Cook­ies always taste better after turn­ing in appli­ca­tion pack­ets! Its offi­cial. My RIT packet is in. Now I can really start to focus on the next quar­ter and teaching.

In other news I con­tinue to be amazed by my megapixel camera phone. The last few pic­tures have come directly off of that.

I’m still get­ting used to Wordpad’s ins and outs. So I appol­o­gize that there’s a bit of lag in your com­ments get­ting up. That should be fixed now.

I will be dis­cussing Meme theory as well. Which reminds me that I really need to read Richard Dawkins, The Self­ish Gene in particular.

As part of my Data Driven Print class, I want to present some models of how ideas spread through com­mu­ni­ties. One of the ones I wish to address is Mal­colm Gladwell’s Tip­ping Point. If this was a grad­u­ate class, or per­haps I was at a dif­fer­ent school, I’d prob­a­bly make the entire class read the book. How­ever, that isn’t a cur­rent option.

I seem to remem­ber that around 2000/2001, as the book was begin­ning to gain pop­u­lar­ity, a busi­ness mag­a­zine pub­lished an arti­cle, pos­si­bly by Glad­well, that encap­su­lated the core con­cepts of the book. This is an arti­cle that I’d really like to use. The prob­lem is I have no idea where it appeared. It might have been in Fast Com­pany. But I’m not sure.

So, I turn to you, gentle blog reader. If anyone out there has any ideas where it might have appeared can you let me know. Just drop me a com­ment. I’ll be your ador­ing fan for ever!

I have to con­fess to often being in com­plete awe of imag­ing tech­nol­ogy. Joel Snyder, my photo theory pro­fes­sor at Chicago, once remarked that no matter how many times he’s seen it, he’s still amazed watch­ing the latent image emerge on exposed pho­to­graphic paper that is placed in devel­oper. Having spent a bit of time in a dark­room, I under­stand that uncanny reaction.

I often expe­ri­ence a sim­i­lar feel­ing when I watch a press at work. Such was the case when I stopped by RIT’s Print­ing Appli­ca­tions Lab today to watch a class project being run on the Goss Web Press. It’s strangely breath­tak­ing to observe an image appear, color-​by-​color, on a web of paper flow­ing at break­neck speeds through a press. Faster than the eye can see, for this press oper­ates at a speed of mul­ti­ple feet per second, each layer of ink — black, cyan, magenta, yellow — is applied, in per­fect reg­is­tra­tion, as the paper flows from tower to tower. The paper then dis­ap­pears into a drying unit and then emerges and is imme­di­ately folded and cut.

The press itself is far to large for me to take a pic­ture of. I did manage these two shots using my cell­phone. The first is of the web pass­ing out of the magenta tower (no rela­tion to Stephen King’s famed Dark Tower). The second is of the end result — folded sig­na­tures — emerg­ing from the press.

RIT’s winter quar­ter is almost over. I’m shoot­ing to get my appli­ca­tion packet in this Friday. After that it will be all about writ­ing syl­labi and reread­ing the course mate­ri­als. Hope­fully the inde­ci­sion I’ve been suf­fer­ing from will pass as well.

Teach­ing state­ment has become syn­ony­mous in my mind with the term, or per­haps the feel­ing of, pulling teeth. I???m trying to finish this so I can submit my appli­ca­tion. So far I???ve been burn­ing cycles rewrit­ing the ini­tial para­graph. Its not that I don???t know what I want to say.

That I have.

It???s a ques­tion of how do I say it.

This is what I want to say: If I have learned any­thing in my thirty-​and-​a-​bit years on the planet, it???s this: the world is made up of com­plex, inter­re­lated sys­tems, and all of them will change. If you want to have a suc­cess­ful life, let alone a suc­cess­ful career, you need to acknowl­edge this and be capa­ble of adapt­ing to the changes that occur around you. More so, you need to be able to find oppor­tu­ni­ties for suc­cess within the chal­lenges of change. Con­fin­ing your knowl­edge to what???s expected of you today isn???t going to help you tomor­row. Tac­ti­cal knowl­edge can only get you so far. Learn­ing ???X??? isn???t enough. One must learn how to learn.

Accept­ing all of this, I see my chal­lenge as a teacher to push my stu­dents beyond sur­face facts and tools. Instead they must be able to rec­og­nize the struc­ture and rules from which those facts and tools pro­ceed. And I must do this is such a way that stu­dents are capa­ble of inter­nal­iz­ing these lessons.

Ben­jamin Franklin pre­sented a frame­work for this method­ol­ogy when he wrote:

“Tell me and I forget. Teach me and I remem­ber. Involve me and I learn.”

Involve­ment, or rather engage­ment is key. Whether in the class­room, the field, or in the work­place, stu­dents must actively engage with (observ­ing, inter­ro­gat­ing, and ana­lyz­ing) the infor­ma­tion they receive through encoun­ters with cowork­ers, media, soft­ware, and count­less other inter­ac­tions with their envi­ron­ment. And this is where the tech­niques of social analy­sis can used to assist some­one in under­stand­ing and adapt­ing to the world about them.

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That’s it. Or rather the start of it. Now, we’ll see where I can take it. And how I polish it.

I had wanted to pull the design together for the new blog before I made it live. But I have made peace with the knowl­edge that isn’t going to happen any time soon. Once I cleared that, it made no sense to keep going with blogger.

If you’re inter­ested in get­ting back to the older pages, you can do it here.

Give it time, all the links will even­tu­ally sync up. And I’m sure a kokopelli will appear.