I mentioned yesterday, in the post right below this one, that I wanted to come back to Malcolm Gladwell’s article about Steven Johnson’s book, Everything Bad Is Good For You.

Here’s the article: “Brain Candy.”

And here’s the part I wanted to return to. Let me highlight a segment first:

… an unstructured environment that requires the child actively to intervene, to look for the hidden logic, to find order and meaning in chaos.

Guess what he’s talking about? Recess for elementary school kids.

Now here’s the full quotation:

In recent years, for example, a number of elementary schools have phased out or reduced recess and replaced it with extra math or English instruction. This is the triumph of the explicit over the collateral. After all, recess is “play” for a ten-year-old in precisely the sense that Johnson describes video games as play for an adolescent: an unstructured environment that requires the child actively to intervene, to look for the hidden logic, to find order and meaning in chaos.

So, for elementary school kids, recess is “an unstructured environment that requires the child actively to intervene, to look for the hidden logic, to find order and meaning in chaos.” That sounds right. But if you think that only applies to elementary school, ask a middle-schooler / junior high schooler / high school student whether that same quotation applies to their social world.

For adolescent gamers, Johnson says, video games are also “an unstructured environment that requires the child actively to intervene, to look for the hidden logic, to find order and meaning in chaos.”

And how about you, Gentle Reader? To me, that quotation describes a major skill set we need for Life. So are recess, passing period, and video games essential Life Training? Ask yourself: Where is children’s energy, focus, and motivation at the highest? Is it when they’re doing homework, or when they’re discussing the latest social tangle with a friend? Personally, I suspect they have the priorities right.

Steven Johnson has something important to say. Part of it is in what he says. Part of it is that he says something that goes against our grain – the sound of metal scraping that raises our hackles. I think that’s good for us.

What he says is, “Everything Bad Is Good for You.” His argument is that “Watching TV Makes You Smarter,” and that video games are good for kids. It’s an important thesis, and I’ll come back to it in a ripstick. What’s a “ripstick,” you say? It’s Esther Helmstetter’s wonderful word for a brief, but indeterminate time.)

But before we get to that: It’s that part about going against the grain that intrigues me.

When a new idea comes along that raises our hackles, how do we evaluate it? Are his titles merely a marketing ploy? Are they at least a public-spirited marketing ploy to help us notice that in the daily and plethoric avalanche of information, there’s something here we should attend to? I like that perspective, because I think this is one of those ideas that has to screech its way into our consciousness.

By way of example, here’s a fondly remembered dialog with an early adolescent boy and his mom:

Me: So, are you a gamer?

Boy: Yeah (Mom rolls her eyes upward to say “Woe betide us.")

Me: So, what do you play?

Boy: Starcraft, mostly. (Mom rolls her eyes upward to say “Pointless violence.")

Me: So, what do you learn from playing it? (Mom rolls her eyes upward to say “How to avoid his homework.")

Boy: Oh, nothing really: Allocation of resources…. (and he goes off into a list that would impress a cognitive psychologist.)

Mom: I’ve been missing something here.

Now that’s an impressive mom! She had her opinions. But when her son said “Allocation of resources…,” she got it – he was learning important stuff from Starcraft. She had seen aliens melting into vaguely bloody pools. He had seen the cognitive demands of an engaging task. She got it, and, in spite of the sound of metal grating on metal, she started to shift gears about games.

If we’ll listen, I think that’s what Johnson can do for us. As his titles make crystalline, he’s being deliberately outrageous. But he has to do that to get through our preconceptions. He catches our attention. Once we listen, he makes sense, with ideas like these:

• TV plots are enormously more complex than they were two decades ago. We have to use more brain power to watch them. That makes us smarter.

• While shows used to be black and white, cut and dried, now they are shaded and open ended. Reality TV ("Survivor") forces us to look for subtle nonverbal cues about motives and intentions. It asks us to read real emotions, on real human faces. We become detectives instead of “the audience.” (I hate this idea – I can hear the screech in my brain!)

• Video games beat the heck out of homework when it comes to engagement and learning. (That idea causes no screeching at all!)

You get the gist. Here’s his argument that TV Makes You Smarter.

Here’s a slightly tongue-in-cheek interview and review by Bob Thompson in the Washington Post, with the double-entendre title The ‘Bad’ Guy .

Here’s Malcolm Gladwell, with his usual flare, writing about Brain Candy.
(I want to come back to this article again in another post – or maybe two.)

Finally, here’s Steven Johnson’s book:
Everything Bad Is Good for You: How Today’s Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter
Riverhead, 2005
ISBN: 1573223077

You can order his book from my sister, Kathleen, at The Erie Book Store.

Are you into board games? Really into board games? I mean,really, really, really into board games? Yes? Have we got a site for you!

BoardGameGeek is a fine example of what can happen when people with a passion take full advantage of the Internet’s astonishing capacity to build communities without regard to geography. The site categorizes, describes, reviews, rates, and discusses more board games than I dreamed existed. Their data base merits words like “incredible.”

Here’s an example of the helpfulness of the site.

If you believe in the educational value of board games, as I do, here’s a way to locate one that suits any imaginable interest of your child, or gives just the learning opportunity you’re looking for. (And did I fail to say “fun” just then?)

The site feels noncommercial, but does allow you to purchase and trade games. Most of the site is accessible without signing in, but you can also create a (free) account and become a member of the BoardGameGeek community.

Please note: Depending on your child’s developmental maturity, you may prefer to use the site as your own resource, for two reasons: First, most of the games are for adults, and you may feel some aren’t ones you want your child to play; and second, there are online forums for people to discuss games, and we obviously can’t vouch for the content of those forums.

Check this out! Pass it on to your kids! Bzzzpeek is more fun than a barrel of highly vocal, multilingual monkeys.

My son, Paul, put enough money in the bank to spend a year composing and performing music, and playing with some computer projects of interest to him. (Check out his music blog and podcast) He also agreed to build IntelligenceRiver.net, the web site that is to support the community of Grow With the Flow readers.

As I explained a while back, just about the time Grow With the Flow arrived from the printer, friends of Paul’s at Minnesota Public Radio asked if he would help with some software for their pledge drives. He was happy to, and the short-term consulting job also allowed him to stay “gainfully unemployed” a while longer. But of course that meant work on IntelligenceRiver.net went on the shelf.

But we’re back in business! Paul sent me a draft this week of the web site home page. It looks great! It hasn’t been checked out on different operating systems yet, so we aren’t “public,” but we are getting soooo close!

As we saw in yesterday’s thrilling installment, we Peak Potential folks just keep the Coffee Shop (forum) tidy, and drop in on conversations if the spirit moves us. But the RiverTown News (RTN), our blog, needs our initiative: We write the articles. Readers may comment ("letters to the editor") but it starts with an article we write.

I’ve been posting to the RTN now for a couple months. It’s been entertaining, and it’s kept me off the streets after dark. Am I posting the kind of article “today’s reader” wants to find? I have no idea, since IntelligenceRiver.net, the website to support readers of Grow With the Flow (GWTF), isn’t online yet. But what ace reporter ever let a complete lack of knowledge or feedback stop him? Here’s what I think I’m figuring out:

Categories

Every posting goes into one or more “Categories.” Here are the categories we’re using right now:

General – Meaning both “Of interest to many” and “Doesn’t fit anywhere else”
In The News – Events in the world that may interest our readers, including reports on books, articles, or other media sources
Outfitters – Links to useful resources for our readers
Reviews – Longer critical comment on books, articles, or other media sources
Web Site & GWTF Updates – “News from RiverTown”

You can include an article in as many categories as are appropriate, and you can change categories if you don’t like your first choice. If you do a posting which seems to need a new category, it’s easy to set it up.

Besides identifying an article’s general topic, categories allow readers to look at only articles of a particular sort, like opening the newspaper to the “Local” section instead of reading from the front page on. Notice that many readers will come to an article from a search engine, so they’ll jump straight to what they were searching for – more like a clipping service. Hopefully, some readers will browse around in the rest of the RTN before they move along.

Sizes

The first “web logs” (from which “blog” is shortened) were simply lists of interesting web sites someone had visited, sent to friends with only the implied comment. “Here’s something you might want to check out.” The origin is preserved in the idea that short is good when it comes to blog postings. That’s tough for academic types like me, but I’m seeing my way to a three-level system:

* Many posts can be very short – Brief news bulletins like “John Paul sent a design for the flyer for GWTF. It looks great.” Marilyn, I think many postings that offer readers a useful link will be very short – just the link and an explanation of what’s there.

* Some really are legitimately longer: postings like this one you’re reading, book reviews, philosophical diatribes, and so on.

* The third category is interesting me right now: short entries that link into a series of connected articles, so as to present a thorough treatment of a topic, but in related bursts. (Just as an article in RTN can have a link to another web site, it can have a link that simply bounces the reader to an earlier article in RTN.) For example, Steven Johnson’s new book, Everything Bad Is Good for You, is putting forward an argument I’d like to talk about in several different ways. On top of that, he’s excerpted one of his arguments in a New York Times Magazine article, “Watching TV Makes You Smarter.” Instead of one big review, I’ll try to post a series of short bursts as I think my way through his argument. Otherwise, the next thing I know, I’m writing a term paper!

Staying Organized

For that third situation, you can imagine that it’s tough to keep the series of short articles organized. I’m experimenting with setting up a single word processing document which I know will eventually break up into several small RTN articles / postings. That way, I can work back and forth between them as I write, reference them, and try to keep the whole sequence coherent. I cut and paste sections into RTN as I’m ready to publish them. I save a document for each such topic / thread (for example, a “Steven Johnson” document), so that if new topics come up, I can add them first to that document, then cut and paste to RTN.

Marilyn, I think this might be useful as you assemble a first list of “Outfitters” – resources for our readers. You could have, for example, a document called “Parent Organizations.” Every time you found an organization with a web site with useful tools for our readers, you’d put the URL (web address), your comments on the site, and possibly some clipped text from the site into a word processing document. This way, you can look at the organizations as a group, notice connections between them, decide whether you want to keep track of a marginal site or delete it, consider whether one or more sites might best be presented in the same posting, and in general make your postings efficient and most helpful to readers.

Putting things in a word processing document also lets you easily clean up the text – get it all in the same font, size, and color. Whenever you’re ready to post one part, you cut and paste it into the RTN editor, add any necessary HTML code, and post it. When you do post it, you make a note in the word processing file that that particular unit has been posted.

All this is fantasy at this point. I’ve been using word processing documents for one-time posts, and that works well. The word processor is more powerful and more flexible, and lets me save a posting more easily as I work on it. But I haven’t yet tried it with a single document that represents multiple postings.

We’ll explore together!

Gentle Readers: I just sent this out to my colleagues in Peak Potential who will be helping out with IntelligenceRiver.net, the web site that will support Grow With the Flow (GWTF). Just in case you’re as clueless as we are about blogs and forums and the differences between them, here’s what I sent my fellow “Peakers.”

This is the first of two messages. This one explains the difference between a blog and a forum. The second one is my thoughts on how to keep our blog entries organized. That one is mostly thinking out loud to myself – I hope it will also be helpful to you.

A reminder: The Coffee Shop is our forum, RiverTown News (RTN) is our blog. Let’s see how far I can push the analogies about the two.

In the Coffee Shop / forum, GWTF readers chat with each other, and we join in when we want to. In the coffee shop analogy, I picture us as the folks behind the counter who serve the coffee and clean the tables when someone spills something. We chat with customers from time to time, but mostly they sit and talk with each other and we keep the shop neat and tidy so they have a pleasant, orderly place to talk.

Each conversational topic stays active indefinitely, as though each table in the coffee shop were reserved for people who wanted to talk about a certain topic: “If you want to discuss Media and the Culture come sit at this table.” If no one’s there, the table still stays there, waiting for people who want to talk about that topic. Of course people are writing each other, not really talking, so someone can come in when no one else is there and leave a note at the table for others, who may want to add their own note later – in this coffee shop, customers don’t have to be there at the same time. (And, of course, a person can sit at more than one table.)

But there isn’t just one table for a topic; within a broad topic like Media and the Culture, there may be many tables on facets of the topic – picture that there’s a corner of the Coffee Shop where everyone is talking about Media and the Culture, but with lots of tables in that corner: one where people are talking about TV, another where they’re talking about whether video games are good or evil, and so on. Although we shopkeepers set up a few likely tables for people when we opened the shop, any customer can set up a new table any time a more detailed conversation seems to need it. However, we also encourage them to not have too many tables, or people will get lost in the maze and not be able to find the one that interests them.

Paul can clarify this for us, but I think the most recent post is always at the top, and the earlier ones are farther down the pile – pushing the analogy beyond all hope, there’s a record at each table of the conversations held there, with the most recent one on top of the pile, so when you get to the table, you can look over what people have been saying, and continue the conversation, whether anyone’s there at the moment or not.

In the RiverTown News / blog, we start up a given topic: We write articles, and readers may write to comment on our articles. Thus the newspaper analogy: We’re the editors and reporters of the newspaper, readers write letters to the editor by posting a “Comment.” Each article gradually moves down the stack of new articles – picture the old stack of newspapers, with the newest one on top.

There are three problems with the analogy:
(1) Articles appear whenever we post them, one at a time: We don’t collect a whole issue of articles and publish them all at the same time, the way a paper newspaper would.
(2) Letters to the editor (comments on our articles) stay with the original article, instead of showing up in a later issue of the paper. This works much better: Readers can easily search for a topic, then all the comments about it are right there together. The comments (letters to the editor) follow the original article in the order they were posted, so the fiirst comment is nearest to the article. This means you can read the article, then keep on reading down through the conversation it engendered.
(3) You and I eventually get around to tossing out back issues, but on IntelligenceRiver.net, the stack grows indefinitely. We do keep the stack neat and orderly by checking comments that come in on any article, however old.

It seems to me the two places, Coffee Shop / forum and RiverTown News / blog will overlap: If one reader comments on an article we wrote for the paper, and then another reader comments on the comment, the blog begins to look like a forum. The only difference lies in the point of origin: they’re commenting on an article we posted. Note that if we posted an article in RTN and it interested people so there was a whole string of comments, we might decide we needed a new table in the Coffee Shop, dedicated to this topic.

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