancer around and also not enough. I guess no one is ever ready to hear the whole truth.
I’m reminded of the terror that shook my whole self prior to that surgery; I was terrified of what lay beyond that point when I walked into the operating room, and not just because I was scared to have surgery (which I definitely was). I was scared of the whole thing: being cut, being bandaged up, being in pain; going hypo, the possibility (certainty) of having cancer. Having to incorporate all that into me. Having to be strong enough through that. And now I understand why that terror was justified. It’s not that it’s horribly painful (though the hips, as I say, were really something else, but that has now subsided). It’s that it alters absolutely everything about who you think you are. It’s hard to pick up and move on; you’re just not the person you think you are.
The chief librarian at my place of work likened it to having your central control panel ripped out, and that’s a good comparison. My own metaphors are much darker.
My whole life I didn’t feel all that much of a mind/body split. I am what I am, and all of me is me. It was a very simple equation. Right now I feel like a wine topper stuck on top of a bottle, a disembodied personality; I’m attached to this body, but I have no idea how it works, and half the time there appears to be no relationship at all between what’s going on in my mind and how my body is behaving. I am a terrible judge at what will make me feel good or bad, what will make me cry, what will exhaust me. I can’t determine how much I can do before I hit a wall, I seem to be deaf to any hints my body tries to give me. Today I actually hit a wall in the middle of a sentence. Normally you know how much oxygen and energy you have left to say what you were about to say, but not me. Not right now. All my dials are flailing. Nothing tastes or smells the same, on the banal edge of it. While I never got car sick before, now I’m noticing it, a little, when I take the bus. Where did that come from? Twice now I’ve carried gifts onto buses and left them there, just sitting there, on the seat next to me. Didn’t even notice they were missing until days later. It’s as if I’m not really here at all.
So my realization is this: synthroid (artificial thyroid hormone, to replace my absent thyroid gland) makes me different. Of course it does; given how much it controls, it’s like my new landlord, my new roommate. I’m still me, but my body is now fundamentally different. I’m a pharmaceutical cyborg, with a crucial bit of my physical functioning turned over to carefully calibrated technology in the shape of a tiny purple pill. It’s not as if there was a choice or any other alternative, so there isn’t much room for regrets. If I stop taking it, I get sick and die. Until that looks like a valid option, there’s only one way into this town.
I live in a fundamentally and permanently changed my body, and I need to accept that and begin to learn its rules and cues. There must be a time, when we’re very small, when we don’t know our bodies very well. I can’t imagine that we know from birth how our bodies are going to react in certain circumstances, how we need to protect them. (I can’t help but split mind/body even in my sentence construction; it’s so old school but so completely my reality right now.) Somewhere along the way we must learn to make friends with our bodies, to listen to them and just know, as if instinctively, when something’s wrong, or when they need something, or when we can step it up or need to step back. My slate is wiped clean and I have to take it slowly, learn what I can and can’t do.
It’s not something they’re likely to tell you when they diagnose you, though I’m sure I wouldn’t have wanted to hear it.
You’re not going to be just you anymore. You’re you + synthroid. It will be different.
I suppose I’ll get used to it with time.
The Birth of Israel
When I was at Divinity School in the late 90s, one of the things I was required to do was to take two classes in scriptural studies along with my very free-wheeling program of early modern European history. I didn’t object to this, as it was useful for my studies in Reformation history and religion, but it was extremely new for me. I was a bit intimidated by it. First I took a class on the New Testament, which didn’t make that much of an impression on me other than to boggle at the art of parsing small collections of words to determine who wrote them and what influenced them. After that I took a class on the Hebrew bible, which intimidated me far more. Raised an atheist by devoutly atheist parents, I had at least a cursory understanding of the New Testament, given that our culture is saturated with it; the Hebrew bible was more of a mystery. But in the end, this class was one of the ones that utterly changed my world view.
We started at the beginning, with Genesis, of course. The first big revelation is that we have particular expectations of stories, expectations that are culturally defined, not “natural”. When someone tells us a story, a “history”, we anticipate that we are getting a basic list of facts. This is not the way middle eastern stories were told. Instead, they expressed truths through metaphor; take a familiar narrative and twist it in a particular way. We still do this, of course. But for narratives like this to make sense, you need to be well-versed in the whole culture in order to understand the signifiers. This is the same revelation I had when I took a music history class that finally explained to me why it was impossible to understand hip hop as anything other than an extraordinarily high form of art; to use the culture as your instrument, and manipulate it to say something new, with each note, each tone, coming with its own particular cultural resonance. To tell a story that isn’t just the straight narrative, but is a story that constructs itself in your head based on all the internal meanings of the pieces. To be outside the culture that created these kinds of narratives means that you won’t ever entirely understand all of it, like reading novels based on biblical stories without knowing the bible; you can understand the straight narrative, but not it’s inherent meaning. I was inspired by this form of story telling. I appreciate the depth of it. So my subsequent reading of the Hebrew bible brought me insights I couldn’t have come to otherwise, though I know I’m missing so much else. If you think about it, one of the overriding stories of the Hebrew Bible is that anyone who thinks they understand the will of G-d, the mind of G-d, is bound for failure. G-d cannot be understood by the human mind. To me, this was an important spiritual realization. Men and women since the beginning have been trying to find a way to communicate, to understand.
What followed in that course was a description of the history of the tribes; the nomadic history, the tribes who claimed land, the one who was dispossessed and became the priestly class. The remaining nomadic tradition that brought the key religious objects, the tabernacle containing the holiest of objects, to all communities in turn. I loved this idea; a movable temple, so that no one area laid claim to these precious objects. And how precious those objects were! Imagine: you have found one way to communicate with your creator and benefactor; it’s an unusual way, granted. You carry a seat, and this seat is the liminal space where your G-d’s space and yours coincide. This is the one chink in the wall between you and G-d; being near these objects is being near your G-d, not because they are divine necessarily, but because these are the tools that restructure space and time so that the hear the strains of G-d’s voice. G-d might well be everywhere, but this space, this little string and cans, is the only way you can make direct contact. And then the temple settles and is built in Jerusalem; the centre of that temple contains this special spot, the telephone line between heaven and earth. The communication lines aren’t just initiated by objects anymore, but are linked to this particular place, this special rock, this quality of the planet at this particular location. A tiny footprint of the planet where everything is arranged just right, the riverbed that brings G-d’s words to earth. As time goes on, this place is more and more protected; only the priests can go inside to be near this wonderful and dangerous spot. The course ended with only a mention that the following event is the destruction of the temple in 586 BCE. Just a mention.
Photo by Christopher Chan
The following term I took a course in comparative iconography. And the very first day, the instructor (the wonderful Kimberley Patton) showed us a picture of the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem. She told us: “according to measurements based on the placement of the remains of the temple, the Dome of the Rock, the oldest existing Muslim structure, sits over the place where the Holiest of Holies would have been.”
I was so struck by this image, by this reality. It’s as if the temple had just been destroyed for me, the implications hadn’t quite been revealed to me until that moment. There are no more prophets after the destruction of the temple, because there cannot be. G-d’s voice can no longer be heard. The means of communication are gone. These two spheres, the mortal and the immortal, still spin around each other, regarding each other, but no voice can be heard. No more fire in the bushes that does not burn its leaves, no more commandments, no more lost and confused youngest sons asked to bring an awkward, unwanted message to his people. No more surprise visits at the well. And here it is, that spot, the broken communication lines. The tools are long gone. The silence is deafening. I had to leave the room to catch my breath and consider it all, let it all sink in. The tragedy of it; a crucial, comforting connection, gone. To be cast adrift like that, never hearing the voice of a loved one ever again.
So in that moment I understood how contested that ground is, how high the stakes can be when history, religious and geography collide. So that’s my story for the 60th birthday of the modern state of Israel. G-d help us all.
Everyone’s a Billionaire
I’ve been thinking about this lately, because I’ve had a serious downturn in my recovery this week. I can speculate about why, but to be honest I’m not entirely certain. My body is rebelling, and it goes from vaguely achey to gobsmackingly, agonizingly painful. It’s incredibly frustrating. I’m supposed to be getting better, not worse. I have work to do! This is getting seriously old; I’m so over the whole illness thing. I want a normal, reliable body back.
This state has brought me some insight into things I should be more grateful for when I’m not sick. Sadly, the best way I can think of to communicate it is with a money metaphor.
When it comes to energy, most people are billionaires. They have so much energy that they occupy most of the day spending it frivolously and furiously. Jetting up and down the stairs, dancing, talking long walks, fidgeting. Some people make a point of trying blowing their entire savings account as often as possible by running or doing aerobics or other expensive activities. Obviously this practice is very good for their local energy economies, because by the time they wake up every morning they have earned all their energy back in interest. Their savings accounts are constantly replenished by a good night’s sleep. Billionaires never have to count their cash; even when their wallets appear empty, their savings are merely on temporary hold.
And then there are the energy poor. They only have a few dollars in their pockets from the start, so they have to decide what they need to spend it on over span of the day. Each purchase needs to be carefully thought out and considered. Need to walk up the stairs a few times? In order to do it, a few other things need to be crossed off the list, like the ability to focus and concentrate, or being able to communicate with others for the duration of the day. The energy poor conserve so carefully that stray body movements are controlled; do you need to fidget while on the bus? Once you’ve sat down, do you really need to shift your limbs? The original action is enough to get you there. Sitting still until the next necessary action seems like a good move. This isn’t an endless cup of riches, it’s only a handful of change. While billionaires get their money back every morning, the energy poor have to wait much longer than that. Sleep doesn’t give them the energy interest boost; they need a few days to earn that energy back. Billionaires rarely need to pull out a credit card, but if they do, they can rest assured that balance can be repaid very quickly; the poor draw their line of credit from their joints, muscles, bones, and heart; slapping that card down at the till means sacrificing some bodily well-being for a few more hours of activity, a few more flights of stairs, an hour or two of conversation. At the end of the day the poor have an empty bank account and the stinging pain of physical debt, waiting for a pay packet.