Lord of the Flies

Have you seen these social networking sites for kids?  Just as Facebook has evolved into the domain of middle-aged women  looking for old boyfriends and posting family photos, sites like Webkinz, Toontown, Club Penguin, and Roblox now have kids interacting with others in virtual worlds.

What's interesting is how many kids, when given the chance, transform these seemingly safe and innocent places into competitive, social-pressure-filled, more "mature" themed zones, often using codes that adults cannot readily recognize.  The designers program filters, safeguards, and activities to insure  a safe experience for children, but these are only partly successful, as kids form their own words to substitute for  swears to get by filters/censors, engage in more mature activities like "dating" (and are very competitive and combative about it), and find ways to be mean to each other.  Assuming that these are kids on such websites, a worrisome assumption for parents, when left to their own devices more often than not the experience degrades into the law of the jungle, where some strangers may demonstrate kindness and cooperation, but many will bully and destroy, form cybergangs, and chat trash.

How ironic that these social sites are just the opposite, exposing kids to antisocial behavior and keeping kids away from real kids outside of the lcd screen. 

Brevity is the soul of wit

One of the skills we focus on in college is the art of presenting.  What it has become all too often  is a focus on making pretty PowerPoint slides, often using flash, sometimes with embeds, and then reading the slides to the audience. The result is that the form distracts from the content, and in fact the focus often becomes the form itself.  Students are getting very good at creating PowerPoints, but the presentations are no better, and may be worse, than the old poster-board days.

So how can students, and anybody else for that matter, make interesting and informative presentations?  One interesting attempt is something called pecha-kucha (Japanese for "chatter"), which applies a simple set of rules to Power-Point presentations: exactly 20 slides displayed for 20 seconds each for a total of six minutes and 40 seconds of well-matched words and images. The result, when done well, combines business meeting and poetry slam to transform PowerPoint pap into compelling beat-the-clock performance art.

While it might be argued that this is just another focus on form rather than content, what it does do is force the presenter to distill the critical information to that which is most meaningful and absorbable for the audience.  It's kind of a variation on the old editing axiom that if one can understand the point without that sentence, then eliminate that sentence.  The 20x20 is just a fun gimmick for driving home the point that the point is the point.

The world is filled with ironies...

... Jerry Garcia ties?

Money, Alcohol, and Driving in the Snow

 
Name three things that make you more of who you really are.

Trick or Treat

While trick-or-treating with the kids and their friends and parents this year it was amazing to observe the swine flu paranoia.  Purell on porches and worried parents wondering whether they should allow their children to receive flu shots.  People talking about thalidomide and lead and contamination and  having virtually no knowledge of science or control of their emotions.  We love our kids, but apparently not enough to learn.