Category Archives: playfulness

academic podcasting, Apple, collaborative learning, Education, educational technology, eLearning, enthusiasm, iPhone, iPod touch, learning materials, playfulness, podcasting, ramblings

Educational Touch: Handhelds in Schools

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The more I think about it, the more Touch-style handhelds seem to make sense in educational and academic contexts. They don’t need to be made by Apple. But Apple’s devices are inspiring in this respect.

Here’s a thought, which would be a deal-maker for many an instructor: automatically turn off all student cellphones. A kind of “classroom mode,” similar to the “airplane mode” already on the iPhone. And it could apply to non-phone devices (i.e., the iPod touch and future models in those Touch lines). An instructor could turn off all audio out from the all the handheld devices in the room. Or turn them all on, if needed. This could even be location-based, if the devices have sufficiently precise positioning systems.
To go even further, one might imagine some control over what apps may be used during class. Turning off games, for instance. Or chat. Or limit browsing to the LAN. Not “always off,” mind you. But selectively opting out of some of the handhelds’ features. Temporarily.

In most situations, such controls seem overly restrictive to me. Apart from preventing cellphones from ringing during lecture, I typically want to let students as free as possible. But I do know that many of my colleagues (not just admins) would just love it if they could limit some of the things students can do during class with such devices.

One obvious context for such limits is an in-class exam. If they could easily prevent students from using non-allowed materials during an exam, many teachers would likely appreciate the convenience of exams on handhelds. Just imagine: automatic grading and grade reporting, easy transfer of answers, access to rich multimedia content, seamless interface…
As was obvious to me during the Apple event yesterday, Touch-style handhelds could be excellent tools for “distance education.” Learners and teachers could be anywhere and the handhelds could make for more direct collaboration than large lectures. Advantages of handhelds over laptops are less obvious here than in classroom contexts but it’s easy to think of fieldwork situations in which learners could collaborate with experts from just about anywhere there is a wireless connection. Immediate access to learning materials at almost any moment.

And podcasting. While podcasting got a big boost when iTunes began podcast support, there’s a lot which could be done to improve podcasting and podcast management. As iPod media devices, Touch handhelds have good playback features already. But there could be so much more in terms of interacting with (multimedia) content. Transcripts, tags, associated slides, audio comments, fast-speed playback, text notes, video responses, links, cross-references, playback statistics, waveform-based navigation…

Podcasting can still become big.  It’s now a “household concept” but it’s not as mainstream nor as life-changing as many hoped it’d become, back in 2005. I’m not really forecasting anything but I can envision contexts in which enhance podcasting feautres could make our lives easier. Especially in schools.

Education in general (and university education in particular) may be the context where podcasting’s potential is most likely to be realized. Though the technological basis for podcasting is quite general in scope (RSS enclosures, podcatching software, etc.), podcasting often feels like an educational solution, first and foremost.

A lot has been said about educational uses of podcasting. Early reports showed some promising results with those teachers who were willing to think creatively about the technology. I personally enjoyed a number of advantages of podcasting in my own courses, including several imponderables. Software packages meant for lecturecasts (podcast lectures) already exist. Apple’s own iTunes U is specifically geared toward university education using podcasts.

But there’s still something missing. Not just for podcasts. For handheld “educational technology.”
Momentum? Possibly. Where would it come from, though?

Killer devices? Apple already pushes its own devices (including the iPod touch) for “Mobile Learning.”

Cool apps? Haven’t really looked at the Web apps but it seems likely that some of them can already lead to epiphanies and “teaching moments.” Not to mention that tons of excellent learning software will surely come out of Cocoa Touch development.

Funding? My feeling is that apart from providing financial support for user-driven and development projects, “educational technology” monies are often spent unwisely. The idea isn’t to spend money but to “unleash the potential” of learners and teachers.

Motivation? Many learners and teachers are ready and it would be absurd to force anyone to become enthusiastic about a specific tool or technology.

My guess is that the main thing we need to make “mobile learning” a reality is to take a step back and look at what is already possible. Then look at what can become possible. And just start playing around with ideas and tools.

Learning is a component of playfulness.

Austin, comment-fishing, linkfest, media, naïveté, news, play, playfulness, shameless plug, U.S. media, U.S. politics, United States

Game, Drama, Fashion Show, Media Event?

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Austin, my current hometown, was host last night to the kind of event which gets national coverage. This time, 43,436 people tried to attend the event but only a hundred of them got selected. There were also 400 tickets for around 18,000 UT students who had entered the lottery.

Contrary to what one might guess, the event was not about Longhorn Football. Although, one of the protagonists in last night’s event, a basketball player, did visit UT’s famous team.

The “post-game analysis” makes it sound like a match between two sports teams.

Interestingly enough, it’s a mixed sport, making it easy for journalists to use pronouns to distinguish players in the two teams. One source described the night’s event as possible end game for the team led by a woman:

After losing a string of contests to [him] over the last several weeks, she is running neck-and-neck with him in Texas, according to some polls, a state in which she previously had a commanding lead.

One might think it was a fashion show:

the gold piping on her raised black collar and pockets gave her a martial, commander-in-chief look (the very model of a modern major general)

But I also get the impression that it was a theater premiere, with one source describing one actor’s “classic ‘I-feel-your-pain’ finale” meant to go to watchers’ “heads and hearts.”

In the end, the event was mostly “media event.” By the media, for the media, of the media.

Most likely, it won’t change the dynamic of this race, though the true effect of it will be determined by the media coverage around it: Should it get replayed over and over on television, it just may have an impact on this race and could stand out as the debate’s most striking moment.

So, I’m a bit puzzled by the whole thing.

Blogging, Coffee, Facebook, memes, personal, playfulness, podcasts, politics, Quiet Revolution, randomness, social networking, tagging

Keeping Up With the Loshes

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Elizabeth Losh has tagged me:

virtualpolitik: Pieces of Eight

I actually feel honoured. I met Losh randomly, on a rather high-profile blog she contributes to. I simply posted a comment. And here I am, tagged by a high-profile blogger (and, it seems, a very interesting person).

This “meme” seems to be about revealing eight random things about yourself. As silly as this may sound, I like the idea.

What Losh did was pretty neat. She used eight (presumably consecutive tracks on her iPod Shuffle as inspiration for her facts. Since I can’t get coolness points for doing the same thing, I’ll reverse the randomness factor by using Losh’s facts as inspiration for mine. I’ll then associate some music with every fact.

  1. My family has never been into partisan politics and none of us has been very faithful to a political party. I did attend, as a child, a meeting of Parti Québécois during the 1980 referendum. (Stéphane Venne, Le début d’un temps nouveau, Renée Claude)
  2. Though I’m not a sports fan by any stretch of the imagination, the only time in my life I skipped school was to see the parade when the Montreal Canadiens won the Stanley cup in 1986. There was a riot later that day, IIRC. (Dolores Claman, The Hockey Theme)
  3. I listen to a lot of podcasts and I archive episodes that I want to blog about. I only use a very small fraction of those archives. Guess I should find an easy way to nanoblog based on podcast episodes. Too bad iTunes doesn’t have any blogging/sharing feature. (Fabio FZero, Samba do Aeroporto, Gerador Zero)
  4. I pretty much never had a hero. My role models have been my mother, my paternal grandmother, and my wife. No wonder my “PersonalDNA” has me at the 72th percentile for femininity and at the 10th percentile for masculinity. (Claude Dubois, Femme de rêve)
  5. I never got my driver’s license. As surprising as it may sound, not driving hasn’t been so much of an issue for me, even in car-intense parts of the United States. (Tracy Chapman, Fast Car)
  6. The comment I originally left on one of Losh’s blog entries was about addictions. I don’t think that I’m addicted to anything. There’s a number of things I do quite regularly (drink coffee, play solitaire on a PDA, spend time online…) but none of them I ever feel compelled to do. (Robert Palmer, Addicted to Love)
  7. Though I haven’t been baptized, I’m culturally Catholic meaning that I probably behave like a Catholic by mere virtue of having been raised in Catholic Quebec during the end of the Quiet Revolution. (Jacques Brel, Les Flamingants)
  8. Among the first things which tickled my philosophical curiosity was thinking about an infinite universe. I kept thinking about what would lie beyond the Universe. I was quite young (10yo) and didn’t know much about (astro)physics. I still wonder about the grander scheme of things. (Nancy Hamilton/Morgan Lewis, How High The Moon, Ella Fitzgerald)

(Can anyone guess what took me longer while preparing this entry?)
Now, who should follow this meme? Here’s a list of people I’m tagging:

Sydney Hutchinson, Mireille Caissy, Jean Crawford, Yara El-Ghadban, Erin McLeod, Aurora Flewwelling-Skup, Hélène Recule, asphaire

(Notice a pattern, here?)

Let’s see who goes along.

Facebook, fun, language sciences, play, playfulness, ramblings

Silly Minds Think Alike

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One of the things I love about the ‘Net is that it makes you realize that just about anything you can think has been discussed by someone else before.

Case in point. Some of my friends have started playing Scrabble within Facebook using the Scrabulous.com application. So I eventually decided to play with one of those friends. This game is almost over (we take our turns whenever we’re on Facebook) and my friend is clearly winning, but playing Scrabble has made me think about quite a few things.

I used to love playing Scrabble (in French) when I was younger but pretty much didn’t play at all in the last seventeen years. I had never played in English before. After trying the Scrabulous version on Facebook, I tried a few games on the Scrabulous.com website itself, and started looking for different ways to play Scrabble on- or offline. Luckily enough, the Open Source Quackle does have support for French games. But I’m still nowhere as good as the computer player.

I don’t typically find fun in any kind of competition. I don’t want to be the best at anything. I just want to be happy.

Things I find fun can be quite silly.

And I do find Scrabble fun. As per an overly simplified version of Csikszentmihalyi’s flow theory, things are fun when they’re doable yet challenging. Playing Scrabble against a bot which has access to the complete dictionary isn’t that much fun. Many of the words played by computer players (or highly competitive players) are extremely obscure. Now, it can be interesting to learn about all about qat and cwm, but this type of Scrabble becomes overbearing after a while.

So my favourite plays at Scrabble were with people who were not totally crazy at playing Scrabble. I remember one play where adding two letters made me score a rather amazing number of points because a high value tile was played on a high value square and was used for two different words. I don’t remember the exact score of any of this but it was quite high and satisfying for the mere rarity of the event. In fact, it’s quite possible that this play I remember so vividly was made by one of the other two player. Yet I only remember the glory of the moment.

Actually, it seems that players who are of a somewhat lower calibre than expert players may end up breaking records because they’re less competitive. But I digress even more than I should.

Point is, I find beauty in Scrabble when it’s not just about strategies for putting the largest number of obscure words on the board and blocking other players. In fact, I’d rather play something that I find neat even if it scores lower. For instance, I enjoyed adding “queen” to “ship” for the mere fact that “queenship” is a neat word (I wasn’t even sure it existed). Also, I like the ability to string two words together to make a new one. Call me crazy. Must come from my language science background.

So… I started thinking about variants. In one variant I had in mind, a player can invent one new word every game as long as s/he can provide a definition for it. This word would then be added to the working dictionary to be used in future games. In another variant, words from multiple languages could be used. In yet another variant, proper names could be used. In perhaps my favourite variant, words which relate to another word on the board would gain the points from that other word (all players would need to agree on the connection).

Possibilities are endless. And many of these variants would be rather easy to implement on a computer-based platform. For instance, all variants which relate to dictionaries could be implemented through the use of custom dictionaries. And alternative scoring rules could be added to a Scrabble program through the use of bonus points or some such.

One variant I thought about which could be quite interesting for language scientists would be IPA Scrabble or Scrabble using the International Phonetic Alphabet. Players could use IPA characters to “spell out” valid words using either narrow or broad phonetic transcription strategies. So, in some cases, ˈlɪtl̩ or ˈlɪtɫ̩ could be allowed. Personally, I’d be one to accept a rather broad range of even impressionistic variants, including “litl” and “lidl” even though they miss some transcription details.

Such a game could be quite fun for people who have working knowledge of IPA and it doesn’t sound so hard to implement. What’s more, it could help people get used to IPA transcription, which is often a good thing in language sciences.

Well, as it turns out, I’m not the only one who thought about IPA Scrabble. A simple Google search for these two turns returns several relevant hits including: a wishlist for fun language things in which IPA Scrabble is assumed to exist; a page for a linguistics club which lists IPA Scrabble as one of their activities; and a page citing Scrabble variants which lists the IPA magnets as a Scrabble-like game. As my wife happens to have these IPA magnets, I was thinking about the same exact thing.

What’s funny about this last page I mentioned as a result for my “IPA Scrabble” Google search is that author Jed Hartman spoke my mind, back in 1998:

I like playing word games for fun rather than competitively. So I like the general idea of Scrabble®, but I don’t much enjoy playing it with devotees of the game; they tend to score lots of points by playing dozens of two-letter words that nobody except The Official Scrabble Players Dictionary has ever used. vv is for vvariants

Three of the six variants he lists are quite close to what I had in mind

  • Multidirectional Scrabble
  • Wraparound Scrabble
  • Multi-Source Scrabble (similar to my multi-language version)
  • Stackable Scrabble
  • Plausible Scrabble (similar to my word-addition version)
  • IPA Crossword (similar to my IPA Scrabble)

So, I don’t score for originality on this one. Ah, well.

I do wonder if Hartman himself has played all of these variants. And I wonder how implementable they all are through computer versions. My hunch is that any competent program could easily implement most of them within certain limits. For instance, the multi-source variant would only need dictionary files to be implemented but such dictionary files may be hard to come by. Although, with initiatives like Wiktionary and Urban Dictionary, it may be relatively trivial to get wordlists for use in dictionary files.

One thing this all made me think of is the fact that there’s indeed a lot of data available out there and that uses of data may not be entirely predicted by the type of data used. Ok, sure, the leaps from online dictionaries to wordlists to dictionary files to multi-source Scrabble are rather obvious. But chances are that most contributors to Wiktionary and Urban Dictionary weren’t thinking of multi-source Scrabble when they added most of those entries. There’s a whole thing about human-readable vs. machine-readable data involved here. And it all makes me think about newish approaches to data management, such as Freebase (results for “Scrabble”) and Mahalo (results for “Scrabble”).

arrogance, ethnocentrism, fun, humour, intellectualism, linkfest, play, playfulness, Radio Open Source, U.S. exceptionalism, U.S. media, United States

Lydon at His Best

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By definition, my reaction is subjective. So it might just be the fact that it’s a sunny day or that Life Is Good®, as my water bottle and diner mug say.

Yet there’s something about the April 17 episode of the Radio Open Source (ROS) podcast with Christopher Lydon which works for me.

Maybe I was just charmed by the introduction as it played with my expectations. But there’s clearly more to my enthusiasm for Lydon’s interviewing style in that specific episode than the mere enjoyment of being fooled. My initial excitement abated a bit as the show progressed and Lydon went back to his I-show mode (which I mentioned before and warned students about). This decrease in excitement strengthens my notion that Lydon was, surprisingly enough, letting participants speak in earlier portions of the show.

In fact, Lydon did something he rarely does, during the first part of this episode: he proposed a topic and let one of his guests respond without even asking a question. Sometimes, Lydon will string together a long series of questions to which the interviewee cannot really respond. In the way I was enculturated, these strings of questions are markers of close-mindedness so I have a hard time understanding why Lydon would produce them.

In fact, I would seriously like to do some conversation analysis of Lydon’s interviewing style. For instance, how long (in seconds) are his questions as compared to his guests’ comments? Is there a difference when the guest is perceived to have a higher status, in which case Lydon might go into “deference mode?” Is my perception accurate, that Lydon speaks differently to women and men? (In my observations, ROS seems to mostly have women as guests when gender is admittedly the focus.) Are there cues in Lydon’s speech patterns which reveal what he might be thinking about his guests? Is Lydon typical of “Old Media” radio shows even though he entered the “Web 2.0 landscape” with ROS?
What ticked me off, originally, was Lydon’s tendency to cut his guests in a very cavalier manner and his habit of emphasising distinctions based on perceived prestige. These issues are less problematic to me during some shows, but they still do tick me off fairly frequently. Lydon’s respect, contrary to mine, seems quite selective.

Why do I care so much about Lydon’s style, you ask? Why do I ever listen to the show if it makes me react so strongly? A number of reasons.

Radio Open Source is one of the first few podcasts to which I subscribed when iTunes began podcast support. Although I’ve unsubscribed to many other podcasts, this is a podcast which became part of my habits. I know several people who watch shows they don’t like so that they can complain about it. It might be the case for my listening to Open Source. Although, I would really prefer it if I were not to complain (I hate myself every time I do). My “problem” is that ROS often has insightful guests, frequently tackles fascinating issues, and represents the cultural specificity of a small segment of U.S. society with which I happen to relate on a fairly regular basis. In fact, ROS often provokes thoughts in me which lead to my own insight about U.S. society specifically or, on occasion, about post-industrial societies in general. And the often insightful blog comments, gatekept by the very thoughtful “blogger in chief” Brendan Greeley, occasionally make their way into the program, which evokes a type of polyvocality that is rare in Old Media (but required in the “Web 2.0 movement”). (Unfortunately, Greeley is apparently leaving the show, on which occasion I might start listening to another Greeley show if it’s podcast.)

So I probably won’t stop listening to ROS for a while. Can’t avert my ear.

Why do I tease Lydon so much? Well, as we say in French, «qui aime bien, châtie bien» or “I keed because I like.” People from the United States, especially those who claim European-American ancestry and respond rather well to the Judeo-Christian liberal model, tend to avoid conflict at all cost. It might be the main reason why, though some members of the ROS staff have contacted me after reading some of my blog posts about the show, I get this feeling that my perspective on the show is falling on deaf ears. It’s not that they don’t want to hear criticisms and critiques of the show, it’s just that my voluntarily confrontational style might clash with their own styles. If anyone on the ROS staff reads this: sorry, nothing personal!

So, do I write those posts just to be mean? Not really. But I do like challenging preconceived notions about the skills of people in positions of power. In other words, I tease Christopher Lydon because I know he can handle it. He apparently has a fairly high status within “PRI culture” (which is possibly similar to the “BBC culture” described by Georgina Born). And, to be honest, he sounds self-assured enough (notice I didn’t say “cocky” or “arrogant”) to dismiss this type of nagging offhandedly.

So, Lydon is the journalist I enjoy teasing.

Hey, it is some people’s idea of fun!

CBC, freedom, fun, humour, media, playfulness, Québec, télévision, Yulblog

Les pieds dans la marge

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En réponse à: ni.vu.ni.connu / Rentrée radio-canadienne

Suis pas trop télé. Pour dire la franche vérité, ces temps-ci, les émissions qui me plaisent le plus passent surtout à Télé-Québec (y compris Méchant contraste et autres émissions à intérêt social, ce qui est important pour un anthropologue).
Hier, un peu par hasard, ma femme et moi avons regardé quelques émissions radio-canadiennes, dont Les pieds dans la marge. Retonti ici en faisant une recherche pour une comparaison avec Pop Citrouille. Content de voir que c’est une YulBlogueuse qui en parle.
Ça nous a pris quelques minutes pour nous habituer au style d’humour. On savait pas du tout à quoi s’attendre, à qui ça s’adressait. Une de mes premières réactions était que ça ressemblait vraiment à Pop Citrouille, presque une émission-culte de ma jeunesse. Mais avec un peu de Bruno Blanchette (N’ajustez pas votre sécheuse), du Phylactère Cola, du Dans une galaxie près de chez vous, et même un peu de Têtes à claques. D’ailleurs, parlant de TàC, les nouvelles de CBC avait un segment sur le passage possible des vidéos en-ligne les plus connus au Québec (autre que Lynda Tremblay décoration sur YouTube) à la langue anglaise. La lectrice de nouvelles, un peu pincée, qui nous dit que Têtes à claques est… difficile à décrire. Precious! 😉
Pour revenir aux Pieds. C’est très absurde, évidemment. Débridé. Flyé, même. Mais aussi pas mal gutsy. Un petit côté scato, mais pas extrême ni même inapproprié. Ça semble s’adresser à des jeunes ados, mais sans être vraiment puéril.
Ça faisait longtemps que j’avais pas vu des émissions du genre. Et, honnêtement, ça m’étonne un peu de RadCan qui semble se cantonner dans des émissions très structurées, voire stiff.
tk… Tout ça pour dire que j’ai bien aimé et que je suis content de voir que le parallèle avec la mythique Pop Citrouille est bien attesté.

Academia, academic institutions, academics, activism, Anthropology, ethnomusicology, experimentation, France, Francophones, hedonism, intellectualism, intellectuals, journalism, media, Montreal, playfulness, Québec, télévision

French «Intellectuels» (draft)

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[Old draft of a post that I never finished writing… Started it in late February.]

Been thinking about intellectuals, especially French ones. It might have been a long-standing issue for me. To this French-speaking North American academic, the theme is obvious.

More specifically, though.

Was listening to a podcast with French journalist Daniel Schneidermann who, among other things, is a blogger. During the podcast, Schneidermann made a simple yet interesting comment about validation by readers. As a journalist, he has an obligationto adopt strict standards, verify sources, etc. As a blogger, he knows that if something that he says is inaccurate, blog readers will quickly point out the mistake. Again, dead simple. One of the basic things people have understood about online communication since at least 1994. But some journalists have typically been slow to understand the implications, perhaps because it causes a sea change in their practise. So Scheidermann’s comment was relatively “refreshing” in such a context.

Wanted to blog on that issue. Went to Scheidermann’s blog and read a few things. Noticed one about a Wikipedia entry on Schneidermann. While the blogger understands the value of reader validation, he seems to be uneasy with the fact that his Wikipedia entry was, when he first read it, disproportionally devoted to some specific issues in his life. Which leads me to the intellectuel thing.

A little over ten years ago, Pierre Bourdieu was on Schneidermann’s television set for a show about television. Bourdieu had been thinking and writing about television’s social impact. The context in which Schneidermann invited Bourdieu was a series of political and social events centering on an important strike with which Bourdieu had been associated. By participating in the show, Bourdieu had the (secret) intention of demonstrating television’s incapacity at taking distance from itself. Bourdieu had participated in another television show a few years prior and apparently saw his presence on a television set as an occasion to experiment with some important issues having to do with the media’s channeling of dialogue. Didn’t see the show but had heard about the events that followed without following it. A brief summary, from very limited evidence.After appearing on the show, Bourdieu published a short piece in Le Monde diplomatique (Schneidermann was a journalist at Le Monde). That piece was strongly-worded but can be seen as a fairly typical media analysis by a social scientist or other scholar. Not Bourdieu’s most memorable work, maybe, but clear and simple, if a bit watered down at times. In fact, the analysis looked more Barthes-type semiotics than Bourdieu’s more, erm, “socially confrontational” work.

Schneidermann’s response to Bourdieu’s analysis looks more like a knee-jerk reaction to what was perceived as personal attacks. Kind of sad, really. In fact, the introduction to that response points out the relevance of Bourdieu’s interrogations.

At any rate, one aspect of Schneidermann’s response which is pretty telling in context is the repeated use of the term intellectuel at key points in that text. It’s not so much about the term itself, although it does easily become a loaded term. An intellectual could simply be…

[Google: define intellectual…]:

a person who uses his or her intellect to study, reflect, or speculate on a variety of different ideas

[ Thank you, Wikipedia! 😉 ]

But, in context, repeated use of the term, along with repeated mentions of Collège de France (a prestigious yet unusual academic institution) may give the impression that Schneidermann was reacting less to Bourdieu as former guest than to the actions of an intellectuel. Obligatory Prévert citation:

Il ne faut pas laisser les intellectuels jouer avec les allumettes.

(Intellectuals shouldn’t be allowed to play with matches.)

Now, second stream of thought on intellectuels. Was teaching an ethnomusicology course at an anthropology department. A frequent reaction by students was that we were intellectualizing music too much. Understandable reaction. Music isn’t just an intellectual object. But, after all, isn’t the role of academia to understand life intellectually?

Those comments tended to come in reaction to some of the more difficult readings. To be fair, other reactions included students who point out that an author’s analysis isn’t going beyond some of the more obvious statements and yet others are cherishing the intellectual dimensions of our perspective on music. Altogether the class went extremely well, but the intellectual character of some of the content was clearly surprising to some.

The third strand or stream of thought on intellectuels came on February 27 in a television show with Jacques Attali. His was a typical attitude of confidence in being a “jack of all trades” who didn’t hesitate to take part in politics, public service, and commercial initiatives. I personally have been influenced by some of Jacques Attali’s work and, though I may disagree with several of his ideas, I have nothing but respect for his carreer. His is a refreshingly unapologetic form of intellectualism. Not exclusion of non-intellectuals. Just an attempt at living peacefully with everyone while thinking about as many issues as possible. He isn’t my hero but he deserves my respect, along with people like Yoro Sidibe, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Louis Armstrong, Boris Vian, Jan Garbarek, Georges Brassens, Steven Feld, Roland Barthes, James Brown, and Serge Gainsbourg.

A fourth thread came in a departmental conference at Université de Montréal’s Department of Anthropology. Much discussion of the involvement of anthropologists in social life. And the visit of two public intellectuals who happen to be anthropological provocateurs, here in Quebec: Serge Bouchard and Bernard Arcand.. . .

Never finished this draft.

Should really follow on these threads. They have been haunting me for almost a year. And connect with multiple issues that I tend to think about.

My attitude now is that through blogs, mailing-lists, online forums, classes, lectures, conferences, informal and formal discussions, I’m able to help people think about a large set of different issues, whether or not they agree with me on any single point. Not because I’m somehow better than others: I’m clearly not. Not because my ideas are better than those cherished by others: they clearly aren’t. Possibly because I’m extremely talkative. And enthusiastic about talking to just about anyone. There’s even a slight chance that I may have understood something important about my “role in life,” my “calling.” If so, great. If not, I’m having fun anyway and I don’t mind being (called) an intellectual. 😉

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Individualism, Freedom, and Food

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A surprisingly superficial podcast episode on what could have been a very deep subject.

Open Source » Blog Archive » The End of Free Will?

start a conversation about manipulation, persuasion and freedom from choice

To summarize the main issue of that episode: is marketing and "upselling" by restaurant chains undermining the individual freedom to choose quality food? Apparently simple a question, but billed as much more than that.

Maybe they refrained from delving deeper into any of those issues because philosophical discussions, perhaps aesthetic ones especially, are off limits in "polite company" in U.S. media. Too bad.

Actually, I’m genuinely disappointed. Not necessarily because restaurant chains are very important an issue for me (in Montreal, they don’t seem to have the exact same type of impact and I love to cook). But because the show’s participants all came very close to saying very important things about individualism, food, and freedom. The first two are too rarely discussed, IMHO, and the third could have been the "hook" to discuss the other two.

Ah, well…

If you want to know more about my thoughts on this podcast episode, check out some of the tags below.

online publishing, optimism, playfulness, pleasure, podcasts, Radio Open Source, writing

The Word

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Speaking of language change and digital life, Radio Open Source is preparing a show about "Language Evolution in the Digital Age." Unfortunately, they seem to focus on lexicography and use an awkward notion of "evolution," but it’s quite representative of the language ideology of North American English-speakers.

Let’s hope they  grok the deeper implications of the fact that young people are in fact writing a lot. William Labov and Penny Eckert would be ideal people to talk about language change in this context.

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