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| Author: |
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Doc Searls |
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| Posted: |
7/7/2001; 6:03:13 PM |
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825 (top msg in thread) |
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The Beginning of the End of Education as Usual 
| | The problem with Business as Usual is that it fundamentally doesn't exist. Here's another way of looking at it: markets are real, corporations are not. In any case (and there are more cases all the time), markets are a helluva lot more real than the companies that operate in them. Allow yourself to be haunted by the Yoruba saying, "Life is a market," and you start to get what I'm talking about here. Even cultures as corporatized as our own wouldn't think of saying "Life is a corporation." |
| | I could go on about this, but I'd rather point to the conversation that has gone wild on this very subject over at the Cluetrain list on Topica. Follow the Irony thread that gets thick right around here. Great stuff by Tom, Marek, Chris, Kevin, Tim... Jesus. (Yeah, probably Him too. Who knows.) Watch them tear down veils around the Nothing that produces them. |
| | But blowing away Business as Usual is no big deal compared with Education as Usual, which is far more entrenched, far more embedded in our culture. But it's happening. Why? Because, Marek points out, John Taylor Gatto is right there in Fast Company, of all places. |
| | For those ofyou who don't know, Gatto is Professional Education's fool killer. The man is a 12-guage parriah and he doesn't fuck around. He's one of the best teachers who ever lived, and he proved it year after year by breaking every rule in the book, starting with the one that says your kids and what they know ought to be products of a system. |
| | He's quoted all over the Web, but my favorite line comes from this latest in Fast Company: the truth is that genius is an exceedingly common human quality, probably natural to most of us. |
| | Schools don't want you to believe this. They want you to believe that genius is exceedingly rare, and that all children have degrees of academic value that fall in a bell curve somewhere. For that reason some will be better "products" of their education than others. Few will be Great Achievers. |
| | ...You have to trust children more. What if we started from exactly the opposite premise of the Viking conquerors who've now become the Fortune 500? Suppose we began with the idea that almost everyone has superhuman powers to see into a grain of sand and say, "Why, I can scratch little lines on this piece of silicon." I mean, is that an unlikely idea? Is that counterintuitive? "And the pieces of sand can talk to each other across the world, and we can drive Bell Telephone out of business." You'd lock someone up who said that! But that's the thinking that changes the world. We need to start from the cold-blooded premise that almost everyone is a genius -- not that almost everyone is worthless. |
| | That's why the great achievement of the brief dot-com era was to reward every possible wacky ambition almost without regard to the entrepreneur's educational resume. It was a cash-on-the-barrelhead expression of faith in the natural abundance of genius. |
| | So thank you, VCs. The school of hard knocks will teach us a helluva lot more than any B-school ever would. And we'll all be back with more ideas. Count on it. |
Hope we're in the right 50 year interquake period
And I'm betting it's love
| | I am sure about the source of the cooing and gurgling on Dave's roof: racoons. Soon as I can, I'll put up the pix of the two racoons that play around in the huge oak trees that shade our new back yard. These guys are playful and fearless acrobats — like a cross between monkeys and squirrels. |
| | For awhile at an earlier house (in San Carlos, about 3 miles from Dave's place) we had a family of racoons living in our roof. The cooing and gurgling was right over our bedroom, every night. We finally had to hire a professional to come over and break up the party. |
The Continuing End of Television as Usual
| | So the question was, what do we do for television here? Joyce's default choice was: nothing. When we got together in 1990 she had gone without TV for her entire adult life. Jeffrey mostly wants something that will play animated Disney movies. I, of course, want the widest possible jack into The Matrix. Professional necessity, of course. |
| | Joyce doesn't care how I jack in, as long as she doesn't have to look at ugly antennas or nests of wires behind black boxes that are ugly enough all by themselves. At the old house I achieved maximum crapwidth through the following: |
| | Since we built (actually, rebuilt) the house from scratch, I could hide most of the wires. And since the roof was relatively flat, and the house sat high at the back of the property, the antenna farm on the roof was invisible from most vantages. Most importantly, at 800 feet above The Bay, with an unobstructed view in almost all directions, reception was kinda fabulous. |
| | That place is sold and gone, however, and we're starting from scratch here in the new place, which is about half the size of the old one and not well situated to receive anything other than the handful of local FM stations on Gibraltar Peak, which is actually a pointy foothill on the seaward slope of the Santa Ynez Mountains that looms above our house. Everything else is out of sight. We're in what I never wanted to be: a reception hole. |
| | Of course, there's cable. We're already using Cox@Home for Internet access. I'm on it right now (almost 4mb down, .5mb up — not bad). But I bought a year's worth of DishTV at a discount last November, and still have the receiver. Dish slso has a nice DishMover promo, by which they install a new dish on the roof for free. I've also liked their customer service, which has always been fast, friendly and informative. Also, Dish added the L.A. network stations when we were up at the old place, which was pretty nice. |
| | One catch. For some reason, they said they couldn't let us keep the L.A. stations at our new place, even though we're now in the greater L.A. "market." Apparently this is determined by some complex combination of regulatory nonsense and software that determines that our new zip code (Montecito, CA: 93108) gets great L.A. reception. This may be true for some folks in Montecito, but not us. I grumbed bitterly over the phone to a Dish person, who said the best they could do was give us a Fox and a CBS station from somewhere other than L.A., for $4.95/month. I said the hell with it and decided to buy the best possible antenna and a rotator to see what we could get. |
| | So I went down to the only place in town that still sells TV antennas: Radio Shack (which has a Web site that's so sucky that its only search function is an Ask Jeeves frame-filler that does nothing but search for everything in the world other than stuff from Radio Shack). I bought the biggest, baddest TV antenna in the store, a new rotator, and a couple of short poles and some straps to fix the whole thing to the chimney of the house. |
| | It took me most of yesterday to put the thing together, mounted on the roof and fully operational. And the whole time I enjoyed listening to KPIG over its 128kbps stream, rebroadcast over K-SEARLS, which came down here with the rest of our gear. |
| | I hauled our most portable TV up to a little room next to the roof and ran some coax and rotator cable straight to it, flipped the thing on, spun the rotator around and hoped for the best. What I got were snowy but watchable pictures from all the L.A. VHF stations (2,4,5,7,9,11 & 13), slightly less snowy pictures from San Diego (8 &10), and a great picture from Channel 3 in Santa Barbara (which radiates from Broadcast Peak, which is far away and out of sight to the West). This was frankly better than I expected, but still disappointing. I was about to check the UHF performance when I invited Joyce outside to see if the thing was too ugly to live. Her immediate response was a mix of horror and revulsion. The thing was bright as silver, ugly and so huge that it almost dwarfed our little cottage of a house. So down it came. I have no idea how it would have done on UHF. Probably not very well, since UHF has an even harder time finding its way into holes than VHF. |
| | Later the Dish installer showed up and we found a spot for the new Dish 500 antenna. It is now visible from nowhere but elsewhere on the roof. When we turned it on, everything we got at the old place was there, plus a bunch of new channels we couldn't get before and still can't get (they're marked red), but are made possible by the new antenna, which watches two different satellites at once. Most remarkably, the L.A. stations are there. Meaning the whole antenna exercize was pointless anyway, except for Channel 3 and whatever they have around here on UHF. |
| | Now the moral dilemma. Should I tell them? Will they cut me off if they figure out the L.A. stations are still coming in? They know where I live. They know I moved. But "they" is just a database, no? |
| | I think I'll go through the "waiver appeal" process they told me about and see what happens. The DishTV rep on the phone told me it might take months. |
| | Meanwhile, if any of the rest of ya'll want a really nice (and very huge) TV antenna, I'll make you a deal on one. |
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