Ken's Blog

Sharon’s thoughtful comment yesterday helped frame the parallel between our current traditional notion of teaching literacy in school (currently seen as a necessity), and the more modern notion of extending the teaching of literacy to include visual storytelling (currently seen as elective, at best).

Teaching young people to read and write is a multi-year effort, which extends from kindergarten all the way through their senior year of high school and beyond. This effort touches on many areas, including vocabulary, grammar, reading comprehension, writing practice, study of fiction and non-fiction, as well as the study and analysis of great works in a wide variety of literary genres.

If we are to take seriously the teaching of visual narrative creation, we need to break it down into a multiyear program consisting of progressive age-appropriate courseware, where each academic year builds upon skills that were mastered during the previous year.

In addition, we’d want to incorporate skills of visual storytelling into the teaching of classes in other subjects, including math and the sciences, as well as history and cultural studies. In today’s curriculum we expect students to be able to express their mastery of a subject through the written word. It would be logical to extend that expectation to include the creation of expository visual narratives.

It has not escaped our notice that an educational shift to more visual and dynamic means of expression would quite likely increase the teaching of computer programming and computational thinking. 🙂

I’m on a jury for a short film festival, so today I spent quite a bit of time looking at lots of entries, mainly by young people. Some entries were extremely good, but most were so bad that they were startlingly bad. I found myself asking “what were they thinking?”

And that started me thinking … shouldn’t the basics of visual storytelling, effective construction of dramatic or comic narrative, character arc and development, building of audience involvement, anticipation, pacing, timing, use of camera, focus, lighting, montage — be a part of today’s core educational curriculum?

After all, we now live in a world where the means of production — even high quality production — are within easy reach of any child with access to a computer. Consequently, the ability to express oneself in a visual narrative medium is a skill that can make the difference between success and failure in many fields, and the importance of that skill will continue to increase rapidly as the technical and economic barriers to entry continue to fall away.

Just as, in an earlier time, parents understood that a child who cannot read has no real chance of success in a highly competitive world, shouldn’t parents of today realize that the ability to put together an effective short movie to communicate one’s viewpoint and ideas is a necessary skill for their child to master?

And shouldn’t we be addressing that need in our K-12 curriculum?

When the news first broke about Dominique Strauss-Kahn being charged with sexual assault, all of the U.S. newspapers reported the story as though the man’s guilt was a foregone conclusion. And just about every American I spoke to (although there were exceptions) also took it as a certainty that he must be guilty.

I remember telling people at the time “Yes, but we don’t yet know the facts. He might be innocent.” And I was surprised by how many people couldn’t even hear what I was saying. They seemed to think I was declaring him to be innocent.

In fact I did not think he was innocent, and I didn’t think he was guilty. I just didn’t know.

My reason for reminding people that he might be innocent actually had little to do with DSK himself, but rather with a worry I have about the current state of our Media, and the effect it has on our collective thinking. When certain types of events happen, the Media seems to move en masse into a kind of collective hysteria, often lining up behind one particular viewpoint with a fervid, perhaps even religious, certainty.

And this tainted way of thinking then seems to infect all the people who read the newspapers and watch the news reports. Pretty soon everyone has caught the same bug, and the idea that there could be two sides to the issue at hand becomes widely seen to be absurd.

Now that the prosecution of this case is swiftly unraveling, I suspect people will wake up from their collective certainty as from a dream. Everyone will forget that they were ever caught up in this particular wave of hysteria, and it will be as though it never happened.

Until the next time it happens.

The other day when I referred to my novel The Attic, written here last year as a series of posts, I realized that I had never actually put the whole thing together into a single continuous document.

So today I did just that. It seemed like a good way to mark the conclusion of a very eventful first half of this year 2011.

For your metaphysical enjoyment, the entire novel is now on-line in one piece.

Yesterday I was talking with some colleagues on the subject of using well-known branded characters in games for learning, and suddenly the phrase “Factor Me Elmo” popped into my head. So of course I started trying to imagine what such an educational game might actually be like.

Instead of tickling Elmo to make him giggle (the basic premise of the popular toy “Tickle Me Elmo”), you and your child would factor numbers with him. If Elmo says “forty eight”, and your child responds “six times eight” or “three times sixteen”, Elmo starts to giggle. If your child says “two times two times three times four” Elmo laughs out loud. But if your child says “two times two times two times two times three” then Elmo just totally loses it, and starts rolling on the floor laughing. Pretty soon your kid is laughing too, you’re laughing till your sides ache, and you’re both wondering why you’d never realized math could be so much fun.

But why stop there, when there are so many other educational possibilities? How about “Tackle Me Elmo”? This educational game would have two levels. In level one, young learners would use Elmo for football practice: Kids place the adorable red Muppet out in the middle of a yard or other open area, put a football in his hands, and then take turns knocking him over. This game level helps your child to build valuable self-esteem through healthful physical exercise. In level two, a six foot tall robotic Elmo attempts to tackle your child every time the young learner picks up a football. This game level teaches your child valuable lessons in proper balance and self-defense, as well as such advanced philosophical concepts as “moral relativism”.

Maybe the most daring game concept is “Pickle Me Elmo”. In this game your child takes Elmo out and gets him drunk. After he has knocked back a few shots, Elmo starts saying things about Kermit and Miss Piggy that he will come to dearly regret. At some point the sodden Muppet staggers outside and steals a car, which he eventually crashes. The next morning Elmo wakes up to find himself in a fleabag motel somewhere in Tijuana, married to a stripper from Salsipuedes.

This game teaches your child valuable lessons in social responsibility.

Also geography.

Sometimes you feel like performing in the moment, and other times you want to go back and fine-tune things. This next take on the “desktop movie maker” is a design sketch for an animation tool that lets you go back and forth between those two ways of thinking.

It really comes down to how you look at time. The version yesterday used hot-keys to let you create an “in the moment” puppetry performance. I wanted to keep that spontaneous way of doing things, while also adding the ability to see and manipulate time holistically, the way Jenny’s grandmother Amelia experiences time in my story Attic.

This second version is only a design sketch, so it doesn’t have things you’d want in a real working system, like undo and save/load (operations to shift and stretch time would also be nice). I implemented it this afternoon mostly as a way to get conversations going.

Click on the image below to try it out:

I can’t figure out whether the title of this post refers to making movies on your computer desktop, or to making movies about a desktop.

Hmm. Maybe both.

In any case, this is an example of one of my programming hobbies — interactive digital puppetry. Click on the image below to try it out for yourself. Then let me know what you think!

It occurred to me today that an unsung hero of the recent vote allowing gay marriage in New York State might be former Republican candidate for governor Carl Paladino. Those who remember Mr. Paladino mainly from his weirdly homophobic stump speech might think that odd, so I’ll explain.

Politics is very much about perception. Our elected representatives like to look as though they are on the correct side of an issue, where the definition of “correct” depends, of course, on their constituency. But absolutely nobody likes to be seen as a bad guy.

Paladino, who is really more of a businessman than a politician, made an impressive timing blunder in a well-publicized speech during his campaign for NYS governor. The theme of his speech, “Gays are not equal”. unfortunately came mere days after a vicious anti-gay hate crime that had sickened the citizenry.

Within days Paladino, realizing he had been given very bad political advice, had disavowed his own speech, but the damage had already been done. By the time the election had arrived, Paladino was left looking, at best, politically clueless. His loss to our current governor, the Democratic candidate Andrew Cuomo, was dramatic.

But one effect of this sequence of events, I think, was that when Cuomo went to the State Assembly to lobby for votes, had political cover for voting in favor of Gay marriage. After all, nobody wanted to look like Paladino, who had managed to blunder into becoming the poster child for hate and intolerance.

So in effect, Paladino’s speech was an act of very useful stupidity, which ended up bringing about an outcome that might never have been possible without him.

Yesterday the New York State legislature made it legal for gay people to marry each other. New York is only the sixth state in the U.S. to have done this, and I am very proud of New York right now. Politics in our state is far from perfect, but at least they can get the fundamentals right.

I come from an ethnic group that has run into rather extreme trouble in the past by being cast as outsiders, and the line from tolerated outsider to intolerated outsider can be very thin. So I am very aware of that slippery slope, because you never know where you will find prejudice, and you never know where it will lead.

Maybe somebody you know says they find a particular group of people “disgusting”, and perhaps they even add with pride that they will pass those attitudes on to their kids. Then you realize what this implies — that it’s ok for somebody to say the same thing about your group of people.

And you realize, in moments like this, that the prerequisite for atrocity is just those little slips and slides, those small imperceptible steps toward looking at an entire large swath of fellow citizens as the “other”.

So when something as sensible as this legislation is enacted here in New York — a bold statement that is the very opposite of prejudice — it makes me proud to live here.

Until recently I thought that no matter how advanced human/computer interfaces become, they will stop well short of direct control of thought. But recently I learned about the relatively new field of optogenetics, which allows neurons to be switched on or off by infrared light.

In particular, researchers have figured out how to insert a light-sensitive gene from algae into brain neurons. This essentially makes the neuron function as an externally controllable switch: one kind of IR stimulus turns it on, another turns it off.

Why is this so significant? Because human tissue, while fairly opaque to visible light, is translucent to infrared light. The further into the infrared spectrum, the more transparent human tissue becomes. Which means that genetically modified brain neurons could be switched on or off non-invasively — no nasty surgery required.

In the short term this won’t have much impact. But eventually, certainly sometime in the next half century, technology will have advanced sufficiently to enable real-time computer generated infrared holograms that target specific neurons and clusters of neurons from outside the skull.

Which means direct control of thought, for better or worse.

As I’m sure you already realize, there are both very good and very bad scenarios here. And it’s not really a question of whether this will be used. As with all technologies, inevitably it will be used. The question is what we will choose to do, as a society, once we can directly stimulate — and therefore simulate — sensation, experience and thought itself.