Archives for April 2010

The digital world is full of educational experiences. People who wish to learn can now much more easily acquire a lot of the skills and knowledge they need in order to effectively translate what they’ve learned into practical workplace applications as well as pleasing educational or creative experiences.

Who among us as writers, or students or the merely curious have not followed a trail of thinking through the internet’s wealth of websites, definitions, essays, images, references and other sources of information? Look at the number of photographers who have found in the digital world new access and control over their art. Music will never be the same, though literally now it can be. TV, movies, radio, books and computer programs are converging, while HD is morphing into 3-D. The ease of access to much of this is improving daily, as is the range of subject matter and expertise, all of which just about anyone can acquire without the benefit of a set of instructions, a school room or university, books, a guide or an instructor.

As someone with several years experience in writing, publishing, photography, editing, management and education, I recognize the creative kinship among many of these fields, and the role the digital world has played in each. In particular, my role as an educator makes me wonder about whether education now needs to be understood and practiced in an entirely different way.

With this digital world as an alternative source of just about any information and knowledge, we as creators and educators need to prove our worth to students every day. So, in this emerging digital world, what does a student need most from an instructor or educational provider?

The first thing we have to realize is that the old and new educational worlds are light years apart in their cultures. The classroom setting is an environment where the teacher-to-student delivery method is linear in nature, whereas the digital is decidedly nonlinear, even metaphoric in the way it presents alternatives the student can explore. The two processes are distinct, clearly impacting how someone learns, the paths of learning they take, and, in fact, the kind of knowledge they emerge with from the other end. The classroom is heavy on guided thought, sometimes featuring mentoring, nurturing, one-on-one relationships. The digital setting relies more on independent thought and exploration, and relies more on number and data driven solutions or experiences which are a direct result of the design structures and meta-data algorithms of search engines.

Traditional educators tend to think of themselves as providers (keepers) of knowledge, content and skills, whereas perhaps our new role has less to do with merely providing information. Perhaps it is more along the lines of knowledgeable guide, mentor, coordinator. We need to create environments where we help students coordinate together in combining and making sense of the knowledge and information. The best education always seems to come in groups, where people learn from each other in an incremental map of discovery followed by application.

The educational experience needs to swing equally between information gathering and what to do with it. In a way, both the classroom and the internet are ideal environments for this, and so the much discussed hybrid version of education (some classroom time/ some online) seems to be the right direction. The goal would be to accelerate both the range and pace of learning in communities of learners. When people feel a connect to what they are a part of, then you get a whole different set of behaviors and learning outcomes. Add to this a student group version of a social network, and you have the makings of a powerful engine of interactivity that can self-organize, share information, and support the growth, development and progress of the group.

I believe that a poem knows where it’s going, often before I do, and well before it has arrived fully formed with its journey complete. There’s nothing particularly mystical about this; it merely reflects the notion that communications in all forms are shared and shaped as much by the nature and flow of the language we use as they are by the form and content we wish to impart.

Language, and poetry in particular, is always hard at work solving the complex problem of coordinating the paths and meanings of its form and content. Its words are like pedestrians on a crowded and busy sidewalk; the nature of their flow determines the path of thoughts and ideas which in turn alter the nature and direction of the whole. This “self-coordination” has a special kind of beauty for the writer because the language seems to both self-organize as well as respond to whatever control the writer exerts in community with the flow of the language. Somehow this partnership works, at least often enough to make the writerly solutions it produces worth doing

The power of language is that it connects us with each other, and creates communities of ourselves with the outside world; in that sense it is a medium informing our sense of what is real in the world by provoking a comparison to the literature it evokes and inhabits. This is one of the great illusions as well as mysteries of art as a whole, that it makes us bear witness to the similarities that are borne out of inherent differences between what we see and what we make, what we wish to say and how it actually emerges.

 

Portrait in a Room

The absence is in the place someone leaves
behind, departing the room without so much

as another word, an unlikely place to be thinking
someone might be searching for something else

entirely. It is the feeling left behind, the feeling
of a certain way of knowing what works best

and what might take its place. If there is a word
for it, it must be the promise of what is no longer

there to see or know, the promise of a promise
not to be what we hoped or longed for, not to be

left alone in a room, but the promise of that solitary
hour when you spoke softly, slowly of everything.

It’s hard to believe there can be anyone left in Canada who still might actually believe anything Stephen Harper has to say about a blueprint for balancing the country’s inexcusably massive deficit. Conservatives will desperately want us to believe in their fiscal credentials and alchemy, but history tells a different story.

The Harper/Flaherty “stewardship” of the economy has been nothing short of disastrous, built upon a recorded history of fiscal blunders with the GST, willfully ignoring the signs of the coming recession, bizarre “no-deficit-at-any-cost” forecasts of surpluses, followed by a succession of repeated and wildly inaccurate monthly guesses over the past years about an ever-expanding deficit.

To paraphrase John Kenneth Galbraith on economics, these boys make astrology look respectable.

The Conservative government’s dismal record is a four-year history of economic and recession myopia that has shown up in everything from massive government overspending, resulting deficits, badly timed and ill-advised GST and corporate tax cuts. In particular, the latter two items together now account for close to half of this year’s projected $57 billion deficit. Given the Conservatives’ history as the last ones in the country to have even recognized the economy was in deep trouble, it should come as no surprise they are ironically positioning themselves once again as this country’s fiscally responsible party. Since taking office, “Deficit Jim” Flaherty and his boss have become the poster boys of miss-the-mark economic forecasting. More to the point, though, is the uncertainty this creates in the mind of the public, especially when the response of the Conservatives is to badger, cut funding, withhold information, obfuscate, and generally undermine the credibility of Kevin Page, the parliamentary budget officer they hired to police the job in the first place.

As our governing parties in Ottawa chase each other willy-nilly towards a coming election, Stephen Harper, Jim Flaherty and their Conservatives spin-meisters will be working hard to try and make us believers in an economic and budgetary miracle. However, the only blueprint around a surplus that can apply to Finance Minister Jim Flaherty happened a few years ago when the defeated Liberal government handed a surplus to him.

With the Conservative’s last budget, Mr. Flaherty’s on-the-job training continued to show no encouraging signs of fiscal insight or accuracy, nor do the Harper Conservatives seem to fully appreciate the need now for much more innovative, aggressive action against both the deficit and in support of job creation. Their invocation of innovation is a laudable technical objective, but the Conservatives, through their unfocussed corporate tax incentives, clearly have no idea how this might be brought about. It all seems like more window dressing and bafflegab.

By refusing to act now, this “wait-and-see” government is once again condemning Canada to an economic action plan that has no meaningful actions at all. With this kind of approach we can expect the deficit to grow in the coming years, and to be with us for at least a decade or more.

Stephen Harper has become an expert in saying one thing and doing its opposite. From yo-yo fiscal policies and binge deficit budgeting to reversals on Senate reform and inconsistency on Afghanistan, he has become the consummate shape-shifter, staying in power at all costs by almost weekly moving policy down whatever road the winds are blowing. But these contradictions are mere pragmatic detours for Harper along what is for him a much longer ideological road, one that, should he ever attain a viable majority, will bring massive structural shifts to Canada in the form of political decentralization and altered Canadian values. The recent budget is both an economic and strategic diversion for Harper, keeping him in power but also, more importantly, diverting our attention away from what he actually wants to accomplish. For those wishing to look closely, even the budget itself isn’t what it seems, with huge portions tied to improbable projections for the economy, unrealistic provincial participation or pie-in-the-sky future deficit reductions unlikely ever to see the light of day. Canadians can expect more of these illusions and contradictions to be revealed in the coming months, especially where the economy and budget are concerned.

Probably one of this country’s best historical examples of a petty, malevolently partisan and ideologically driven politician, Harper routinely whipsaws his audiences with performances from nice to nasty, from hero to hyperbole. His party is scared to death of him, but, as is the case with all such abusive players, I expect his fellow Conservative actors would be willing in the blink of an eye to jettison him at the first sign of weakness. Mr. Ignatieff certainly is no better, being completely and irrevocably blind to his own endlessly destructive deficiencies in leadership, timing, vision, and political intelligence. He lingers, stage left, like a dark, comedic character, transforming simple ideas in complex theories, advantage to disaster, opportunity to humiliating political errors. Mired in the mud of their own political sloughs, these two “leaders” are characters out of a bad play, unable to let go, refusing to recognize that the stage lights are dimming and that the audience is rapidly leaving the building. Maybe the problem for Canadians really isn’t about Liberal or Conservative. Maybe it’s just the truly dreadful lead actors we’ve hired. Most days I think a lot of us wish we could get together and simultaneously throw them both out. I say to you, and to all who would listen, a plague on both their houses.

So, the truly pressing question here today is: twenty years from now, when Stephen Harper’s Conservative/Reform/Alliance coalition has long departed the halls of power in Ottawa, what kind of country might we expect to find as a result of the myriad blunders in economic planning he is now implementing? Can we expect Canada to be a better place, more stable and secure? Or will history look back upon these early Harper years of the new century as the beginning of economic policies and actions that profoundly threatened the long-term well being of the country?