Anglia Ruskin University is in Cambridge, but it’s not Cambridge University. It’s likely that none of us would even know of Anglia Ruskin’s existence if it wasn’t for Naomi Sugai, but she’s not interested in promoting the school.
She’s got complaints, she’s fed up, and she’s taking her case to YouTube.

Well, she took her case to YouTube, and then she got suspended. The video that’s up now doesn’t seem suspension-worthy, but the Telegraph story suggests there’s a different version that may slander an ARU administrator, and that’s the reason ARU gives for suspending her.

Over at KLE’s Web 2.0 Challenge I was surprised to learn:

Both Bisson and Stephens are so excited about this concept of Web 2.0 they have not taken a good look at what they can’t do for our libraries. …with all this new technology we can not forget that what is the most important in our libraries is the personal touch. We are one of the few institutions left that still offers individual attention.

KLE is doing some cool things, so I can tell this isn’t an offhanded rejection of Web 2.0 concepts, but the criticism makes me feel as though I’ve been missing my target somehow.

We wouldn’t accept poor service at the desk or over the phone, why should we treat our patrons so poorly online? I don’t think we’ve yet figured out what “good service online” is yet, but that’s what I’ve been focused on. Make no mistake, the future of libraries demands outstanding service everywhere we serve our users.

[tags]web 2.0, library 2.0, lib20, service, quality, libraries, criticism, online, good service, good service online[/tags]

Some are calling it the Jesus phone, but Jason Chen calls it a moral quandry, Gartner Group is telling IT to avoid it (really, because iTunes is scary to enterprise), Business 2.0’s Joshua Quittner is reminding the peeps it’s just a regular phone, and Wayne Smallman is whining that it doesn’t have a flash or telephoto lens. (Humor alert: one of those is supposed to be funny, and another is supposed to be hilarious.)

Analysts who claim “It doesn’t have any features that would make it successful as a business tool” must surely be on the pay of competing manufacturers or networks. The promise here is that the phone is an incredibly rich and portable network device; businesses that can’t find value in that are probably in decline anyway. Still it is expensive, and it is subject to all the vagaries of cell phone service, and it doesn’t have a laser.

iPhone, haters, criticism, humor

Today I discovered (thank you Ryan) Kareem Elnahal’s speech as valedictorian of Mainland Regional High School and I discovered new hope, new faith in our country’s future. When high school students can step up and speak truth to power, as Elnahal did so well, I become a believer in the strength of human spirit. “We study what is, never why, never what should be. …[T]his pattern, grade for the sake of a grade, work for the sake of work, can be found everywhere,” said Elnahal.

Ladies and gentlemen, the spirit of intellectual thought is lost. I speak today not to rant, complain or cause trouble, and certainly not to draw attention to myself. I have accomplished nothing and I am nothing. I know that. Rather, I was moved by the countless hours wasted in those halls. Today, you should focus on your child or loved one. This is meant to be a day of celebration, and if I’ve taken away from that, I’m sorry. But I know how highly this community values learning, and I urge you all to re-evaluate what it means to be educated.

Bravo. Of course a press report notes that “he was interrupted by school officials when he started to talk about the shortcomings of the American educational system. He finished quickly and walked off the field.”

Fiteen years ago I read an essay by John Taylor Gatto, 1991 New York state teacher of the year and three times New York City teacher of the year. I’ve no idea whether Elnahal has ever seen The Six Lesson Schoolteacher — the essay that helped me through my highschool years — but I find surprising concordance in the arguments.

Gatto’s lessons are, in short: know your place and stay there, nothing matters (except what I say), you are powerless, you are dependent on authority, your worth will be judged by “authorities,” and we are watching you constantly.

Lessons two and four ring out every time I read them:

The second lesson I teach kids is to turn on and off like a light switch. I demand that they become totally involved in my lessons, jumping up and down in their seats with anticipation, competing vigorously with each other for my favor. But when the bell rings I insist that they drop the work at once and proceed quickly to the next work station. Nothing important is ever finished in my class, nor in any other class I know of.

The lesson of bells is that no work is worth finishing, so why care too deeply about anything? Bells are the secret logic of schooltime; their argument is inexorable; bells destroy past and future, converting every interval into a sameness, as an abstract map makes every living mountain and river the same even though they are not. Bells inoculate each undertaking with indifference.

The fourth lesson I teach is that only I determine what curriculum you will study. (Rather, I enforce decisions transmitted by the people who pay me). This power lets me separate good kids from bad kids instantly. Good kids do the tasks I appoint with a minimum of conflict and a decent show of enthusiasm. Of the millions of things of value to learn, I decide what few we have time for. The choices are mine. Curiosity has no important place in my work, only conformity.

Bad kids fight against this, of course, trying openly or covertly to make decisions for themselves about what they will learn. How can we allow that and survive as schoolteachers? Fortunately there are procedures to break the will of those who resist.

This is another way I teach the lesson of dependency. Good people wait for a teacher to tell them what to do. This is the most important lesson of all, that we must wait for other people, better trained than ourselves, to make the meanings of our lives. It is no exaggeration to say that our entire economy depends upon this lesson being learned. Think of what would fall apart if kids weren’t trained in the dependency lesson: The social-service businesses could hardly survive, including the fast-growing counseling industry; commercial entertainment of all sorts, along with television, would wither if people remembered how to make their own fun; the food services, restaurants and prepared-food warehouses would shrink if people returned to making their own meals rather than depending on strangers to cook for them. Much of modern law, medicine, and engineering would go too — the clothing business as well — unless a guaranteed supply of helpless people poured out of our schools each year. We’ve built a way of life that depends on people doing what they are told because they don’t know any other way. For God’s sake, let’s not rock that boat!

But not in my schools you say? Daniel Loggi, superintendent of the Atlantic County, NJ, School District might argue with you. “I know Mainland is one of our top high schools in this county. They’ve been a Blue Ribbon school and received a lot of awards.” To emphaisize the point, Loggie added “The education [Elnahal] received there is permitting him to go on to Princeton.”

Gatto left teaching, Elnahal is moving on. Is there room for criticism or self-inspection from active insiders? I doubt it when I read the story reported here, of a school administrator tearing down a group art project and openly questioning the the art teacher regarding a project that appeared to truly engage her students. I doubt it as I remember the experience of Steve Geluso, a student who received an “F” for writing an essay questioning the current copyright dogma.

Still, we have Kareem Elnahal’s example. Perhaps free thought is not dead.

american education, critical thinking, criticism, education, John Taylor Gatto, Kareem Elnahal, public education, public schools, speech, valedictorian

I wrote yesterday of Nicole Engard’s comment that the ILS was about as open and flexible as a brick wall. Today I learned that the vendor of that ILS had tried to squash her public criticism.

Not cool.

It’s pure speculation on my part, but what comes next? Surely no vendor would send Vinny over to bust an uppity biblioblogger’s knee-caps, but might they offer a customer a better deal if they could just help quiet down a critic within the customer’s organization?

Not speculation: how do we feel about vendors that will spend lavish sums of money to court potential customers, but do little to improve the product and regularly refuse suggestions that they open a round-table with technology leaders among their existing client-base?

John Blyberg’s ILS Customer Bill-of-Rights is especially relevant here, but also, let’s think about our side of the relationship.

update: I keep forgetting to link to this public example of how bad our OPACs/ILSs are. Thanks go to David Walker for making me ROTFL.

III, ILS, ILS Customer Bill-of-Rights, Innovative Interfaces, John Blyberg, Nicole Engard, criticism, libraries, library, squashing criticism, squelched

We’ve all heard it before, but we just can’t get it out of our heads. Today’s movies make us feel dumb. Paulina Borsook joins the chorus and condemns contemporary cinema by praising movies of the 60s and 70s:

They were movies made for adults, even if they had been mainstream movies and/or nominally rated PG. They made presumptions about the intelligence of their audience, didn’t need things to be boldly spelled out, and they were predicated on the assumption that their audience was capable of making inferences. No semaphoring! No high-concept! Satire as opposed to scatology! Shades of gray in motive and character! Minimum numbers of car crashes! No fish out of water! No hilarious mixups!

Interestingly, she also found praise for The Interpreter:

The female characters didn’t simper, and didn’t seem like 30 going on 13 (hey, wasn’t there…). They were about themselves, subject rather than object.

The male characters had interior lives that made them seem human, creatures capable of emotional nuance.

So what else does she recommend? She’s made a list. Interestingly, all of this appears at GreenCine.com, a Netflix competitor I’d not heard of before it got a recommendation at O’Grady’s PowerPage.

netflix, greencine, dvd rental, paulina borsook, movie, movie criticism, film criticism, film, films, movies, old movies, good movies, criticism

Conservatives hate Freakonomics, that book by economist Steven D. Levitt and journalist Stephen J. Dubner that takes on more than a few sticky issues that most people don’t normally consider to be within the purview of economics. (See also the Freakonomics blog).

Publisher’s Weekly notes:

There isn’t really a grand theory of everything here, except perhaps the suggestion that self-styled experts have a vested interest in promoting conventional wisdom even when it’s wrong. Instead, Dubner and Levitt deconstruct everything from the organizational structure of drug-dealing gangs to baby-naming patterns. While some chapters might seem frivolous, others touch on more serious issues, including a detailed look at Levitt’s controversial linkage between the legalization of abortion and a reduced crime rate two decades later. Underlying all these research subjects is a belief that complex phenomena can be understood if we find the right perspective. Levitt has a knack for making that principle relevant to our daily lives

See, conservatives like conventional wisdom because it supports things the way they are and counsels against change. And conservatives especially dislike Levitt’s theories in Freakonomics because one of them suggests crime rates are causally linked to abortion and that the drop in crime rates in the late 90s was caused by the legalization of abortion in 1973 (read the book to understand it).

That’s why conservative icon Bill Bennett was criticizing the book. Not only did Bennett misunderstand Levitt’s argument, but he tried to make a false and intentionally racist corollary: “I do know that it’s true that if you wanted to reduce crime, you could [...] you could abort every black baby in this country, and your crime rate would go down.” Well, that made a sound.

In the list of those who understand how wrong Bennett was stands Harry Shearer, host of the radio program Le Show. His October 2 program (RealAudio stream, start at about 33 or 34 minutes in) of Le Show brought this to my attention and highlighted Bennett’s attempts to backpedal. Le Show, incidentally, is also available by podcast.

tags: abortion, bill bennett, conservative, conservatives, criticism, economist, economy, freakonomics, harry shearer, levitt, racisim, steven d levitt, steven d. levitt, steven levitt, theory, william bennett, william j bennett, william j. bennett